PLOT -- Part I: What is plot?

In the aftermath of the wonderful Western Washington SCBWI conference, I thought I'd share here my notes for the Plotting workshop I gave the other day. Plot is something that people ask me about a lot, and I find it is a hard thing to talk about in the abstract. I mean, you can talk in either the most basic, generic terms, or you can be really specific and talk about plots of particular books, etc. But I wanted to find something in between, a way of discussing plot that would be useful to pe...