11 Terms
Contributors in Fiction
Fiction
Superman syndrome
Literature; Fiction
The habit of magnifying the good points of focus characters and either giving them no bad points whatsoever or obscuring and rationalising the minor ones they have. Usually leads to melodrama and ...
Shadow staging
Literature; Fiction
Presenting a crucial event (such as an out-of- whack event) by its consequences rather than showing it directly. In ''Sophie's Choice,'' for example, Sophie's choice is shadow-staged throughout the ...
Pay off
Literature; Fiction
To be employed later in the furtherance of the dramatic or thematic intent of the story. Under the principle of economy, elements which fail to pay off weaken the storey and cause the reader to ...
Used furniture
Literature; Fiction
A background out of Central Casting, often chosen by an author too lazy to invent a good one.
Unreliable narrator
Literature; Fiction
A storyteller who is eventually revealed to have been concealing the truth, or even mis-stating it (unintentionally or deliberately). A development of twentieth-century literature (first made famous ...
Stapledon
Literature; Fiction
A character prone to holding forth, at length and without interruption, while various info dumps are unloaded on the helpless reader. Often surrounded by sycophantic peripheral characters whose lines ...
Premise
Literature; Fiction
The science fiction universe. In mainstream fiction, the premise is almost exclusively the present, real world. Science fiction uses the real world as a springboard or boomerang; it changes one or ...
