usually of cause and effect—between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience, such as surprise or suspense.
Although in a loose sense the term commonly refers to that sequence of chief events which can be summarized from a story or play, modern criticism often makes a stricter distinction between the plot of a work and its STORY: the plot is the selected version of events as presented to the reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place in their 'natural' order and duration. The story, then, is the hypothetical
'raw material' of events which we reconstruct from the finished product of the plot. The critical discussion of plots originates in Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE), in which his term mythos corresponds roughly with our 'plot'.
Aristotle saw plot as more than just the arrangement of incidents: he assigned to plot the most important function in a drama, as a governing principle of development and coherence to which other elements (including character) must be subordinated. He insisted that a plot should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that its events should form a coherent whole. Plots vary in form from the fully integrated or 'tightly knit' to the loosely EPISODIC.
In general, though, most plots will trace some process of change in which characters are caught up in a developing conflict that is finally resolved.