Yes, but stories aren't *about* plot

This is an example of why plot as it's usually discussed doesn't make sense to me.

( Spoilers for as-yet-unfinished and unpublished novel... )

And this is part of why plot-oriented craft discussions don't work for me. They're all about those bullet points, as though that's what's driving the story. But for me, they're almost irrelevant at this stage, except for how they enable other things.

The other reason plot discussions don't work for me, of course, is that they never go into how to make those bullet points happen. They seem to think that once you have those bullet-points, it will be obvious how to get from one to another, but it never, ever is for me. There's always at least one step into a murky well of impenetrable darkness, which may conceal solid ground from which to step back out or may conceal a hole of bottomless depth and width that cannot be spanned without tools and materials and a significant investment in infrastructure. And that's the hard bit, for me.