Story structure
Fabula and syuzhet
Russian formalism's pair of terms: the fabula is a story's events in chronological order, the syuzhet the order and manner of their telling.
Fabula and syuzhet are narratology's names for the two clocks a story runs on. The fabula "refers to the chronological sequence of events within the world of a narrative"; the syuzhet "refers to the time of its telling, the sequence of events as they are presented to the reader." Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky introduced the pair as part of Russian Formalism in the early twentieth century, and narratologists have called the fabula "the raw material of a story" and the syuzhet "the way a story is organized." Citizen Kane is the standard demonstration: the fabula is Kane's life in chronological order, while the syuzhet opens on his death and works back through flashbacks. Classical narratives tend to keep the two synchronized; flashbacks and flashforwards pull them apart.
For novelists the pair names exactly what a nonlinear narrative does by feel: the author must know the fabula even when the reader only ever sees the syuzhet, and a story within a story adds a narrator's own syuzhet on top of the frame's.