Story or Plot?

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Craft

Note: This is a reworking of an earlier post. I am making an effort (slowly) to gather all the posts about craft into a series.

The distinction between story and plot is a deceptively simple one.

Story: what happened

Plot: the artful rearrangement of what happened in a way that keeps your readers engaged.

A police report is a story told as a series of facts, in chronological order:

August 29 2008. At approximately 10:16am Officer Rodriquez and I w...