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Literary Terms
It’s impossible to write about writing without using basic
literary terms – the ones that are used all the time. Literary
critics have a whole dictionary of terms that the rest of us are
hard-pressed to understand, and I indeed own one such dictionary;
it’s quite good fun to read, oddly enough. But the following
will get you through any discussion of your work with agents and
editors, and make sure you can follow any advice that I have to
give.
ACTION
Anything that your characters are doing, whether its hacking their
way through the Amazonian rainforests or blinking.
ANTAGONIST/VILLAIN
This needn’t be anyone villainous or antagonistic; it needn’t
even be a person. It is whoever or whatever is set against your
hero. It could be his wife, boss, son, or simply his circumstances,
or his own nature. It can be the mountain he has to climb, literary
or figuratively. It is whatever stands between him and his goal.
DENOUEMENT
The outcome of events.
DIALOGUE
The words that are directly spoken by a character or characters.
EXPOSITION
The explanation to the reader of something he must know in order
to follow the plot. This can be done by narrative, by dialogue,
by flashback – by any means that will keep the reader entertained,
and unaware that he is being given
information.
FIRST PERSON
I, we, me, myself, us, ourselves.
HERO/HEROINE/PROTAGONIST
The main character. The use of the word hero does not imply heroism;
the hero can be an abject coward. If he is spectacularly unheroic,
or not at all admirable, he is often called an anti-hero.
NARRATIVE
The non-dialogue text.
PLOT
The planned arrangement of events
in a story.
POINT OF VIEW/ANGLE OF NARRATION
The events in a story must be seen through someone’s eyes. That
can range from an all-seeing, all-knowing invisible narrator who tells
the story in the third person, as in ‘Once Upon a Time’
(where, for instance, the narrator knows what both the wolf and Little
Red Riding Hood are thinking, and what LRH is doing while the wolf
devours her grandmother), to its being narrated in the first person
by a character in the novel, when the reader can be told only what
the character narrating can see and hear, and the narrator knows only
what he himself is thinking. Or it can be virtually anything in between.
STORY LINE
The sequence of events that carry
the plot. E. M Forster once famously defined the difference between
story and plot as ‘“The King died and then the Queen died’
is a story, but the “The King died and then the Queen died
of grief” is a plot.”’ In other words, a story is
a sequence of events, whereas a plot is a sequence of cause and
effect, and in plotting a novel, the writer arranges the events
of the story accordingly.
THIRD PERSON
He. They. Him, himself, them, themselves.
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