The Tyranny of Cause and Effect
The King died and then the Queen died is a story. The King died, and then the Queen died of grief is a plot.-
E.M. Forster
Consider the following sequences: The tree in front of your house gets struck by lightning. Later, you almost hit your toddler as you back out of the driveway. You realize, wondering about your own sanity, that you can see a dragon flying high above in the sky. That evening, you and your husband fight about the bills.
Versus:
The tree in front of your house gets struck by lightning. The boom of the strike has your nerves rattled, but after the storm you go outside anyway to take pictures of the damage that the shattered branches did to you lawn. Through the lens of the camera, you see a strange aura, like the corona of the sun, emanating from the hollow that has appeared. Intrigued, you move closer, and find a single symbol, perhaps a word, in a script you have never seen before. And when you see it, you feel something change inside your mind, and you're more nervous, because it feels as if someone has rearranged all the furniture from the way you like it. You decide to go to the store, to convince yourself that everything's normal, and begin to back out of the driveway, but the sudden certainty that you should stop, an eerie sense of what would come to pass if you did not, overwhelms you, you brake, you see your two year old daughter run from behind the muffler. And there's relief, but you feel overwhelmed. What is happening to you?
The first sequence is what E.M. Forster would call a story. You saw a dragon! There are usually a lot of high points in a story: Explosions, fights, miracles, and deus ex machinas abound. But unlike South Park's Michael Bay, you should understand that a series of extreme events is not what an audience is looking for.
The second sequence is a plot. Each event is caused by something that came before it. And because each event is connected, we can understand the character's motivations. The stakes heighten as the characters attempt to solve their problems, and those actions have effects, and those effects make the problems worse. Without this cause and effect relationship, there is very little to no drama.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone once visited an NYU screenwriting class for a few minutes. Of all the insight they could offer, they chose this: "Each individual scene has to work as a funny sketch," advises Parker. "If the words 'and then' belong between those beats, you're f*****. You want therefore or but." In no uncertain terms, the previous scene had better cause the current scene. You can sell movies with explosions, but you can't produce drama, and you might earn yourself an unflattering cameo on South Park season fifty.