…plot is an accurate term that names the internally consistent, interrelated pattern of events that move through time to shape and design a story.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 43)
…a plot should serve to orchestrate a symphony of changes. It’s change that obsesses brains and keeps them engaged.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 196)
I’m a writer, so I want to understand the plot points and beats as a means toward manipulating reader desires.
Gail Carriger, The Heroine’s Journey (2020, p. 85)
A plot point is defined as any incident, episode, or event that hooks into the action and spins it around in another direction.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 26)
The job of your plot is to test, break and retest a flawed character.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 221)
We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king dies and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot…Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927, p. 86)
In literature there are two great organizing patterns. One is the natural cycle itself; the other, a final separation between an idealized and happy world and a horrifying or miserable one. Comedy moves in the general direction of the former, and traditionally closes in some such formula as ‘They lived happily ever after.’ Tragedy moves in the opposite direction, and toward the complementary formula ‘Count no man happy until he is dead.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981, p. 73)
And an old debate in screenwriting asks: what’s more important, character or plot? But this query also raises a false question. Because in visual storytelling it’s impossible to separate effective plot from character. We can’t declare either one more important. They’re two aspects of the same thing.
Eric Edson, The Story Solution (2011, p. 113)
The way you drive your story foreword is by focusing on the actions of the character and the dramatic choices he or she makes during the narrative story line.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, pp. 46–47)
The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 190)
…the plot, instead of finding human beings more or less cut to its requirements, as they are in the drama, finds them enormous, shadowy, and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like an iceberg.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927, p. 85)