Story vs Plot

For a definition of a story we turn to British literary scholar Richard Bradford who defines a story by citing the work of the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky:

Shklovsky (1917) reduced fictional structures to two opposing and interactive dimensions: sjuzhet and fabula.  Fabula refers to the actuality and the chronological sequence of the events that make up a narrative; and the sjuzhet to the order, manner, and style in which they are presented in the novel in question. The fabula of Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) concerns the experiences, in and around London, from the early childhood to adulthood of Pip.  Its sjuzhet involves the presentation of these events in Pip's first-person account [...].  In Dickens's novel, the first-person manner of the sjuzhet has the effect of personalizing the fabula; Pip's description of Miss Havisham and of his relationship with Estella is...influenced by factors such as his own emotion[...] his...habits and his...perspective. [Richard Bradford, Stylistics (London 1997), p. 52.]

A narrative text contains a fabula, also known as story; and a sjuzhet, known as plot. 

·         Fabula (story: what)– the raw materials (such as the literal events and their chronological sequence). 

A text must have some kind of logic, some kind of recognizable sequence and that's what a fabula provides.

In fact some theorists argue that if a story doesn't mirror human behavior in a way a reader can recognize then they won't understand it, and your story is useless.  

·         Sjuzhet (plot: how) The narrator gives the story its sjuzhet when they filter the events through their perspective.  So the sjuzhet encompasses all of the devices that a narrator has at their disposal when they tell the fabula to the reader.