the.com/storyline
The skeleton of events you'd still see if you stripped away every pretty sentence.
means The sequence of connected events that makes up the plot of a story, book, film, or show.
from A straightforward 20th-century compound of 'story' and 'line' — 'line' here carrying its old sense of a thread or course followed through something, as in 'line of argument' or 'line of thought.' Screenwriters and editors needed a word for the narrative thread running under all the scenes and dialogue, and this plain, functional compound did the job without any fuss.
- not plot
- plot is events; storyline is their throughline across a work
- soap opera test
- if you can summarize a season in one breath, that's storyline
- multiple per story
- big novels braid several storylines into one spine
- etymology
- literally story plus line, coined for comic strip continuity