Literature

Literature

Of or pertaining to the art of writing in any form or style, most especially published works.

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Literature > Fiction

pump up

Literature; Fiction

Expanding a scene’s staging to give it more impact on the reader: foreshadowing it, placing it onstage, stretching out time, increasing the stakes. It is the literary foreplay ...

punish the careless reader

Literature; Fiction

An authorial device to make a reader engage: to sprinkle throughout the story information vital to understanding subsequent events; this punishes the careless reader by making him ...

pushbutton words

Literature; Fiction

Words used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the reader’s intellect or critical faculties, like ‘song’, ‘poet’, ‘tears’ or ‘dreams’. They are supposed to make us ...

reaction shot

Literature; Fiction

From the movies, a cutaway shift inside a bundle of narrative action which shows us the emotional or other responses of a character, usually a reader surrogate.

reader cheating

Literature; Fiction

Producing a result (a surprise, a deduction, an unexpected denouement) without having given the reader a fair opportunity to foresee the result. For instance, having a detective ...

reader surrogate

Literature; Fiction

A focus character who voices or experiences the thoughts, reactions and emotions which the author desires the reader to have. Usually the point-of-view character, usually ...

rear-view mirror description

Literature; Fiction

The habit of describing things only after they’ve figured in the action, never before they’re used. “She dodged behind the boulder that she’d just seen out of the corner of her ...