Episode: 2531
Title: HPR2531: Plot And Story
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2531/hpr2531.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:53:47

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This in HPR episode 2,531 entitled, Plot and Torrid, it is hosted by Lost in Drunks and
is about 14 minutes long, and Karim a clean flag.
The summary is Lost in Drunks tells some thoughts about the nature of Plot and Torrid
in storytelling.
Today's show is licensed under a CC hero license.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com, get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15, better web hosting that's honest and
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Hello, this is Lost in Drunks, and you'll have to forgive the audio quality I'm in the
car right now.
Today I wanted to talk about story and plot in storytelling.
Now to many people those two things might be one and the same, but really we should approach
them differently.
Very famously they have been described as follows.
Plot is what happens, story is who it happens to.
Now what that really means of course is plot as a sequence of events that drive the story
forward.
Whereas story is synonymous with character at least by this description.
Synonymous is probably strong, why don't we say closely tied to?
And why would that be?
Well because a sequence of events is not personal, it's dry, it's a bullet point of fact.
This happens there and this happens then and oh we didn't know about that to begin with
so it's a surprise at the very end, but that's not an emotional tie.
See it could probably be described this way.
Plot satisfies us intellectually, story satisfies us emotionally.
If we don't care about what's happening we could say that the story is lacking.
If the story is interesting but it's highly predictable we can also say it's lacking.
However sometimes the story is so compelling, that is to say the characters are either so
engaging or what happens to them is so engaging or so compelling that we don't really care
if it's predictable.
And that's very common, we see that all the time.
In many ways people might say the plot is mostly important in things like murder mysteries
especially who done it.
It's important in spy thrillers, it's important in political thrillers or in say legal thrillers
or legal dramas.
Plot becomes important when we have a very specific sequence of events that have to occur
in order for these characters to go through the journey they're going through and by extension
the reader or the consumer of the story is carried along for the ride.
Of course we have problems when we have plot over story because again it's boring.
I don't really care about the who done it if I don't care about who it was done too
or who's involved or any of that.
And I don't really care about a story so much if all we have is a bunch of people sitting
around talking about their problems.
You have to have something for these characters to do but you also have to have interesting
characters.
In other words plot and story go hand in hand at least under this definition.
Now what are other ways to look at this?
We'll say the movie Titanic, the most recent one in the big one.
Whether you like it or not, you could say well the plot of this is that the ship hits
an iceberg and sinks.
However, the way this film, that particular film, was put together in point of fact that
isn't the plot, that's the background, that's the texture.
That's like having a love story set during World War II.
You could say well the plot is you have the allies and the axis and they're going at
it and the allies end up winning.
That's the plot.
No, that's the background, that's the texture.
The plot ends up focusing on the characters, right?
So in that particular structure, plot is closely associated with story.
It's very closely associated with those characters.
It isn't just a sequence of events or I should say it is but it's a sequence of events
that affect particular characters.
So plot and story are very closely associated as well.
When you have a disconnect, when you have distance from the plot to the character that
is when the sequence of events is happening outside of the direct scope or control or influence
of the characters, it is no longer plot, it is background.
Plot, the sequence of events has to be something that directly involves your characters or
else it has nothing to do with the story directly.
And the story, your characters and what's happening to them, those are the things that matter
and your plot has to reflect that.
These characters, this story, has to be directly involved with the plot of your tale.
Otherwise everything else is texture.
It is background and background serves to color your story.
It exists in order for the story and the plot to have a particular form.
Say we want to do a spy tale set in World War II.
It's also a romance because maybe you have an axis spy and an allied spy and they're
after the same MacGuffin, maybe microfilm, that's a famous one, they're after this microfilm
but in so doing, they fall in love.
So what do we have?
We have two characters, hopefully they're engaging, intelligent, funny, attractive.
They also have their duty, they have the danger they're involved in, it's a dangerous business
being a spy.
We have all of these things, that's our story, they have to get this microfilm and if the
axis gets it, it'll cost allied lives and if the allies get it, it'll cost access lives.
So the stakes are high, but that's not the plot.
The plot will be that the microfilm is being stored in this impregnable vault inside an
impregnable fortress up on the top of some impregnable mountain in the middle of some
godforsaken country.
Our plot is how do we get this thing or at least that's the challenge, right?
The challenge is part of the plot.
In this particular type of story, we could tell it from one character's point of view.
We can tell it from one spy's point of view or from the other.
We could have a third character who didn't have it from that person's point of view, but
it gets complicated and muddy at that point.
We could tell the story from both their points of view and just go back and forth, back
and forth, back and forth and as they narrow in on this thing, they draw closer together,
their emotions play up higher and the stakes get higher because we don't know who's going
to end up with this thing.
And are they going to end up together or is the background going to insert itself into
the foreground that is to say the tragedy of the war is it going to visit our characters?
And all of these things are vital and they all feed into each other.
Our World War II story is what's allowing for the plot to exist and the story will be
served best by these characters.
You could also look at it from the other point of view.
You can also say what kind of characters work best with a plot like this.
A different storytellers approach that from different points of view, but the end result
is generally the same.
So in this example, and it's a pretty triathlon, but we want things simplistic because
I'm just, you know, talking off the top of my head here.
In this example, we have background, plot, story, characters.
All of these things are in a dance and you may see, at least I do anyway, they are not
entirely separated from each other by any means.
You cannot talk plot without talking story.
You cannot talk story without talking character and you cannot talk about any of these things
without talking about the background, the texture of the story.
All of these things are working together to bring this story forward.
Now on top of all this, then you have to have good dialogue on top of everything else
or else all of it falls apart.
These are all elements of good storytelling, but it is the plot and the story in this particular
case and in this conversation, your plot has to work.
It has to be good enough so that the story seems to make sense.
If your characters are good characters, not that they're intrinsically good people, but
if the characters stand up and they seem like real enough people for this particular story,
then the plot has to be good enough that it makes sense to them because if it's ridiculous
and yet they go along with it, we have a dissonance.
We can say why would this character think that makes sense because it makes no sense to
me.
Suddenly they don't seem like they're good characters anymore and the plot seems bad.
Bad plot is hurting your characters.
The plot has to make sense to them.
From an objective standpoint, you can say, well, why didn't they do this?
Why didn't they do that?
Why didn't they call in for reinforcements?
Why didn't they just leave the castle to the Air Force to vomit so that nobody gets it?
Those questions can exist outside of the story and the plot and what you're trying to tell.
But within context of the characters, they cannot have these problems.
You either have to deal with that plot whole, that detail within the story or the setting
is such that the stakes are so high and time is so short, none of it matters because objectively
speaking, you can always just say they didn't have time or they couldn't communicate their
desires or they had no backup whatsoever.
It just is the way it is.
Now that's both an overused and an underused technique right there.
It is the way it is.
You can see stories that are absurd on the face of it.
But they work simply by saying, well, it's just the way it is in the story.
Almost every episode of the Twilight Zone worked that way.
We didn't question why this completely bizarre, creepy and sometimes flat out absurd or
comically ridiculous situation is existing.
It simply is existing and we're running with it.
It worked very, very well there.
There are many examples where it doesn't work so well and it's because it wasn't deliberate.
When you see a story where the setting or the background or the situation is just flat
out absurd, just flat out ridiculous and you can't get over it.
It's because they didn't do it on purpose.
It's because they decided that we want to tell a Terminator knockoff story about a robot
coming from the future.
In order for that to work, we have to have a company that this robot's got to come back
to because they're going to have the secret that can stop it in the future and it's got
to destroy the main frame this time around because again, it's not the Terminator.
It's a Terminator knockoff.
We're not killing Sarah Connor.
We're killing some program, some machine.
The McGuffin is this machine that has to either be saved or destroyed in order for the future
to be saved.
You can set up this corporate structure so that it's just absurd and no one believes
it and you watch it and it's like this is terrible.
Maybe it's terrible because the production values are low or the acting is bad or the dialogue
is bad or it has multiple problems on multiple levels, but if the basic setting is bad, you
have a disconnect there and if that's the case, when that sort of thing happens, don't
forget how closely connected the other aspects of the story are.
If you have a problem there, you have a problem everywhere else in the story.
Now again, sometimes you have a plot that's so compelling, it can shine more than the other
things and if the shine is bright enough, you don't see the problems existing elsewhere.
That does happen and it works well when it does, right?
That's okay.
We can have great stories that are like that.
But what we're mostly talking about here is when it all works together because if you
have an area that is really well developed, much more so than another area of your story,
then you do run the risk of people seeing those holes, seeing where well, you know, this
is a great story, but you know, it's a great plot, but great characters, but love the
background, good concept, but you don't want that but you don't want anyone to look
at your story and say it could have or should have been better.
The ultimate goal is to tell a story and for the consumer of that story, the reader,
the viewer, if it's a movie or television show, the listener, if it's an audio drama, the
reader again, if it's a comic book, something like that, you want the consumer of that story
to be satisfied.
You're after that sense of satisfaction that everything works.
It doesn't have to have the conclusion that they're after, they don't have to be happy
about it, but when they're done, they have to say this thing fit together.
It all fit, it all works.
Plot and story are the two big elements there, but as I've pointed out, they are not
unconnected either to each other or to the other pieces of that tale.
At any rate, this was just a few thoughts about plot and story and how they all go together.
It's just an opinion.
You may have a different opinion.
If so, please feel free to put it in the comments for this particular episode on Hacker
Public Radio or better yet do your own episode, either about this topic or another one.
You have ideas, you have interests and we want to hear about them.
This has been Lost in Bronx, thank you for listening, take care.
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