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My old Webster’s Ninth uses each term in defining the other. Those who say there’s a difference agree that plot is a series of events linked by cause and effect, but their notions of story range all over the place. To novelist E. M. Forster, story meant the events without the links, meaningless until given a plot.* To director Martin Scorsese, mere plot fades by comparison to the character and camerawork of story.
At the University of Wisconsin’s Write-by-the-Lake week in June, I heard story described as what the work is about, a character responding to an event or choice or challenge. The plot of my life resembles a resume with causal links: After high school in West Virginia, impatience to leave home took me to a liberal arts college in Ohio . . . The story? Here’s one version: None of my major life decisions turned out as intended, and I don’t regret a single one. Writing and exploring have been part of every turn, enriched by the unexpected that happened along the way. What’s the short form of your life story? *Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel that “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.
3 Comments
Corrine
7/9/2018 10:15:47 am
Great question. I wonder that often. I always felt that the age old interview, “where do you see yourself in 5, 10 years?”, was pointless, as I would been proven wrong at any point in time. Perhaps, she actively “followed the force” gleaning all she could from every turn. I, too, had trouble answering where I envisioned myself in five or ten years. Always wrong. For the first time ever, I have a vision of the future in that to keep on doing more or less what I'm doing, where and with whom I'm doing it, for the rest of my life would be fine. (Not the sort of answer interviewers are looking for.) But experience suggests a big difference between a vision and a prediction. Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin.
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