Fiction

Fiction

Industry: Literature

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Fiction

Punish the careless reader

Literature; Fiction

An authorial device to make a reader engage: to sprinkle throughout the storey information vital to understanding subsequent events; this punishes the careless reader by making him retreat and ...

Events are meaningful to the reader when the reader understand what they signify. Thus for a scene to be meaningful, there must be (1) table-setting to establish what is at stake, and (2) the action ...

Point of view

Literature; Fiction

The 'hidden camera' through which the reader perceives a scene. It may be inside a focus character (we see that character's thoughts and reactions to events), it may move among characters, or it may ...

Pushbutton words

Literature; Fiction

Words used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the reader's intellect or critical faculties, like 'song', 'poet', 'tears' or 'dreams'. They are supposed to make us misty-eyed without ...

Pump up

Literature; Fiction

Expanding a scene's staging to give it more impact on the reader: foreshadowing it, placing it onstage, stretching out time, increasing the stakes. It is the literary foreplay that allows a scene to ...

Powderpuff

Literature; Fiction

The authorial habit of being too nice to characters about whom the author cares. Violates the basic principle, if you want your reader to care about your characters, do horrible things to them early ...

Reaction shot

Literature; Fiction

From the movies, a cutaway shift inside a bundle of narrative action which shows us the emotional or other responses of a character, usually a reader surrogate.