“If you had to sum up the plot in one action.”
Plot is what happens in the story. It is not just a bunch of things that happen. Actually, it is one thing that happens. That is really the difference between storytelling and recounting history. Recounting history is taking a time period and chronicling everything that happened, without the events having to be related. Storytelling is taking one of those events and telling it in a way that tells us something about being alive.
So, how do you make sure that you’re storytelling, not recounting history? By checking your plot for its singular action. Summarized down to the basic core, you should be able to state the plot in one action:
“Defeat Sauron” (Lord of the Rings)
Every storyline should be about achieving that singular action or about how it contributes to doing so.
And everything should originate from that singular action when you go about developing your plot. This way you ensure the structural union of the plot. So that if you remove or switch around any of the plot events, the whole thing gets disturbed and disjointed. If you have plot events that you can freely move from the end of the story to the middle or vice versa without much impact, your plot is not a plot, it’s a series of random events. It’s possible that you have overall an organic plot but one or two events that are not organic. If that is the case, you know that they don’t belong in the plot.