Word list · 14 words
Words for writers: storytelling terms
Writers and critics use a small set of terms to talk about how stories are built: where a story starts, what drives the plot, how it ends and who is telling it. Knowing the names makes a draft easier to diagnose and a review easier to follow.
The list runs roughly in the order a story does, from the opening, through the machinery of the plot, to the ending and the narrator. Each entry gives the meaning and where the term comes from. For the sentence-level devices, such as chiasmus and zeugma, see the figures of speech list.
Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.
The words
In Medias Res
In medias res is starting a story in the middle of the action, with the earlier events filled in later.
Literary & Rhetorical
Chekhov's Gun
Chekhov's gun is the rule that nothing conspicuous should sit in a story unless it's going to matter.
Literary & Rhetorical
MacGuffin
A MacGuffin is the object everyone in the story is chasing, whose actual nature doesn't matter to the story.
Literary & Rhetorical
Red Herring
A red herring is a detail planted to pull attention away from what actually matters — and its famous origin story may itself be a fabrication.
Literary & Rhetorical
Pathetic Fallacy
The pathetic fallacy is giving nature human feelings — grieving clouds, angry seas — because the observer is feeling them.
Literary & Rhetorical
Defamiliarization
Presenting an ordinary thing so strangely that you actually perceive it again, instead of recognising it and moving on.
Literary & Rhetorical
Mise en Abyme
A work containing a smaller copy of itself — a play within a play, a painting showing the room it hangs in, a story about someone writing this story.
Literary & Rhetorical
Allegory
A story whose surface stands for something else entirely — a whole extended metaphor, built to be decoded.
Literary & Rhetorical
Deus Ex Machina
An improbable outside force nobody set up, which turns up and resolves a plot's difficulties — usually at the end.
Literary & Rhetorical
Eucatastrophe
A eucatastrophe is the sudden joyful turn near the end of a story that snatches a good ending out of apparent defeat.
Rare & Beautiful English
Denouement
The untying — the part of a story after the climax where the knot the plot tied comes undone.
Literary & Rhetorical
Unreliable Narrator
A narrator whose account you cannot take at face value — because they are lying or concealing, because they are naive or self-deceived, or because, in Wayne Booth's formulation, they do not speak…
Literary & Rhetorical
Bildungsroman
A novel of formation — the story of someone becoming who they will be, not merely growing older.
Literary & Rhetorical
Negative Capability
Negative capability is Keats's phrase for the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without grabbing for a resolution.
Philosophy & Ways of Living