plot

The storyline in a novel, play, film, or other work of fiction. A plot is traditionally a scheme of connected events.

Novelists in particular have at times tried to subvert or ignore the reader's expectation of a causally linked story with a clear beginning, middle, and end, with no loose ends. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf wrote novels that explore the minutiae of a character's experience, rather than telling a tale. However, the tradition that the novel must tell a story, whatever else it may do, survives for the most part intact.

In Aspects of the Novel (1927), English novelist E M Forster defined ‘plot’ thus: The king died and then the queen died. The king died and then the queen died of grief at the king's death. The first is the beginning of a series of events; the second is the beginning of a plot.