What is a Plot? Transcript (English Subtitles Available in Video)
By Evan Gottlieb, Oregon State University Professor of British Literature
14 May 2026
The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to write at length about story, plot, and narrative as distinct from other kinds of subjects. In his Poetics, Aristotle is primarily interested in defining what makes a good tragedy vs. an effective epic: those were the primary literary modes of ancient Greece. Along the way, however, Aristotle offers some foundational insights about their basic components that are still relevant today.
Plot, according to Aristotle, is simple: it is “an ordered series of events”: a “whole [action],” which means it has “a beginning, a middle, and an end.” The beginning of the plot sets the actions in motion, the middle elaborates on the consequences of those actions, and the end lays out their “final” consequences, after which the plot of the story is complete.
Now, that might all sound rather obvious, but that’s because we’ve so thoroughly absorbed Aristotle’s definition that we take its components for granted. So you didn’t like the ending of a story? Blame the plot’s conclusion. You didn’t like its middle? Too many plot holes! Too many actions that violate the cause-and-effect logic of a solid plot, as Aristotle laid it out so many centuries ago.
Even though they’re separated by millennia, then, we can see how Aristotle’s basic ideas lie behind what is essentially the modern popular standard regarding how to understand plot: that’s the structure that you probably already know as Freytag’s Pyramid. In essence, Freytag’s pyramid is an unpacked version of Aristotle’s beginning (right, the “exposition and inciting incident”), the middle (the “rising action, climax, and falling action”), and the end (the “resolution”). Note too that in the diagrammatic version of Freytag’s pyramid, the “resolution” is usually shown as leveling out higher than where the “exposition” began. I think that’s is meant to represent spatially what is actually a temporal phenomenon: that the end of a plot usually doesn’t leave off at exactly the same point where it began. (If it did we’d be talking about “Freytag’s circle.”)
Freytag’s pyramid is a useful way of generalizing about the structure of a typical fictional plot. What it can’t tell us, however, is the content that fills in the structure: only the author can do that. Let’s talk briefly about that content. In theory, it could be anything – and this has been borne out in practice. But according to novelist John Gardner, although there are literally millions of variations, there are actually only TWO basic plots:
1) A person goes on a journey
2) A stranger comes to town
So Gardner is really exaggerating here – it’s not hard to think of specific plots that seem very far away from these two – but especially once we realize that Gardner’s two plots can be understood literally and metaphorically, we can see that they actually cover a surprising amount of ground.
"A person goes on a journey." Taken literally, here we have the journey as physical movement or adventure – at its most basic, to travel somewhere new. Some of the earliest modern novels employ this plot: in the Anglophone tradition, Daniel Defoe’s Strange, Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) are two classics. But journeys can be metaphorical as well as literal, of course, and then the possibilities really begin to open up. One of the most common modern “metaphorical journeys” is called a bildungsroman -- that is, a novel or narrative of education (literal or figurative) and growth/maturation. This covers everything from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend. But you don’t have to go full-blown metaphorical to see that there are all kinds of other non-literal journeys. What if the “journey” is actually a mystery that needs solving? – now we have every Sherlock Holmes story and every Agatha Christie mystery!
Ok, what about Gardner’s other basic plot: A Stranger Comes to Town? Is this literal? Then you’ve got many classic Westerns (we’ll go with Shane and High Noon: in which a heroic loner comes to town to protect it from outlaws, or an evil sheriff, or what have you.) You also have countless fairy and folk tales, both older and more modern: Zora Neale Hurston’s story “Uncle Monday” (1934), for instance – but also P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins (also 1934): in which a seemingly – or possibly really – magical stranger arrives in a new place and proceeds to shake things up.
Now of course, the story can be told from the opposite perspective, too, right? The “stranger” can also be the narrator or protagonist themselves, who seems “strange” only to those whose community they’re about to enter or disrupt: this is the basic formula for innumerable “fish out of water”-type stories, in which, say, the protagonist moves from the country to the city, or vice versa. A lot of Dickens’ best known novels rely on this pattern: Pip in Great Expectations, David in David Copperfield, and Oliver in Oliver Twist all move to London.
But of course, neither “stranger” nor “town” needs to be taken literally. “Town” can be replaced by any tight-knit, pre-existing community, especially THE FAMILY UNIT. Any narrative that deals with the introduction of a new person who shakes up the status quo – a new baby, a step-parent, or a magical new governess – could potentially be described this way. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) takes this form insofar as it’s the introduction of a foreign child, Heathcliff, into the Earnshaw family unit that sets off most of the action of that book.
Likewise, the STRANGER doesn’t have to be someone completely new or unknown. It could be someone from the past who’s returned to their previous community/town/family. A lot of contemporary Romances use this trope: the protagonist’s ex-partner returns to the town where they both grew up and where the protagonist still lives (how romantic!); or vice versa: when the protagonist returns to her small hometown after years away in the city, and reconnects with an old flame (also romantic!) But a lot of Horror also works this way too: everything from Dracula to The Changeling -- especially stories of missing children who return home but seem somehow different than they were previously (this is a classic way to create effects of the uncanny—and just about every other Horror movie that shows up in the theater.)
And of course you can then create nearly endless variations by combining versions of Gardner’s two basic plots. For example: a stranger comes to town and then a person goes on a journey – and voila: you have Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, more or less. And the same can be said for all the Dickens novels I mentioned earlier, each of which features a protagonist who not only arrives in a new place (usually London) but does so as part of a journey that is equal parts literal (moving from the country to the city) and metaphorical (moving from childhood to adulthood).
Are there exceptions to Gardner’s rule – plots that don’t follow either of the two basic formulae he lays out? Of course – although they’re somewhat sparser on the ground than you might expect. Even an enormously complex novel, like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, can in fact be understood via “a person goes on a journey”: in this case being Raskolnikov, and the journey being one of self-discovery as he commits a heinous, unmotivated crime and then bears responsibility for it. Of course, no plot summary alone can even begin to do justice to the richness of Dostoyevsky’s characters, dialogue, themes and all-around world-building. But as a starting point from which to explore everything else that makes a given story meaningful, there’s no better place to begin than with the simple outline of its plot.
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Gottlieb, Evan. "What is a Plot?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 14 May 2026, Oregon State University, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-plot-definition-and-examples. Accessed [insert date].