Starting with Aristotle, there’s been a great deal of controversy about what “plot” means. Aristotle called plot “the arrangement of incidents,” incorporating a beginning, middle, and an end. My dictionary defines plot as “the scheme of events or situations in a story.” The novelist E. M. Forster distinguished between story and plot, saying that a story was “a narrative of events in their time sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” Later critics suggested that the purpose of a plot was to show the interplay of events and character, with those events requiring conflict.
Yet I’m finding that there is a certain small subset of readers who equate “plot” with “action,” especially physical action with lots of violence, threats of death, and a high body count. That is, for these readers, if there is not a cascade of continuing action, the story or novel has no plot or point.
I fully understand that some readers read primarily, if not solely, for excitement and physical action, and there are more than enough books that provide such action. Many of them, I would contend, actually are without any vestige of a plot, in the sense that those books contain minimal character development, and no emotional or intellectual conflict, aspects of a novel that most readers and scholars would consider as necessary elements of plot. I certainly do.
A series of high energy actions isn’t necessarily a plot. The big-bang creation of the universe was violent and high energy, but it has no plot. For that matter, the Biblical take on creation is only a series of events, with neither character nor conflict [after the serpent and Cain and Abel, things change].
This also brings up a subsidiary but vital point. The lack of violent action doesn’t necessarily mean the lack of conflict, or for that matter, the lack of tension. Hitchcock’s acclaimed picture Vertigo contains no actual scenes of violence, only one apparent suicide, and an accidental death, yet the tension builds throughout, and it can hardly be called plotless.
In the end action doesn’t equal plot, and a well-plotted and tense story may contain little physical action or violence.