Plot

In Alan Moore's Writing for Comics, Moore explains plot in an unconventional way. He says that the plot of a story is not the events or actions of the story, but the implication of it. It's the subtext, what the story is really about. He used an issue of Superman that he wrote as an example. The events of the story were Superman being trapped in a hallucination where Krypton never exploded and he lived his life there. Eventually, Superman saw that the life he would have had there was not desirable and that was how he broke free from the spell.

The plot, however, was about people who live in the past or the future. It is that people should not wish that events had happened differently and they shouldn't wait for the future for their lives to get better. They should be happy in the here and now.

Although it can be confusing to use the word plot in an unconventional sense, I think it is worth it. Everybody generally agrees that stories need a plot. If plot is subtext or a bigger picture, that means that every story will have relevance beyond mindless entertainment. It would also mean that a writer is creating something worth reading. The biggest problem I see in amateur writing is a bunch of stuff that happens with no point. When I come across that, all I can say is "so what?" When somebody is trying to express an idea through the medium of a story, then we at least have an idea of how we can help to shape it to make it the most effective expression.