The writing glossary

Short definitions with their sources, for the terms that come up when writing and reading long fiction: genre labels, structure beats, prose techniques and serialization vocabulary. Where a term is community-defined or contested, the entry says so. New here? The guides go deeper.

Genres

What the labels mean, from traditional shelves to web-fiction-native tags.

LitRPG: Fiction in which the game mechanics are explicit and visible: stat blocks, level-ups, skill trees, status screens.
GameLit: The broader umbrella of game-influenced fiction, with or without explicit tracked mechanics.
Progression fantasy: Fiction in which the accumulation of power or skill is the primary narrative engine.
Cultivation: The Chinese web-fiction tradition of power growth through internal-energy cultivation, with a tiered realm ladder.
Xianxia: Cultivation fiction whose protagonists pursue immortality and transcendence, with Daoist and Buddhist framing.
Wuxia: Martial-heroes fiction: mortal, peak-human martial artists centered on moral codes and human relationships.
Isekai: Fiction in which an ordinary Earth protagonist is transported, reincarnated or summoned into a parallel world.
Portal fantasy: The older Western category of travel between worlds: Narnia, Barsoom. The crossing is the obligatory beat.
Dungeon core: RoyalRoad-native stories in which the protagonist is, or controls, a sentient RPG-style dungeon.
System apocalypse: LitRPG subgenre requiring both an apocalyptic inciting event and functioning system mechanics; the System's arrival is involuntary.
Slice of life: Stories of ordinary daily experience with minimal plot conflict; often episodic and open-ended.
Harem: A relationship-structure convention: one protagonist surrounded by three or more romantically interested partners.
Romantasy: Fantasy and romance structurally interdependent: remove the romance and the plot falls apart.
Grimdark: Dystopian, amoral, violent fantasy tone; realism and psychology in place of idealism.
Sword and sorcery: Personal-scale violent adventure with morally gray characters; the hero usually still wins.
High fantasy: Mythic-toned fantasy in a fully secondary world, at epic scale: wars, gods, world-ending stakes.
Low fantasy: Fantasy defined negatively: magic is rare or marginal in an otherwise mundane, human-dominated world.
Urban fantasy: Fantasy transplanted into a modern real-world city, with a protagonist who has a foot in both worlds.
Contemporary fantasy: Fantasy set in the real, present-day world, where magic exists but is not commonly seen; urban fantasy is one of its most popular subgenres.
Cozy mystery: Near-formulaic mystery: amateur sleuth, community setting, fair-play clueing, and no on-page violence or gore.
Fair-play mystery: The whodunit's contract: all clues available to the reader, no undisclosed poisons, twins or divine intervention.
Noir: Protagonist trapped in a corrupt system, distinct from the tough-but-moral hardboiled detective.
Neo-noir: Noir after the classic era: the post-1970 crime mode of blurred moral lines, paranoia and conflicted antiheroes, named by film critics.
Nordic noir: Scandinavian crime fiction usually written from a police point of view, with plain, precise prose, bleak landscapes and morose detectives.
Cyberpunk: High tech, low life: dystopian near-future SF with noir tone and morally gray anti-heroes.
Biopunk: Speculative fiction derived from cyberpunk that centers on biotechnology: genetic engineering, bio-hackers and biotech megacorporations.
Space opera: Adventure SF at galactic scale: essentially fantasy in SF trappings, tolerating implausibility for mythic sweep.
Magical realism: Fantastic elements in a realistic setting, narrated in a flat, matter-of-fact voice that never registers wonder.
HEA / HFN: Happily Ever After and Happy For Now: the romance genre's baseline ending expectation, treated as near-inviolable.
Status screen: The LitRPG system message: an in-prose interface element showing stats, levels, skills and notifications.
Xuanhuan: A Chinese fantasy genre rooted in Chinese mythology but free to borrow Western fantasy elements; often translated as Eastern fantasy.
Iyashikei: A Japanese healing genre: peaceful, calming stories meant to soothe the reader, trading plot for atmosphere and immersion.
Light novel: A Japanese publishing format: young-adult novels with manga-style illustrations, issued in the compact bunkobon size and often adapted into anime.
Korean web novel: Serialized fiction native to Korean platforms such as Naver Web Novel, Joara and Munpia, released and sold episode by episode.
Mecha: Science fiction built around piloted giant robots; the cockpit is what separates a mecha from an autonomous robot.
Webtoon: South Korean episodic digital comics built as one long vertical scroll for smartphones; the comics sibling of the web novel.
Hard science fiction: Science fiction built on concern for scientific accuracy and logic, staying rigorous in its use of known science.
Soft science fiction: Science fiction centered on the soft sciences and human experience, defined in contrast to hard science fiction.
Dystopian fiction: Fiction set in an imagined world or society where people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.
Post-apocalyptic fiction: Speculative fiction in which Earth's or another place's civilization is collapsing or has collapsed.
Military science fiction: Science fiction depicting the use of futuristic technology, including spaceships and weapons, for military purposes.
First contact: The science fiction theme of the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or between sapient species.
Time travel in fiction: A common speculative-fiction theme since the late 19th century: travel to the past or future, and its consequences.
Dark fantasy: A fantasy subgenre incorporating magical and supernatural elements with the grim, unsettling, macabre atmosphere of horror fiction.
Fairy tale retelling: A work that retells a traditional fairy tale from a new point of view, setting or moral frame.
Hardboiled fiction: Crime and detective fiction with a cynical, justice-seeking detective fighting organized crime amid a corrupt legal system.
Police procedural: Detective fiction that emphasizes accurate depiction of how police and law enforcement actually investigate, with officials as protagonists.
Psychological thriller: A genre combining the thriller and psychological fiction genres, building suspense from mental states and unstable perceptions of reality.
Techno-thriller: A hybrid genre drawing from science fiction, thrillers, spy fiction, action and war novels, with exceptional technical detail.
Spy fiction: Espionage as an important context or plot device, from early twentieth-century intrigue to the Cold War canon of Fleming and le Carré.
Gothic fiction: A literary aesthetic of fear and haunting, where the past intrudes on the present amid ruins, persecution and family secrets.
Cosmic horror: Horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible, where humanity is cosmically insignificant; also called Lovecraftian horror.
Slasher: A horror subgenre, defined on film, in which a killer stalks and murders a group of people.
Dark romance: A romance shelf label for stories running on fear rather than comfort, sitting between romance, erotica and horror.
Romantic comedy: A subgenre of comedy and romance fiction: lighthearted, humorous plots centered on romantic ideas, typically ending happily.
Western: Fiction set on the American frontier of the Old West, built around cowboys, lawmen and frontier justice.
Satire: A genre of the arts, usually fiction, in which vices, follies and abuses are held up to ridicule toward improvement.
Erotica: Art, literature or photography that deals substantively with erotic, sexually stimulating subject matter.
Hard and soft magic: Sanderson's spectrum for magic systems: hard magic has rules the reader knows; soft magic stays unexplained, buying wonder at the price of solving plot problems.
Fan fiction: Fiction written by fans, usually amateur and unauthorized, using the characters and settings of an existing work or public figure.
Chosen one: The trope in which one character, usually the protagonist, is framed as the inevitable hero by destiny, unique gifts or special lineage.
Love triangle: A rivalry scenario in which two people pursue or are romantically involved with the same one person.
Manhwa: The general Korean word for comics; outside Korea, the name for Korean comics specifically, and the medium the webtoon grew out of.
Manhua: Chinese-language comics, from 1920s Shanghai satire to full-color web manhua on QQ Comic and U17; the Chinese sibling of manga and manhwa.
Danmei: A Chinese genre of literature and fictional media featuring romantic relationships between men; China's homegrown branch of boys' love.
Tankōbon: Japan's standalone-book format and, in English, the collected volume that gathers previously serialized manga chapters into a paperback-sized book.
Novelette: The length class between short story and novella; the Nebula rules set it at 7,500 to 17,499 words.
Novella: Prose fiction longer than most short stories but shorter than most novels; award rules usually draw the lower line near 17,500 words.
Flash fiction: A very short fictional narrative that still offers a character arc or implies a larger story; named varieties are defined by word count.
Young adult fiction: Fiction written for readers aged 12 to 18, typically with teenage protagonists and themes of adolescent life, and read mostly by adults.
Middle grade fiction: Literature intended for children between the ages of 8 and 12, sitting below young adult fiction, with strict content conventions of its own.
New adult fiction: A developing genre of fiction with protagonists aged 18 to 29, built on leaving home, career choices and first adult relationships.
Steampunk: A subgenre of science fiction with retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery.
Dieselpunk: A retrofuturistic subgenre of science fiction built on interwar diesel-era aesthetics and technology, steampunk's darker, pessimistic sibling.
Hard fantasy: Fantasy that builds its world rigorously and logically, by analogy with hard science fiction, treating magic as a rule-bound natural force.
Science fantasy: A hybrid genre within speculative fiction that blends science fiction and fantasy, giving fantastical worlds scientific or naturalistic justifications.
Historical fantasy: A category of fantasy and genre of historical fiction: fantastic elements woven into a real historical setting, generally before the 20th century.
Weird fiction: Speculative fiction blending horror, fantasy and science fiction around unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces, in place of conventional monsters.
New Weird: A literary movement of the 1990s and early 2000s that reworked weird fiction into urban, secondary-world, genre-blending fiction.
Slipstream: Speculative fiction that blends science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction and stays outside conventional genre boundaries.
Southern Gothic: Gothic fiction set in the American South, where social trauma, poverty and violence replace the ruined castles of the European tradition.
Mythopoeia: The making of artificial mythologies: fictional myths, pantheons and cosmologies invented whole by a writer, a practice Tolkien named and defended.
Eucatastrophe: Tolkien's coined word, from his essay On Fairy-Stories, for the sudden turn of events that spares the protagonist a terrible impending doom.
Climate fiction: Literature that deals with climate change, generally speculative and inspired by climate science, set in the present, the near future or fictional worlds.
Solarpunk: A genre of speculative art and fiction centered on ecologically sustainable futures, described as the inverse of cyberpunk.
Utopia: An imagined community or society with highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its residents; the mirror opposite of dystopia.
Myth: A genre of folklore: narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, whether or not anyone treats them as literally true.
Mythology: The collected body of myths of a people or culture, often intertwined with its religion; the word can also mean the study of myths.
Folklore: The body of expressive culture shared by a group: tales, legends, proverbs, poems and jokes passed along informally rather than taught.
Fable: A succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, whose anthropomorphized animals, plants or objects lead to a moral lesson.
Parable: A succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons; the human-cast sibling of the fable.
Fairy tale: A short folklore story of magic and enchantment, set once upon a time, told as fiction rather than believed fact.
Tall tale: A story with unbelievable elements told as if true and factual, where exaggeration grows until it dominates the story.
Saga: The prose stories and histories composed in medieval Iceland: Viking voyages, migration and multi-generation family feuds.
Trilogy: A set of three distinct connected works, seen either as a single work or as three individual works.
Book series: A sequence of books having certain characteristics in common, formally identified together as a group.
Shonen: The manga editorial category aimed mainly at adolescent boys, anchored in action, adventure and clearly defined forces of evil.
Shojo: The manga editorial category aimed at adolescent girls and young adult women, centered on relationships and emotions.
Seinen: The manga editorial category marketed toward young adult and adult men, allowing darker and more mature story lines than shonen.
Josei: The manga editorial category marketed to adult women, known for realist drama and romance about work, sex and life after marriage.
Pulp magazine: Inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 to about 1955, named for the cheap wood pulp paper they were printed on.
Magical girl: A subgenre of Japanese fantasy media centered on young girls with magical abilities, used through an ideal alter ego they transform into.
Tsundere: A Japanese character-development term for an initially harsh, standoffish personality that gradually reveals its warmer side.
Yandere: A character type in anime and manga whose affection becomes possessive or obsessive, willing to go to extreme lengths for the beloved.
Speculative fiction: The umbrella genre covering all fiction that departs from realism: fantasy, science fiction, horror and their hybrids.
Genre fiction: Fiction written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, to appeal to readers already familiar with that genre's conventions.
Literary fiction: Fiction that is more character-driven than plot-driven, examines the human condition, and is regarded by critics as serious art.
Melodrama: A dramatic work in which the plot, typically sensationalized for strong emotional appeal, takes precedence over detailed characterization.
Legend: A genre of folklore: narratives of human actions, believed or perceived to have taken place in human history.
Space western: A subgenre of science fiction that uses the themes, tropes and archetypes of Westerns in stories set in outer space.
Manga: Comics or graphic novels originating from Japan, in a style developed in the late 19th century; within Japan the word means all comics.
Doujinshi: The Japanese term for self-published print works such as magazines, manga and novels, often created by amateurs in groups called circles.
Planetary romance: A science fiction subgenre in which the bulk of the action consists of adventures on one exotic alien planet.
Paranormal romance: A subgenre of both romantic fiction and speculative fiction, pairing romantic love with vampires, shapeshifters, ghosts and other otherworldly beings.
Dark academia: A literary internet aesthetic and subculture concerned with higher education, the arts and literature, wrapped in a gothic, melancholic mood.
Hopepunk: A subgenre of speculative fiction conceived as the opposite of grimdark, where characters fight for positive change with radical kindness and hope.
Regency romance: A subgenre of romance novels set during the British Regency (1811 to 1820) or early 19th century, with its own plot and stylistic conventions.
Body horror: A horror subgenre showcasing grotesque violation of the body through mutation, disease, zombification and uncontrolled transformation.
Tragicomedy: A literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms: a serious play lightened by comedy, or a near-tragedy that ends happily.
Black comedy: A style of comedy that makes light of subject matter generally considered taboo, especially serious or painful topics such as death.
Farce: Farce is the comedy of escalating absurdity: implausible plots, mistaken identities, slamming doors and a pace that accelerates to the end.
Visual novel: A video game genre of Japanese origin focused on presenting a story through text, static art and sound, often with choices that branch the narrative.
Gamebook: A work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices, with the narrative branching through numbered sections.
Kaiju: A Japanese term for giant movie monsters, translating literally as 'strange beast'; the film subgenre pioneered by Godzilla in 1954.
Kodomo: The manga and anime editorial category aimed at pre-adolescent children: moralistic, episodic stories completing the medium's demographic labels.
Omegaverse: A subgenre of speculative erotic fiction, also called A/B/O, that supposes a human dominance hierarchy of alphas, betas and omegas.
Xenofiction: A niche speculative-fiction genre of stories told from the viewpoint of non-human characters, particularly animals, on their own terms.
Bizarro fiction: A contemporary literary genre using absurdism, satire and the grotesque, mixed with pop-surrealism and genre staples to be weird and entertaining.
Novel of manners: Fiction that re-creates a social world, conveying with detailed observation the customs, values and mores of a stratified society.
Legendarium: A literary collection of legends; the word Tolkien used for his own mythology, the body of tales behind The Lord of the Rings.
Weird West: A subgenre blending the Western with fantasy, horror and science fiction: frontier settings of strange encounters, hauntings and impossible machines.
Folk horror: A subgenre of horror film and fiction that uses elements of folklore, in rural isolation, to invoke fear and foreboding.
Campus novel: A novel, also called an academic novel, whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university.
Künstlerroman: The artist's novel: a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity, the sub-category of the bildungsroman.
Coming of age: A genre of literature, theatre, film and video games focused on a protagonist's growth from childhood to adulthood; the bildungsroman is a specific subgenre.
Dying Earth: Science fantasy or science fiction set in the far future at the end of life on Earth, when the laws of the universe themselves fail.
Genre: A category for classifying works of art and communication according to socially agreed conventions developed over time.
Fictional universe: An internally consistent fictional setting, also called an imagined or constructed universe, in which narrative works take place.
Cosmology: The study of the universe's nature and origin; in worldbuilding, a fictional universe's invented origin and structure: its heavens, planes and creation.
Fantasy map: The map of an invented world; in modern fantasy, especially high fantasy, maps are considered common enough to be almost obligatory.
Fantasy: Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving supernatural or magical elements, often including completely imaginary realms and creatures.
Science fiction: Science fiction is the genre of speculative fiction that imagines advanced and futuristic changes in technology, scientific knowledge or biological systems.
Horror fiction: Horror is a genre of speculative fiction intended to disturb, frighten or scare an audience, provoking a fear response on purpose.
Romance novel: Romance novels are fiction whose main narrative focuses on the development of a romantic relationship, ending in an emotionally satisfying way.
Mystery fiction: Mystery fiction is a genre in which the nature of an event, often a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story.
Whodunit: A whodunit is a complex, plot-driven variety of detective fiction in which the puzzle of who committed the crime is the main focus.
Locked-room mystery: A locked-room mystery is a crime whose circumstances seem to make it impossible for the perpetrator to have entered, acted and left undetected.
Inverted detective story: The inverted detective story shows the crime and the perpetrator at the start, then follows the detective closing in: the howcatchem.
Golden Age of Detective Fiction: The Golden Age of Detective Fiction is the interwar British whodunit era of the 1920s and 1930s, which codified fair play.
Enemies to lovers: Enemies to lovers is the romance trope whose leads start the book as antagonists, and the enmity itself becomes the love story.
Slow burn: Slow burn is the romance pacing trope in which attraction builds gradually across the story so the payoff lands like an event.
Meet-cute: A meet-cute is the scene in romantic fiction where the two leads first meet, memorably and often comically, and the romance is launched from it.
Friends to lovers: Friends to lovers is the romance trope in which two people who already know and trust each other see their friendship become the love story.
Fake dating: Fake dating is the romance trope in which two characters pretend to be a couple for mutual benefit, and the pretense turns into real feelings.
Found family: Found family is the trope of bonds chosen rather than inherited: unrelated characters who come to love each other as family.
Instalove: Instalove is romance's love at first sight: an attraction that declares itself as love before the story has earned it on the page.
Second-chance romance: Second-chance romance is the trope of former lovers reuniting: the relationship failed once already, and the story argues it can work now.

Story structure

The named frameworks and their beats.

Three-act structure: The foundational Western dramatic model: setup, confrontation, resolution, with turning points at the act breaks.
The Hero's Journey: Campbell's monomyth and Vogler's practical twelve-stage version: the round trip of departure, initiation and return.
The Story Circle: Dan Harmon's eight-step simplification of the monomyth: You, Need, Go, Search, Find, Take, Return, Change.
Chekhov's gun: Chekhov's principle that every story element must be necessary: if a gun hangs on the wall in act one, it must fire.
Deus ex machina: A plot device going back to Greek theater: a seemingly unsolvable problem is abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence.
MacGuffin: A plot object or event that motivates the characters while being unimportant in itself; Hitchcock called it 'nothing at all'.
Red herring: A false clue planted to lead readers toward a mistaken conclusion; the mystery writer's tool of deliberate misdirection.
Foreshadowing: A narrative device in which suggestions or warnings about events to come are dropped or planted early in the story.
Inciting incident: The event that confronts the protagonist and sets the plot moving; after it, life will never be the same.
Midpoint: The turning point near the middle of a story where the protagonist stops reacting to events and starts acting.
Rising action: The segment between the exposition and the climax where complications pile up and tension builds toward the peak.
Denouement and falling action: The sequence of events between a story's climax and its resolution: the falling action, ending in the untying of the plot.
Freytag's pyramid: Freytag's pyramid is Gustav Freytag's 1863 five-part model of dramatic structure: introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, and catastrophe.
Falling action: Falling action is the sequence of events between a story's climax and its resolution: the conflict unwinding on the slope down from the peak.
Character arc: The transformation or inner journey of a character over the course of a story: who they are at the end is not who they were at the start.
Plot twist: A literary technique that introduces a radical change in the direction of the plot, usually foreshadowed but delivered with an element of surprise.
Dramatic structure: The framework underlying a story's construction: how its elements are ordered and unified, from Aristotle and Freytag to the three-act model.
In medias res: Opening a story in the chronological middle of the plot or conflict rather than at the beginning; Latin for 'into the middle of things'.
Prologue: An opening to a story that establishes the context and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one.
Epilogue: A piece of writing at the end of a work of literature, usually used to bring closure to the work and reveal the fates of its characters.
Frame story: A narrative structure where an opening story introduces a second, more emphasized narrative or a set of shorter tales within it.
Subplot: A strand of the plot that runs as a supporting side story alongside the main plot; screenwriting's B story against the A story.
Exposition: The insertion of background information into a story, delivered directly by telling or indirectly by scattering facts through scenes.
Epistolary novel: A novel told through fictional documents, classically letters between the characters, and in modern practice diaries, emails and blog posts.
Bildungsroman: The coming-of-age novel: a genre focused on the protagonist's psychological and moral growth from childhood to adulthood.
Epigraph: A phrase, quotation or poem set at the beginning of a book, chapter or section to preface or frame it.
Hamartia: Aristotle's term for the tragic error or flaw that brings the hero down, from Greek hamartanein, 'to miss the mark'.
Narrative hook: A literary technique in the opening of a story that "hooks" the reader's attention so that they will keep on reading.
Climax: The point of highest tension and drama in a narrative, where the action turns and the solution is given.
Anticlimax: Anticlimax is the deflation of a buildup: a disappointing event after events that were full of excitement, whether by accident or on purpose.
Conflict: The challenge that stands between characters and their goals; opposing forces that keep the outcome uncertain.
Catharsis: From the Greek for purification or cleansing: the release of pity and fear that Aristotle assigned to tragedy.
Peripeteia: A reversal of circumstances or turning point in a story: Aristotle's change by which the action veers round to its opposite.
Anagnorisis: The moment a character makes a critical discovery, Aristotle's change from ignorance to knowledge, often firing the reversal.
Irony: Irony is the umbrella term for the gap between surface appearance and underlying reality, covering verbal, dramatic and situational types.
Dramatic irony: Irony that gives the audience information the characters lack, putting readers a step above the story's own people.
Allegory: A narrative carrying two meanings at once: a literal story and a second, systematic symbolic one about moral or political ideas.
Poetic justice: The device by which virtue is ultimately rewarded and misdeeds punished, often through an ironic twist tied to the character's own actions.
Tragedy: The drama genre built on human suffering and terrible events befalling a main character, aiming at pity, fear and catharsis.
Comedy: A genre of dramatic works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, classically the form with the happy ending.
Hubris: Extreme pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, classically the transgression that brings a figure low in Greek tragedy.
Protagonist: The main character of a story, whose key decisions drive the plot and whose fate the reader follows most closely.
Antagonist: A character presented as the main enemy or rival of the protagonist, though it need not be a person at all.
Foil: A character who contrasts with another, typically the protagonist, so the contrast highlights qualities in each.
Archetype: Archetype is the original pattern other forms copy: in craft, the recurring character and story patterns, hero, quest, trickster, that later figures descend from.
Stock character: A stock character is a figure the audience recognizes on sight, the damsel in distress or the wise fool, a ready-made type reused across stories and traditions.
Setting: The time and geographic location within a narrative, extended by its culture, historical period and hour, which initiates the story's backdrop and mood.
Hero: A real or fictional character who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through ingenuity, courage or strength; a valued role beside the protagonist's structural one.
Byronic hero: A variant of the Romantic hero named for Lord Byron: proud, moody and cynical, with defiance on the brow and misery in the heart.
Tragic hero: The tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy: a character whose flaws and errors of judgment bring about a downfall from good fortune to bad.
Sidekick: A close companion or colleague, generally regarded as subordinate, who accompanies the story's central character in a supporting role.
Love interest: The character whose role is the protagonist's romance: the partner figure of the love plot, a story's third basic relationship alongside cooperation and conflict.
Comic relief: A humorous character, scene or witty line placed in an otherwise serious work to relieve tension, often a bumbling sidekick who comments on the absurdity.
Logline: A brief, usually one-sentence summary of a book, film or program that states the central conflict and supplies an emotional hook.
Nonlinear narrative: A narrative technique that portrays events out of chronological order, so the telling does not follow the direct causality of the events it features.
Parallel narrative: Two or more stories told concurrently and interleaved, meeting in plot or only in theme; the shape behind the dual-timeline novel.
Story within a story: An embedded narrative: a character inside a story becomes the narrator of a second, inner tale, with further layers called nested stories.
Deuteragonist: The second most important character of a narrative, after the protagonist and before the tritagonist; Greek drama's 'second actor'.
Confidant: The confidant is the character a protagonist confides in and trusts: the listener whose presence turns interior thought into spoken scene.
Mentor: The experienced guide who teaches or advises a less experienced character, usually the protagonist; the word descends from Mentor in Homer's Odyssey.
Characterization: The representation of characters in narrative and dramatic works, delivered directly, by telling the audience, or indirectly, through speech, action, appearance and inference.
Trickster: A figure of myth and story who uses great intellect or secret knowledge to play tricks, break rules and defy conventional behavior.
Picaresque: A genre of prose fiction depicting a roguish but appealing hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society.
Femme fatale: The 'fatal woman' stock character: a mysterious, beautiful, seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often into compromising, deadly traps.
Dark Lord: An antagonistic archetype of fiction and mythology: the pinnacle of villainy and evil within a typically heroic narrative.
Final girl: Carol Clover's term for the last surviving female character to confront the killer, the one left to tell the story.
Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Nathan Rabin's 2007 label for a stock character: a young woman with eccentric quirks serving as an everyman protagonist's romantic interest.
Mad scientist: A stock character: a scientist with unusual or unsettling personality traits, usually in the taboo or hubristic nature of their experiments.
Everyman: A stock character of fiction: an ordinary, humble protagonist whose benign conduct fosters the audience's identification with them.
Kishotenketsu: A four-part narrative structure from East Asian tradition: introduction, development, twist and conclusion, able to run without conflict.
The Heroine's Journey: A female-centric version of the hero's journey: Murdock's descent-and-reclamation arc, which heals and integrates rather than conquers.
Sequel: A work that continues or expands an earlier work, portraying events in the same fictional universe, usually chronologically after it.
Prequel: A work whose story precedes that of a previous work, focusing on events before the original narrative: backstory brought forward.
Tritagonist: The third most important character of a narrative, after the protagonist and deuteragonist; Greek drama's 'third actor'.
Story arc: The chronological construction of a plot across a novel, film or episodic media: a story extended over multiple installments instead of one.
Scene: The structural unit of fiction: a goal-driven passage at one time and place that ends in change, with the sequel reacting between scenes.
Plot device: Any technique in a narrative used to move the plot forward: the umbrella term over deus ex machina, MacGuffins, red herrings and their kin.
Fabula and syuzhet: Russian formalism's pair of terms: the fabula is a story's events in chronological order, the syuzhet the order and manner of their telling.
Damsel in distress: A narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has been kidnapped or placed in other peril.
Wise old man: A Jungian archetype and classic literary figure: the sage, wizard or hermit whose wisdom guides the hero, as Gandalf and Merlin do.
Flashback: An interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time; formally analepsis, the standard device for delivering backstory on the page.
Flashforward: A scene that temporarily takes the narrative forward in time; formally prolepsis, it shows the future where foreshadowing only hints at it.
Time skip: A deliberate jump over story time between scenes or sections: the narrative ellipsis, omitting events and letting the reader fill the gap.
Time loop: A plot device in fiction whereby characters re-experience a repeated span of time, often retaining memories of the previous loop.
Dream sequence: A technique used in storytelling to set apart a brief interlude from the main story: a scene presented as a character's dream.
Suspense: A state of anxiety or excitement caused by mysteriousness, uncertainty, doubt or undecidedness; the tension of not knowing what, or when.
Villain: A cruel, malicious character devoted to wickedness or crime; structurally the opposite of the hero and often the plot's evil agency.
Flat and round characters: E. M. Forster's distinction: flat characters are two-dimensional and uncomplicated; round characters are complex, develop, and can surprise the reader.
Plot: The series of related events in a narrative, linked by cause and effect: what happens, and why each happening leads to the next.
Chapter: Any of the main thematic divisions within a writing of relative length, such as a long work of prose or poetry.
Beat: A beat is the smallest unit of dramatic action, one exchange of behavior in a scene; in scripts it also names a short pause in dialogue.
Save the Cat: Blake Snyder's 2005 screenwriting manual and its fifteen-beat Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, the best-known beat sheet in modern storytelling.
Pacing: The speed at which a story is told rather than the speed at which it happens: how quickly events and information reach the reader.

Prose craft

Point of view, voice and sentence-level technique.

Point of view: Whose eyes and mind the story is told through: first person, second, third limited, third omniscient, or rotating.
Free indirect discourse: Third-person narration in the character's own voice, without 'she thought' tags; narrator and character merge.
Iceberg theory: Hemingway's principle of deliberate omission: the dignity of the prose is in what stays under the surface.
Subtext: The underlying or implicit meaning, never stated outright, that a reader gathers from beneath the surface of dialogue and scene.
Dialogue tag: The phrase that attributes a line of speech to its speaker, 'she said'; also called identifier, attributive or speaker attribution.
Said-bookism: An ornate dialogue tag used instead of 'said' (murmured, whimpered, thundered); thought to detract from the narrative when over-used.
Body language: The nonverbal channel of fiction, posture, gesture, facial expression and movement, carrying meaning and subtext beneath what the dialogue says aloud.
Banter: Playful, teasing, rapid-fire dialogue between characters, most often a pair the story is pulling together; the tease is its cornerstone.
Purple prose: Ornate writing that has tipped into overwrought: unearned ornamentation, not maximalism in general.
Omniscient narrator: A third-person narrator with an overarching perspective who knows all events and what every character thinks and feels.
Second person: Narration built on the pronoun 'you': the narrator recounts experience while adding distance, often ironic, through second person.
Deep POV: Third-person narration written from inside the character's conscious mind: no narrative distance and no filter words.
Filter word: A distancing verb of perception or cognition (saw, felt, heard, noticed, realized) that reports experience instead of rendering it, inserting the narrator between reader and event.
Visceral reaction: The body's involuntary first response to emotion (stomach drop, racing pulse, flush of heat) rendered on the page so the reader feels it before the character thinks.
Upmarket fiction: Publishing's label for fiction that blends commercial appeal with literary quality: character-driven, book-club-ready stories with a hook.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator who cannot be trusted or whose credibility is compromised; the gap between what is told and what is true drives the story.
Stream of consciousness: A narrative method that depicts the many thoughts and feelings passing through a character's mind, following their flow rather than ordered argument.
Interior monologue: The technique of presenting a character's thoughts directly on the page; stream of consciousness is the subject matter it presents.
Trope: A familiar recurring story element: originally a figure of speech, now any conventional idea, character or plot device a genre reuses.
Cliché: An idea, phrase or story element worn out by overuse until it has lost its original meaning, novelty or artistic power.
Theme: A story's major topic, subject or message, such as love, death or betrayal: what the work is about beneath its plot.
Motif: A distinctive feature, element or idea that recurs throughout a story, accumulating meaning that develops theme or mood.
Symbol: A literary symbol is an object, person or image that stands for something beyond its literal meaning, a concrete element carrying an abstract idea.
Objective correlative: Eliot's term for a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events that serves as the formula of a particular emotion.
Fourth wall: The imaginary wall separating performers from audience; a narrative convention whose deliberate breaking is metafiction.
Suspension of disbelief: The reader's intentional setting aside of critical thinking to enjoy fiction; Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief.
Parody: A creative work designed to imitate, comment on or mock its subject by means of satirical or ironic imitation.
Pastiche: A work that imitates the style or character of another artist or genre as homage or exercise, unlike parody, which imitates to mock.
Bathos: An abrupt transition from the elevated to the ridiculous, a ludicrous descent that reads as a failure of tone unless meant as comedy.
Monologue: A speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud.
Vignette: A short, descriptive piece of writing that captures a brief period in time, focused on vivid imagery rather than plot.
Narrator: The specific person or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story, that conveys the narrative to its audience.
First-person narration: A mode of storytelling in which the storyteller recounts events from their own point of view, narrating as a character inside the story.
Third-person narration: Narration that refers to all characters with third-person pronouns like he, she and they, in omniscient or limited form.
Head hopping: Head hopping is the unmarked mid-scene jump between characters' thoughts: a scene that starts in one head and slides into another without a break.
Verisimilitude: The 'lifelikeness' or believability of a work of fiction: the quality that makes an invented story feel true, whether or not it is realistic.
Metaphor: A figure of speech that, for literary effect, refers to one thing by mentioning another, inviting a comparison between unrelated ideas.
Simile: A figure of speech that compares two unrelated things explicitly, typically with like or as: 'x is like y'.
Writer's voice: The distinctive features of a written work in terms of spoken utterance: the characteristics its narrator or speaker displays, assessed by tone, style or personality.
Soliloquy: A monologue in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud, typically while alone on stage, giving the audience direct access to their inner life.
Aside: A dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience, by convention unheard by the other characters; usually brief rather than a full speech.
Pathos: The appeal to the emotions and ideals of an audience; one of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion, alongside ethos and logos.
Metafiction: A form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure, reminding the audience they are reading a fictional work.
Show, don't tell: The craft rule that readers should experience the story through action, dialogue, subtext and sensory detail instead of the author's exposition and summary.
Imagery: The literary device of using sensory language: figurative language that evokes a mental image or other vivid sense impression in the reader.
Hyperbole: The use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech: overstating for effect, usually not meant to be taken literally.
Litotes: Ironic understatement by negation: stating a negative to affirm a positive, so that not bad means good and no small feat means large.
Meiosis: Euphemistic understatement that shrinks what it names: a war becomes The Troubles, an ocean becomes The Pond, a disaster becomes a spot of bother.
Personification: The representation of a thing, being or abstraction as a person or with person-like qualities: death, the seasons, the virtues given a face.
Pathetic fallacy: Ruskin's term for the attribution of human emotion and conduct to nature: sullen clouds, dancing leaves, indifferent rocks.
Oxymoron: A figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings: a compressed self-contradiction such as 'bittersweet' or 'cruel kindness'.
Onomatopoeia: A word that phonetically imitates, resembles or suggests the sound it names: hiss, meow, roar, and the bam of a comic panel.
Alliteration: The repetition of syllable-initial consonant sounds in nearby words: the music behind Peter Piper and Old English alliterative verse.
Assonance: The repetition of identical or similar sounds in nearby words; in the common American sense, repeated vowel sounds, a quieter echo than rhyme.
Consonance: The repetition of identical or similar consonants in nearby words whose vowel sounds differ; alliteration's freer relation and assonance's counterpart.
Pun: A form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect.
Malapropism: The incorrect use of a word in place of one with a similar sound, producing a nonsensical, often humorous utterance.
Zeugma: The use of one word to modify or govern two or more words or phrases, one reading literal and the other figurative.
Chiasmus: The reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses without repeating words: parallelism in an ABBA shape.
Double entendre: A way of wording devised to carry a double meaning, one plain, the other usually too socially unacceptable to state directly.
Anaphora: A rhetorical figure that repeats a word or phrase at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, lending the repeated words emphasis.
Allusion: A figure of speech that references a person, work, event or idea without naming it, trusting the reader's prior knowledge to close the connection.
Epithet: A descriptive word or phrase accompanying or standing in for a name, from Alexander the Great to Homer's swift-footed Achilles.
Euphemism: A euphemism swaps a potentially offensive or unpleasant word or expression for one that is more pleasant or inoffensive: saying around the thing.
Juxtaposition: Juxtaposition is the placing of two elements side by side so the reader compares them: contrast made structural, from a phrase to a whole storyline.
Eye dialect: Eye dialect is nonstandard spelling that marks a speaker as colloquial or uneducated while matching standard pronunciation: enuff for enough.
Tone: The writer's attitude toward the subject matter and audience, built from diction, syntax and detail: how the narration feels about what it says.

Web fiction

Serialization vocabulary: platforms, schedules and monetization.

Web serial: Fiction published in installments on the open web, chapter by chapter, as it is written.
Truck-kun: The self-aware isekai meme: the truck that kills the protagonist so the story can transport them.
Advance chapters: The serial monetization pattern: patrons read a buffer of chapters ahead of the free release.
Cliffhanger: A chapter ending on an unresolved beat; in serial craft, best varied in type rather than maxed every chapter.
Mary Sue: Fan fiction's pejorative for a character, usually a young woman, perceived as unrealistically free of weaknesses or flaws.
Antihero: A protagonist who stands in opposition to the traditional hero: an outsider whose actions are both morally righteous and questionable.
Filler: Serialized media's padding problem: content created to fill a slot or stall for time rather than advance the story.
Alpha reader: An alpha reader reviews a draft that is unrevised or still without an ending: the earliest feedback stage, before the beta read.
Beta reader: A test reader of an unreleased work who gives the author feedback from the perspective of an ordinary reader, before the work is published.
Shōsetsuka ni Narō: Japan's dominant user-submitted web novel site, launched in 2004 and the sourcing pipeline behind a large share of modern light novels and isekai anime.
Bunkobon: Japan's small-format mass-market paperback, almost always A6 (105 by 148mm), used for affordable editions of previously published books.
Pen name: A pseudonym, or a variant form of a real name, adopted by an author and printed on the title page or byline in place of the real name.
High concept: A work that can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise: built on a 'what if' with broad appeal rather than character subtlety.
Elevator pitch: A short summary of a story deliverable in an elevator ride, roughly thirty seconds to two minutes: the spoken ancestor of the logline.
Query letter: The formal letter a writer sends to literary agents, magazine editors and sometimes publishers to propose a work: the standard format for unrepresented authors' submissions.
Synopsis: The point-by-point prose summary of a whole plot, opening to ending, spoilers included: the full-disclosure partner of the query letter.
Literary agent: An agent who represents writers and their written works to publishers and producers, assisting in sale and deal negotiation, generally for a 15 percent commission.
Slush pile: The slush pile is publishing's pile of unsolicited query letters or manuscripts: the uninvited submissions, traditionally read by assistants.
Cover letter: The brief letter accompanying a short-story submission to a magazine: title, word count, a short bio, the sim-sub note.
Simultaneous submission: Sending the same work to several markets at once, allowed by many magazines and governed by each market's stated rules.
Advance against royalties: A payment made to the author at the start of a publishing license, offset against future royalties as the book earns.
Self-publishing: The author-driven publication of a book without a third-party publisher: the author funds, produces and sells it.
Vanity press: A printer paid by authors to publish their books; a derogatory label, a contested scam charge, and the opposite of self-publishing on money and rights.
Print on demand: Printing each copy only after an order exists: no inventory in advance, the technology that underwrites modern self-publishing economics.
Blurb: The short promotional summary printed on a book's back cover, jacket flap or store page, and the praise quoted around it.
ISBN: The International Standard Book Number: a numeric commercial book identifier, unique to each separate edition and variation of a publication.
Trim size: The finished page size a printed book is trimmed to after binding; set it first, because margins, bleed and page-count limits all depend on it.
Front matter: The pages before the main text: half title, title page, copyright page, dedication, table of contents and other preliminaries, each with a conventional page position.
Back matter: The pages after the main text: author bio, bibliography and references, index and other end material, the first section starting on a right-facing page.
Bleed (printing): Printing term for ink extending past the trim edge so pages cut cleanly without white slivers; KDP requires 0.125 in (3.2 mm) beyond the trim.
Gutter margin: The inner margin nearest the spine of a bound page, wider than the outer margin and growing with page count as the binding curve swallows text.
Widow (typesetting): Typesetting's stray line: a paragraph-ending line alone at the top of the next page or column; definitions vary across the industry.
Leading (typography): The vertical space between lines of type, named for the lead strips printers set between lines; today, line spacing.
Recto and verso: The right-hand, front side of a page in a bound book (verso the left), the convention behind right-facing starts and odd page numbers.
Frontispiece: A decorative or informative illustration facing a book's title page, on the verso opposite the recto title page.
Half title: The page carrying nothing but the book's title, standing before the full title page; usually counted as page i.
Dedication (publishing): The author's expression of friendly connection or thanks, on its own page in the front matter, usually after the title page.
Colophon: A brief note at the back of a book recording the imprint, publisher, place and date, often with the publisher's device.
Dust jacket: The detachable paper cover of a hardcover book, printed with the cover art and carrying the blurb and author bio on its folded flaps.
Mass-market paperback: The small, inexpensive paperback format racked in drugstores and airports as well as bookstores; the trade paperback's cheaper sibling.
Omnibus edition: One volume collecting multiple works, usually a whole series, priced at or below the separate editions it gathers.
Audiobook: A recording of a book or other work being read out loud: the narrated edition, unabridged or abridged, a separate edition from the print.
Galley proof: The pre-publication proof: an uncut, often unbound printing made for correction and review before the finished book exists.
Advance reader copy: The ARC: a free pre-publication copy sent to reviewers and booksellers to generate reviews before the release date.
Print run: The number of copies printed in one batch; the first print run is what collectors mean by a first edition.
Fanon: Fandom's unofficial canon: ideas from fan works so widely adopted by a fan community that they are treated as established fact.
Shipping: The act of imagining, desiring or expressing interest in a romantic involvement between two or more fictional (or real) people.
Alternate universe: A fan fiction set in a deliberately divergent version of a story's world: the AU departs from canon while keeping the characters.
Crossover: A story that places two or more otherwise discrete fictional characters, settings or universes into the context of a single work.
Self-insert: A literary device in which the author writes themselves into the story under the guise of, or from the perspective of, a fictional character.
Fandom: A subculture of fans characterized by camaraderie with others who share a common interest, with its own practices, jargon and works.
NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, the annual November challenge to draft a 50,000-word novel (about 1,667 words a day); its nonprofit closed in March 2025.
Writer's block: A non-medical condition in which an author is unable to produce new work or experiences a creative slowdown; fear of failure is the most commonly attributed cause.
Slash fiction: A genre of fan fiction focused on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex, named for the slash in Kirk/Spock.
Spin-off: A narrative work derived from an existing work that focuses on different aspects: a new vehicle for a side character, setting or premise.
Shared universe: A fictional universe shared by a set of distinct creative works that each stand alone while jointly developing the same world.
Web fiction: The umbrella term for written works of literature available primarily or solely on the Internet, from web serials and web novels to blog fiction.
Web novel: A literary work that is published mainly or exclusively on the Internet; most web novels are written and released as serials, chapter by chapter.
Serial fiction: Serial fiction is a publishing format: one larger work released in sequential installments, from Victorian magazine novels to today's web serials.
Cell phone novel: A literary work originally written on a cellular phone via text messaging: Japan's keitai shousetsu tradition, begun in 2003, and its global spread.
Real person fiction: A genre of fan fiction featuring celebrities or other real people rather than fictional characters, raising ethical and legal questions of its own.
Stuffed into the fridge: The fridging trope: a character, disproportionately a woman, killed or maimed to motivate the protagonist; named by Gail Simone in 1999.
Bury your gays: The bury your gays trope: queer characters facing death and tragic fates at disproportionate rates; named by fandom, mainstream since 2016.
Drabble: A short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words; a constraint form that originated in UK science fiction fandom.
Interactive fiction: Software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters; the umbrella over text adventures and choice-based narrative.
Hypertext fiction: A genre of electronic literature characterized by the use of hypertext links: story units the reader moves between, arranging the path.

Continuity

The words for what goes wrong (and what fixes it) in long stories.

Retcon: Retroactive continuity: deliberately adjusting, ignoring, adding to or contradicting established facts later.
Plot hole: An inconsistency in the storyline that goes against the logic the story established.
Story bible: A reference document recording a story's established characters, settings and rules so consistency survives episodes, seasons and sequels.
Canon: The works and facts widely considered official or authoritative within a fictional world, as distinct from fanon and headcanon.
A6 bunko page format: The A6 page size (105 by 148mm) of Japan's bunkobon paperbacks, used by Kanonara as its fixed page.
Canon states: Kanonara terminology: the six labels every important story fact carries, from CANON and PROPOSED through INFERRED, THEORY, UNKNOWN and REJECTED.
Worldbuilding: The process of constructing an imaginary world or setting, chiefly in speculative fiction, so that the story stands on a coherent foundation.
Conlang: A conlang, or constructed language, is a language devised for a particular purpose rather than one that evolved naturally; fiction's Elvish and Klingon are conlangs.
Backstory: The set of events that establishes a character's past or precedes and leads up to the main plot, revealed piecemeal through the story.
Anachronism: A chronological inconsistency: a juxtaposition of people, events, objects, terms or customs from different time periods.
Continuity: The consistency of a story's people, plot, objects and places over time, so that every established detail stays true across the work.