Literary techniques

Literary techniques

Industry: Literature

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Literary techniques

event

Literature; Literary techniques

The fundamental unit of the action. Also called an “incident,” an event can be an act (a kick or a kiss), or a happening when no character is causally involved (a bolt of lightning).

Used in two main senses: 1) the narrator’s emotional distance fromthe characters and the action (the degree of his or her involvement in the story); and 2) the distance between the narrator’smoral, ...

fiction

Literature; Literary techniques

Made-up, as opposed to factual. As a noun it refers to the whole range of made-up narratives that stand opposed to “nonfictional” genres of narrative like history, biography, autobiography, ...

crux

Literature; Literary techniques

A critical point, often a gap, in a fictional narrative where there is an insufficiency of cues, or where cues are sufficiently ambiguous, to create a major disagreement in the intentional ...

discordant narrator

Literature; Literary techniques

A narrator whose perceptions and moral sensibilities differ from those of the implied author.

dierct style

Literature; Literary techniques

The direct expression of a character’s speech or thought, either “untagged” or “tagged” (set off from the narration by quotation marks and other indicators like “he said,” “she ...

constituent events

Literature; Literary techniques

Constituent events are essential to the forward movement of the story; they are not all necessarily “turning points,” but at the least they are essential to the chain of events that make up the ...