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Plot and Story

The writing that follows may look weird to many. But this is a small article on how I learned about two key words that are often linked with movies and prose.
Plot and story are two words that I have used too many times in my writing and talking. It is quite surprising to me that I found it difficult to differentiate between the two when Malayalam filmmaker Jayaraj questioned me on this. Definitely he did have the right answer at hand. Many people in the film industry itself could not differentiate these two commonly used words, adds Jayaraj.
I thought it would be interesting to share a write up on this in this space of mine as I have failed to watch a single movie for the past two days!
The story or the narrative could be defined as something that tells the course of events. Plot could be defined as the logical structure which connects the course of events.
Here goes an example given by E. M. Forster:
The king died and then the queen died.
This is a story. The plot of this story could look like
The king died and then the queen died of grief.
With this example and nothing more I conclude on my happiness of learning few things about plot and story, which are two words I have always loved!
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Comments

Ashwin said…
This was beautiful! Well Put and signed off in style!
February 1, 2009 at 4:21 AM
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