Plot vs. Story: What E.M. Forster Got Wrong
In his book, Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster wrote the following:
""The king died and then the queen died," is a story, but "The king died and then the queen died of grief," is a plot.""
A story, by Forster's definition, is a mere, "narrative of events arranged in their time sequence." Thus, he continued, it, "can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happened next."
I don't claim to be anything in the way of an authority on the craft of writing. After all, I'm just some schmuck with a blog. Certainly, I'm not someone whom anyone with an ounce of intellectual integrity or simple commonsense would think to take seriously. Who am I to disagree with one of the most highly regarded novelists of the previous century?
Yet, I do.
With respect to Forster and to those who love his work (I'm aware I'm insulting a sacred cow when I say this), I honestly believe that the man, brilliant as he was, got things ass-backwards.
The reason comes down to a fundamental difference in understanding of the relationship between plot and story.
(I should point out one caveat. In the world of journalism--if such a place still exists--his definition stands. A story, from a news source, is simply what happened. But here, we're talking about fiction.)
Like many contemporary burgeoning writers who've sought to practice and study the craft, I've taken my share of "writing courses," attended my share of workshops, and studied a fair number of craft books (as my constant readers can attest because I won't shut up about them). Like many such writers, it took me a long time to figure out what the difference between plot and story was. Some of my own instructors in the past even, foolishly, used the two words synonymously. The truth, however, is that while they're related, plot and story are quite different (on that, Forster and I agree).
In much of my writerly education, many of the instructors and authors touched on a concept--or rather a cluster of interrelated concepts--called the Elements of Fiction.
According to most theorists, there are five (5) central elements that make up any piece of fiction. In any given piece, the weight of each element varies, but all five remain nonetheless present. In no particular order, the five elements are:
No matter the piece of fiction--be it Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains, J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish," Middlesex, or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (as it's called in American)--all five of these elements are present to some degree or another. One or two of them may overshadow the remaining three or four, but analyze any novel, novella, short story, play, TV show, or film, and you'll find them.
Now, why do I bring these up? Because it helps to clarify my personal understanding of the difference between Plot and Story.
The central aim of any piece of fiction is to tell a story. The medium and the genre of the story determines what kind of story it will be, how the writer will tell it, and to what degree each of the aforementioned elements are present. All fiction, no matter on which bookstore shelf it sits, tells a story.
But not every story has much in the way of plot. In some cases, in some stories, plot virtually doesn't exist.
For instance, take James Joyce's famous novel, Ulysses.
What's the plot?
A man (Leopold Bloom), walks around Dublin for a day, has lunch, does a little work, lusts after a young woman, meets up with a young friend (Stephen Dedalus) who he gets drunk with in the brothel district, and then goes home to his cheating wife.
The end.
(I know. Super exciting.)
Okay, let's do that same thing again, this time with Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain.
What's the plot?
A satellite probe crash lands in a small town in the southwest of the United States, causing the whole population of the town to suddenly die, except for two people: an old man in declining health and a newborn.
A group of elite scientists are assembled by the US Government to figure out what the cause of this sudden massacre was, and how to cure it before--if it hasn't already--it mutates and inflicts itself on the whole country and possibly the world.
Two scientists eventually figure out, through the trial and error of the scientific method, the virus's weakness and figure out the best means of containment and cure, but before they can act on it, their lab suddenly goes into self-destruct mode, and one of them has to race against the clock to stop it from happening. In the nick of time, he does.
The cure is established, but the incident is kept secret from the rest of the world, the result of an "unfortunate accident."
The end.
(That's a lot to pack into one book, right?)
Both of these books do tell a story. One is simply much more mundane and real, while the other is, to use the Hollywood description, "high concept."
Joyce, whose focus is more on how he tells his story via the famed stream-of-consciousness technique, skews plot in favor of style and focus on the inner conflict and life of his pedestrian characters.
Crichton, meanwhile, opts for a thriller like atmosphere, where the beats of the plot move the reader towards the resolution of the central conflict, with his characters--let's be honest--acting merely as chess pieces moving across his story's gameboard.
Still, both have a story, but one has a greater dose of plot than the other.
This is the relationship between plot and story, in my opinion, that Forster got wrong. Because fiction's aim, and therefore the novel's aim, is always to tell a story, what happens in that story isn't merely a sequence of events. A story, to use Forster's own definition, is the true, "sequence of events propelled by causality."
A good story, at its core, can be broken down into a simply equation: Character + Conflict = Story.
All you really need is a person with a problem, and you have a story. The actions of the character, the ones they take to resolve the conflict at hand, then form the plot.
In the course of the plot, you discover through the thoughts and actions of the character, who they are; thus, you also give a reader reason to care what happens. As the old saying goes, "you can't hate someone once you know their story." Once you've allowed the reader to understand who your character is and what they want, they become invested.
All a plot is after that, on its base level, is a series of things you put in the characters way to keep them from getting what they want. These obstacles could be external factors, like an oppressive society or an antagonist. They also could be internal factors, like the famed "Character's Ghost"; that's literary shorthand for a lie or unresolved internal struggle the character is dealing with that keeps them from growing. Or, it could be a combination of the two.
Finally, once you near the conclusion, you have one fundamental choice to make: do you resolve things and let the character get what they want, or do you leave things unresolved and, thus, keep what your character wants out of their reach?
In truth, "The King died, and then the Queen died," is a plot, bullet points on an outline.
"The King died, and then the Queen died of grief," is the real story, because you force a reader to ask a simple question: why?
Plot is what happens; story is why something happens.
""The king died and then the queen died," is a story, but "The king died and then the queen died of grief," is a plot.""
A story, by Forster's definition, is a mere, "narrative of events arranged in their time sequence." Thus, he continued, it, "can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happened next."
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E.M. Forster by Dora Carrington
Source: Wikipedia
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By contrast, he claimed, "a plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality." After citing the second half of the aforementioned example, he says, "the time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it."
I don't claim to be anything in the way of an authority on the craft of writing. After all, I'm just some schmuck with a blog. Certainly, I'm not someone whom anyone with an ounce of intellectual integrity or simple commonsense would think to take seriously. Who am I to disagree with one of the most highly regarded novelists of the previous century?
Yet, I do.
With respect to Forster and to those who love his work (I'm aware I'm insulting a sacred cow when I say this), I honestly believe that the man, brilliant as he was, got things ass-backwards.
The reason comes down to a fundamental difference in understanding of the relationship between plot and story.
(I should point out one caveat. In the world of journalism--if such a place still exists--his definition stands. A story, from a news source, is simply what happened. But here, we're talking about fiction.)
Like many contemporary burgeoning writers who've sought to practice and study the craft, I've taken my share of "writing courses," attended my share of workshops, and studied a fair number of craft books (as my constant readers can attest because I won't shut up about them). Like many such writers, it took me a long time to figure out what the difference between plot and story was. Some of my own instructors in the past even, foolishly, used the two words synonymously. The truth, however, is that while they're related, plot and story are quite different (on that, Forster and I agree).
In much of my writerly education, many of the instructors and authors touched on a concept--or rather a cluster of interrelated concepts--called the Elements of Fiction.
According to most theorists, there are five (5) central elements that make up any piece of fiction. In any given piece, the weight of each element varies, but all five remain nonetheless present. In no particular order, the five elements are:
1. Character
2. Plot
3. Conflict
4. Setting
5. Theme
No matter the piece of fiction--be it Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains, J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish," Middlesex, or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (as it's called in American)--all five of these elements are present to some degree or another. One or two of them may overshadow the remaining three or four, but analyze any novel, novella, short story, play, TV show, or film, and you'll find them.
Now, why do I bring these up? Because it helps to clarify my personal understanding of the difference between Plot and Story.
The central aim of any piece of fiction is to tell a story. The medium and the genre of the story determines what kind of story it will be, how the writer will tell it, and to what degree each of the aforementioned elements are present. All fiction, no matter on which bookstore shelf it sits, tells a story.
But not every story has much in the way of plot. In some cases, in some stories, plot virtually doesn't exist.
For instance, take James Joyce's famous novel, Ulysses.
What's the plot?
A man (Leopold Bloom), walks around Dublin for a day, has lunch, does a little work, lusts after a young woman, meets up with a young friend (Stephen Dedalus) who he gets drunk with in the brothel district, and then goes home to his cheating wife.
The end.
(I know. Super exciting.)
Okay, let's do that same thing again, this time with Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain.
What's the plot?
A satellite probe crash lands in a small town in the southwest of the United States, causing the whole population of the town to suddenly die, except for two people: an old man in declining health and a newborn.
A group of elite scientists are assembled by the US Government to figure out what the cause of this sudden massacre was, and how to cure it before--if it hasn't already--it mutates and inflicts itself on the whole country and possibly the world.
Two scientists eventually figure out, through the trial and error of the scientific method, the virus's weakness and figure out the best means of containment and cure, but before they can act on it, their lab suddenly goes into self-destruct mode, and one of them has to race against the clock to stop it from happening. In the nick of time, he does.
The cure is established, but the incident is kept secret from the rest of the world, the result of an "unfortunate accident."
The end.
(That's a lot to pack into one book, right?)
Both of these books do tell a story. One is simply much more mundane and real, while the other is, to use the Hollywood description, "high concept."
Joyce, whose focus is more on how he tells his story via the famed stream-of-consciousness technique, skews plot in favor of style and focus on the inner conflict and life of his pedestrian characters.
Crichton, meanwhile, opts for a thriller like atmosphere, where the beats of the plot move the reader towards the resolution of the central conflict, with his characters--let's be honest--acting merely as chess pieces moving across his story's gameboard.
Still, both have a story, but one has a greater dose of plot than the other.
This is the relationship between plot and story, in my opinion, that Forster got wrong. Because fiction's aim, and therefore the novel's aim, is always to tell a story, what happens in that story isn't merely a sequence of events. A story, to use Forster's own definition, is the true, "sequence of events propelled by causality."
A good story, at its core, can be broken down into a simply equation: Character + Conflict = Story.
All you really need is a person with a problem, and you have a story. The actions of the character, the ones they take to resolve the conflict at hand, then form the plot.
In the course of the plot, you discover through the thoughts and actions of the character, who they are; thus, you also give a reader reason to care what happens. As the old saying goes, "you can't hate someone once you know their story." Once you've allowed the reader to understand who your character is and what they want, they become invested.
All a plot is after that, on its base level, is a series of things you put in the characters way to keep them from getting what they want. These obstacles could be external factors, like an oppressive society or an antagonist. They also could be internal factors, like the famed "Character's Ghost"; that's literary shorthand for a lie or unresolved internal struggle the character is dealing with that keeps them from growing. Or, it could be a combination of the two.
Finally, once you near the conclusion, you have one fundamental choice to make: do you resolve things and let the character get what they want, or do you leave things unresolved and, thus, keep what your character wants out of their reach?
In truth, "The King died, and then the Queen died," is a plot, bullet points on an outline.
"The King died, and then the Queen died of grief," is the real story, because you force a reader to ask a simple question: why?
Plot is what happens; story is why something happens.
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