  Action/Adventure
This week: Plot Versus Story Edited by: Annette  
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| Hello writers and readers of action and adventure, I am Annette , your guest editor for this issue. |
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Plot Versus Story
Are you telling a story or weaving a plot?
What to do when your story gets strangled by plot.
The difference between a story and plot is this:
A story can be summed up with the words "and then." Meaning, a story is telling events as they happen. Doesn't have to be chronological, but the events as they happen in the story are not necessarily connected.
Plot can be summed up with "this happens because of that." Meaning in a plot, the events have to not just build upon each other, but one has to cause the other.
A story: The king dies, and then the queen dies.
A plot: The king dies, this causes the queen to die of a broken heart.
As you see, both examples are similar in what happens, but they are still different in what causes the events. In an action adventure, you can choose to follow either path. There are many action adventures that fall under story more so than plot. Especially classic novels like "Call of the Wild" involving animals are more linear as they go from one event to the next in that "and then" fashion.
Modern writers are taught to have an aversion to "and then." While it is certainly a bad thing to have those words "and then" show up in your text over and over, the concept of "and then" is as old as stories told around the night fire. There is nothing wrong with that format, especially when we're talking about action adventures.
Many times, an action adventure is going to be a quest to find or achieve something. Along the way, there are clues to uncover. As those clues add up and form the complete picture, the hero gets closer to the goal of finding or achieving that something. Although these stories are heavily loaded with "and then" events, they can be rich in action and adventure to a point where the lack of a convoluted plot is not felt. Better yet, a convoluted plot would bog down the story way too much. Even a story told in the "and then" format can keep a reader on the edge of their seat.
A way to break this up but still avoid too thick of a plot that slows things down is to have the hero make a choice along the way to is different from the original goal. For instance, if the adventure was about finding an artifact, the hero doesn't hand it over, but chooses to keep it for himself. Because (plot!) the person who sent him to find that artifact is not okay with that and suddenly the hero has to fend off his boss' goons. Just enough plot to make things less linear, but still loads of action!
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After Jackson had to move he met a girl, and they were being chased. Who's chasing them?
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For my last Action/Adventure newsletter "Five Stories" , I got the following replies:
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Action/Adventure: March 22, 2017 Issue [#8161]
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