The Elements of Fiction

Short Story -- a prose narrative usually involving one unified episode or a sequence of related events.

Novel -- a prose narrative usually involving a "larger canvas" of characters and episodes/events.

1.) Plot -- the sequence of events in a story and their relation to one another -- usually, the events are related by causation, and their meaning lies in this relation

• End Orientation -- the outcome of the action or the conclusion of the plot (inherent in the opening paragraphs)
• Conflict -- a struggle between opposing forces (provides interest, suspense, tension)
• Exposition -- gives the background or setting of the conflict
• Rising Action -- dramatizes the specific events that set the conflict in motion
• Turning Point --
• Complications -- prolong the suspense of the conflict’s resolution
• Climax -- the emotional high point of the narration
• Falling Action -- the events begin to wind down and point the reader toward the end
• Conclusion or Denouement -- resolves the conflict to a greater or lesser degree
• Foreshadowing -- anticipating a turn of events
• Showing vs. Telling --

2.) Character

• Protagonist -- the central character
• Antagonist --
• Characterization -- the method of developing or revealing a character
• Round or Flat -- for characters to emerge as round, the reader must feel the play and pull of their actions and responses to situations
• Static or Dynamic -- a dynamic character changes during the narrative because something significant happens to him or her
• Emotional Truth --
• Sentimentality -- emotional overindulgence
• Stereotyping -- generalized, oversimplified judgment

3.) Setting -- the place and time of the story -- used to set the scene and suggest a mood or atmosphere -- must be perceived to affect character or plot

4.) Point of View -- the author’s choice of a narrator for the story

• First-person narration -- uses the pronoun “I”
• Third-person narration -- uses the pronouns “he,” “she,” and “they”
   
• First-Person Narration (narrator apparently a participant in the story)
  • A major character
  • A minor character
• Third-Person Narration (narrator a non-participant in the story)
  • Omniscient -- seeing into the minds of all characters
  • Limited Omniscient -- seeing into one or, sometimes, two characters’ minds
  • Objective -- seeing into none of the characters’ minds

5.) Voice and Style

• Style -- the characteristic way an author uses language to create literature -- style is the result of the writer’s habitual use of certain rhetorical patterns, including sentence length and complexity, word choice and placement, and punctuation
• Voice -- (projected in the author’s prose style)
• Tone -- the way the author conveys his or her unstated attitudes toward the story
• Irony -- makes the reader aware of a reality that differs from the reality the characters perceive (dramatic irony) or from the literal meaning of the author’s words (verbal irony)
• Symbolism -- A literary symbol can be anything in a story’s setting, plot, or characterization that suggests an abstract meaning to the reader in addition to its literal significance -- symbols are more eloquent as specific images, visual ideas, than any paraphrase
• Allegory -- An entire story can also suggest a symbolic as well as a literal meaning -- a story becomes an “allegory” when all the characters, places, things, and events represent symbolic qualities and their interactions are meant to reveal a moral truth

6.) Theme -- a generalization about the meaning of a story -- whereas the plot of a story can be summarized by stating what happened in the action, the theme is the general idea behind the events of the plot that expresses the meaning of the story. (Theme comes last in a discussion of the elements of fiction because all the other elements must be accounted for in determining it.)

Source: Chapter 2, “The Elements of Fiction: A Storyteller’s Means,” in Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, by Ann Charters and Samuel Charters, Compact 2^nd edition, Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2001, pages 37-47.