What's The Difference Between Plot And Narrative?

Many people get confused between plot and narrative, or just don’t see a distinction between the two. But it’s worth picking the two apart a little.

What Is Plot?

Plot is the sequence of events that make up your story. It's the skeleton that gives structure to your narrative, all the key plot points, how they connect and inform each other, all the main actions and conflict, and the resolutions and Denouement of the story. It is not quite “everything that happens.” It is the logical sequence of events that took the character(s) on The Quest from the opening via The Inciting Incident through to its resolution.

Plot is the external journey of the protagonist. It’s also the big events that happen in the story and how they impact and change the characters. All of this is the plot of the novel.

A plot is usually a clear structure, no matter whether the book is straightforward or complex, commercial or literary. Sometimes, a very experimental novel is called plot-free. That’s because the writer (quite rarely now) has rejected many of the formal conventions of plot. But the book does have a plot. It is just an atypical one.

What is Narrative?

Narrative feels as if it is almost the same as plot, but it is, in fact, slightly different. The word derives from the Latin narrativus, which means “telling a story,” and that is what narrative does: it is the story as it is being told. It's the literal, sequential actual series of all chapters and scenes, no matter how crucial they are to the central skeleton of the plot. Plot is that skeleton; narrative is the whole body of the story. It extends out beyond plot, to the voice, perspective and pacing. If plot is “what happened,” narrative is both “what happened” and “how it happened.”

What Does This Mean For Plotting?

Plotting is the process of planning that skeleton of events in your novel. It involves outlining the main plot points, subplots, and the overall structure whether you do that before or during writing. Plotting gives your story a coherent structure and draws it into the compelling, complete narrative all novelists should strive for. We will soon see how this works in the context of a chapter-by-chapter application of Classic Novel Structure, but first let’s look at one crucial aspect of how you tell your story.

This is an excerpt from How To Write A Novel Chapter By Chapter available here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Novel-Chapter-Outlining-ebook/dp/B0DJ8TMVWL?ref_=ast_author_mpb

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