Story vs. plot

What is the difference between plot and story? Is there a difference? To many of us, they mean the same thing, or virtually the same thing. I don't think I had ever considered the distinction until I read Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum" in her book No Time to Spare.

LeGuin sees the difference between story and plot as follows:

"Plot, to me, is variation or complication of the movement of story." This reminds me of the oft-repeated phrase "the plot thickens." This is what we might say, or think, when watching Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and those birds start attacking humans or when watching Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon witness a mob massacre and start running for their lives. To LeGuin, this isn't a matter of the plot thickening but rather of the plot starting. The story began several minutes earlier in each film. Now the plot kicks in.

"Story goes. Plot elaborates the going." The story obviously doesn't stop when the plot begins. It just gets more interesting. That's why most readers can be easily bored by novels (or movies) with no noticeable plot. "When is something going to happen?" we wonder. That something happening is the plot.

"Plot ... turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time." More than just a complication or an elaboration of the story, the plot, says LeGuin, is a thing of beauty, a work of art. I don't think she is suggesting that every plot is a work of art, but even a routine plot makes even a routine story better.

Does every story need a plot? Some novels, including some that are highly regarded in literary circles, don't have them, or at least not that you would notice. Thomas C. Foster writes in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America that Jack Kerouac's On the Road has "no plot worth mentioning." LeGuin herself cites Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall as an example of a story without a plot.

One kind of story that doesn't require a plot to be interesting is a life story, someone's biography or memoir. LeGuin is critical of those writers who try to insert a plot into a person's life "unless the subject obligingly provided one by living it," she says. One person who did have a life with a plot, it seems to me, was Beatrix Potter, who after a long struggle was able to use the wealth she earned from her illustrated children's books to escape a domineering mother and find happiness at her own place in the country.

Most of us live lives without plots, but we prefer that novels and movies have them.