For plot there needs to be at least two distinct, but related events.  E. M. Forester famously identified the difference between plot and narrative with the following sentences: “The king died, and the queen died,” is a narrative; “The king died, and the queen died of grief,” is a plot. One set is relational, the other is not. Can a database narrative be made of only two relational elements?  

Missing data in a story—the background of the characters, the off-screen or offstage action, the unspoken thoughts, the hidden influences on the plot, the cultural contexts of the telling—are essential for story to be present in the mind. Absence is indeed an aperture. We experience story in the brain as a neural network—a field of semantic and sensory effects, of which plot may be one unifying element. The storyteller starts with charged mental data — voices, images, sensations, abstractions—and then arranges selections of data into a material presentation (a narration) so that it can be delivered to an attentive mind. The material form of a story is always the compressed (zipped) version of a living network designed for activation inside other living networks. While plot provides the scaffolding, it is ultimately our cognitive and emotional investment—the associations, desires, visualizations, decodings and fast searches—that transforms a mere series of selected details into a story structure that is more than the sum of its parts.