11 Terms
Contributors in Fiction
Fiction
Countersinking
Literature; Fiction
Expositional redundancy, usually performed by an author who isn't confident of his storytelling: making the actions implied in the storey explicit. "'Let's get out of here,' he said, urging her to ...
Destage
Literature; Fiction
To move offstage action which has been shown onstage. Things can be intentionally destaged (when they're undramatic) or unintentionally (when the author's staged the wrong things).
Grouper effect
Literature; Fiction
Named after the grouper, which eats by opening its capacious mouth and swallowing a huge volume of water, toothlessly capturing its prey in the resulting suction, the specialised form of ...
Get-it-in-the-mail syndrome
Literature; Fiction
Prose over which the author, in his eagerness to finish a work, has taken too little time or care. It implies that the author can easily fix the problems if he concentrates on them.
Handwaving
Literature; Fiction
Distracting the reader with verbal fireworks to keep him from noticing a severe logical flaw.
Out-of-whack event
Literature; Fiction
In Aristotelian drama, the storey concerns a character whose stable life is knocked out of whack by an external force. The remainder of the storey concerns his attempts to put his life back into ...
