While my brain is fermenting...

I was reading Ursula Le Guin's website (as I do periodically) and came across her wee "Discussion of Story" again. Here's a chunk:

I define story as a narrative of events (external or psychological) which moves through time or implies the passage of time, and which involves change.

I define plot as a form of story which uses action as its mode usually in the form of conflict, and which closely and intricately connects one act to another, usually through a causal chain, ending in a climax.

Climax is one kind of pleasure; plot is one kind of story. A strong, shapely plot is a pleasure in itself. It can be reused generation after generation. It provides an armature for narrative that beginning writers may find invaluable.

But most serious modern fictions can’t be reduced to a plot, or retold without fatal loss except in their own words. The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves.

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.

Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

The rest of the essay is here - I've excerpted about half of it. While I like a lot of her fiction, I don't like all of it. But I have loved every single piece of non-fiction writing I have read of hers. If I was a writer, I would find those words inspirational - I do anyway.

And you should read What Makes a Story:

.... But writing, whatever its medium, is made of words, and words are bodily, made with the body and the breath, received by the body, felt with the body, and the rhythms of words are bodily rhythms.

I'm afraid that's the penultimate line, but the rest of it is a series of great similes for various types of story. And again, it's short and sweet. Do read, it's lovely prose.