Monthly Archives: February 2016

Story Terminology

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Here are some of the terms we started using when exploring ELEMENTS OF A STORY. (source: www.ohio.edu)

Character

An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change).

Climax

The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work.

Complication

An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work.

Conflict

A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters.

Dénouement

The resolution of the plot of a literary work.

Dialogue

The conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters’ speech is preceded by their names.

Exposition

The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided.

Falling action

In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it towards its denouement or resolution.

Fiction

An imagined story, whether in prose, poetry, or drama. Ibsen’s Nora is fictional, a “make-believe” character in a play, as are Hamlet and Othello. Characters like Robert Browning’s Duke and Duchess from his poem “My Last Duchess” are fictional as well, though they may be based on actual historical individuals. And, of course, characters in stories and novels are fictional, though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people. The important thing to remember is that writers embellish and embroider and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work. They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they “make things up.”

Narrative

A collection of events that tells a story, which may be true or not, placed in a particular order and recounted through either telling or writing.

Narrator

The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author. See also Point of view.

In literature and film, an unreliable narrator is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable.

Plot

The unified structure of incidents in a literary work. See Conflict, Climax, Denouement, and Flashback. [Abrams]

Point of view

The angle of vision from which a story is narrated. See Narrator. A work’s point of view can be: first person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively; objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader; omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the characters; and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some things about the characters but not everything.

Protagonist

The main character of a literary work–Hamlet and Othello in the plays named after them, Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Paul in Lawrence’s “Rocking-Horse Winner.”

Resolution

The sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story. See Plot.

http://www.ohio.edu/people/hartleyg/ref/fiction/fiction_terms.html