Notes from coursera.org course from Wesleyan University.
Show, don’t tell: how to show instead of tell by writing scenes.
PLOT
What is “plot”?
“Plot is the main events of a novel or story devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.”
Main events of a novel or story = what happens in your story, the actions or events that occur.
Devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence = the connected order in which things happen in the story.
**Story is in the definition of plot. Don’t get story and plot confused.
“The great English author Forster defines the difference between story and plot like this. The king died and then the queen died is a story while the king died and the queen died of grief is a plot. This implies a causal relationship between those two events. In the first description, First x happened and y happened. There’s no relationship between those two actions. It’s like an itinerary of events that happened according to a timeline, but are not related to each other.”
You need one thing happening, then causing another, etc. Not just a series of things happening that don’t have a relationship with each other.
Freytag’s pyramid
“Gustav Freytag was 19th-century German novelist and playwright who analyzed ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama and devised a pyramid to describe how a story works.”
