Glossary
Dictionary of fiction writing terms, from narrative structure to publishing
155 terms
AA
Actantial schema
The actantial schema, modelled by Algirdas Julien Greimas, describes a narrative through six “actants” (functions, not characters): the Subject pursues an Object, driven by a Sender for the benefit of a Receiver, helped by Helpers and hindered by Opponents.
Active rereading
Active rereading is a targeted read of the manuscript with one precise objective (coherence, dialogue, rhythm, subtext), opposed to floating reading where you fix on feeling without method.
Active vs passive voice
Active voice places the subject as agent of the action; passive voice places them as patient. In fiction, the choice shapes rhythm, narrative responsibility, and emotional distance — not just grammatical 'correctness.'
AI contextual memory
An AI system's ability to retain, structure, and reuse information specific to a writing project (characters, rules, tone, scenes).
AI-assisted synopsis generation
Using an AI co-pilot to produce a structured draft pitch or synopsis from the manuscript or notes, which the author rewrites before any submission.
Algorithmic style analysis
Automated methods (lexical statistics, embeddings, cross-chapter comparisons) producing a quantitative portrait of a text's or author's style, without rewriting the manuscript.
Allegory
Allegory is a story whose elements systematically refer to a second meaning (political, moral, religious), often explicitly.
Alternate history (uchronia)
An alternate history is a story set in a counterfactual past, branching from a precise point of divergence (POD): a battle lost, a death averted, a discovery delayed.
Anachronism
An anachronism is an element — object, word, technique, mentality — that doesn't belong to the era or universe depicted. Involuntary, it breaks the trust pact; deliberate, it can become a thematic lever.
Antagonist
The antagonist is the main source of opposition in the story. It can be a character, a group, an institution, a force of nature, or even an inner trait of the protagonist themselves.
Anti-hero
The anti-hero is a protagonist who departs from the classical heroic model: blurred courage, selfish motives, dubious methods, or simply an absence of ideals. They remain the one we follow.
Atmosphere / mood
Atmosphere (or mood) is the overall tonality of a scene or chapter: what the reader feels without realizing it.
Author
A fiction author is the person who creates an original work and bears responsibility for it — creative, ethical and legal — from the plot to publication, a status distinct from the mere activity of writing or drafting a text for someone else.
Author voice
Author voice is a writer's stylistic signature: lexical choices, rhythm, syntax, thematic obsessions.
Automated consistency analysis
Automated consistency analysis uses models (NLP, LLM, knowledge graphs) to flag factual inconsistencies in a manuscript: ages, places, dates, abilities.
BB
Backstory
The backstory is a character's personal history before the story begins: childhood, traumas, training, past relationships. It exists only to explain present behavior.
Bestiary
A bestiary is the set of creatures (real, mythological, or invented) that populate a fictional world, with their traits, behaviors, and ecological or symbolic roles.
Beta reading
Beta reading is critical reading of an unfinished manuscript by one or more target readers, ahead of publication or editorial submission. It spots reader-experience gaps — confusion, boredom, disengagement — and prioritizes structural revision before style polish.
Book design / typesetting
Book design covers typographic and spatial choices — typeface, size, leading, margins, grids, headers — that turn a manuscript into a legible, recognizable book.
CC
Character arc
A character arc is a protagonist's inner evolution across the story: what they believe, want, fear, and what they're willing to pay to change.
Character motivation
Motivation is the force pushing a character to act: a conscious desire (the want) doubled by a deep, often unconscious need (the need).
Chekhov's gun
"Chekhov's gun" is the principle that any element a story visibly highlights must later play a role; an emphasized detail creates an expectation that must be paid off or knowingly subverted.
Cliffhanger
A cliffhanger is a chapter, scene or volume ending that cuts at peak tension, without resolution, leaving the reader with an open question and an emotional cost to pay to close it.
Climax
The climax is the highest-tension scene of a story: it's where the promise laid down by the inciting incident resolves into success, failure, or irreversible turn.
Constructed language (conlang)
A constructed language (conlang) is a language invented for a fictional world, with varying degrees of formalization (from a simple lexicon to a complete grammar).
Copyright / author's rights
Copyright and author's rights protect an original work from the moment it exists: moral rights (attribution, integrity — perpetual in France) and economic rights (reproduction, distribution, adaptation — assignable by contract).
Cosmology (worldbuilding)
Cosmology refers to the metaphysical structure of a fictional universe: nature of the divine, origin of the world, afterlife, supra-physical laws, planes of existence.
Cosy mystery
The cosy mystery is a crime variant marked by a restricted community (village, profession, club), little to no on-page violence, an amateur sleuth, and a convivial tone.
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is an SF subgenre marked by a near-future urban setting, omnipresent technology (networks, implants, AI), dominant corporate structures, and marginal characters.
DD
Denouement
The denouement is the phase after the climax that resolves the consequences: it shows the final state of characters, relationships, and world once the central stake has been decided.
Deus ex machina
Deus ex machina is a resolution where the main conflict is solved by an external, unexpected, unprepared element — a quasi-divine intervention that bypasses the stakes.
Developmental editing
Developmental editing is the editorial phase that works on a manuscript's architecture: narrative arcs, pacing, consistency, motivations, point-of-view choices, and subplot balance.
Dialogue tag
A dialogue tag is the mention identifying the speaker ("she said", "Marc replied"). It anchors the exchange without commenting on it.
Dynamic duo
A dynamic duo is a narrative pair (friend, romantic, professional) built on useful contrast: skills, temperaments, or values that illuminate each other.
EE
Ebook
An ebook (digital book) is a work published in a dedicated digital format — most often EPUB — designed to adapt to any screen size, unlike a print book or a fixed PDF, and it's the preferred entry format for self-publishing.
Editorial reading committee
A publishing house's (or literary prize's) internal panel that evaluates received manuscripts before any publication decision, on editorial and commercial criteria.
Embedded narratives
An embedded narrative is a story inscribed inside another: a character tells a story, which may itself contain another, and so on.
Enemies to lovers
Romance trope in which the two characters begin in outright opposition (rivalry, hostility, ideological antagonism) and the arc consists of turning that conflict into lasting attachment, without negating what set them against each other.
EPUB / MOBI formats
EPUB (W3C/IDPF open standard) and MOBI (legacy Mobipocket format, now largely replaced by KFX on Kindle) are the dominant reflowable digital publishing formats.
Exposition scene
An exposition scene delivers context (who, where, when, world rules, stakes) inside action, ideally through consequences, dialogue or friction rather than an explanatory narrator.
External conflict
External conflict pits the character against an outside force: another character, a group, a system, the environment, or time.
FF
Fae
Fae: creatures from European fairy folklore (seelie/unseelie courts, pacts, iron), reimagined in fantasy as a dangerous people bound by strict rules.
Fair-play
Fair-play is the implicit whodunit rule that all clues necessary to solve the mystery must appear in the text, accessible to the reader, without authorial cheating — red herrings included, but never at the expense of the final solution.
False denouement
A false denouement is an apparent ending: everything seems settled, tension drops, and exactly then comes a final twist that reopens the stakes for the true climax or true ending.
False protagonist
A false protagonist is a character initially presented as the hero before a twist (death, disappearance, revelation) shifts the story's center to another.
Fictional political system
A fictional political system is the architecture of power (institutions, laws, factions, checks) invented to support a fictional world.
Final twist
A final twist is a revelation placed at the very end of the story, retroactively reinterpreting a major portion of what was read.
First contact
First contact is the SF subgenre staging humanity's first meeting with a non-human intelligence (alien, AI, uplifted species).
First draft
The first draft is the initial, raw version of a text — novel, short story, or scene. Its sole goal is to finish a complete draft, not to please the reader or match final style.
Five-act structure
The five-act structure — exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement — comes from classical drama (Freytag) and remains useful for long works where what happens after the climax deserves its own movement.
Flashback (analepsis)
A flashback (or analepsis) is a return to the past that interrupts the main timeline to show an earlier scene and let it shed light on the present.
Flashforward (prolepsis)
A flashforward (or prolepsis) is an anticipated jump: briefly showing a future event, giving the reader a reading grid for the narrative present.
Foil character
A foil is a side character whose traits are deliberately close to or opposed to the protagonist's, in order to throw the protagonist into relief.
Forced proximity
Forced proximity: a romance trope where a situation forces two characters to cohabit or collaborate (one bed, road trip, mission), accelerating intimacy.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing: planting discreet clues early in a story so a later reveal feels inevitable in hindsight. Invisible on first read, obvious on reread.
Found family
The "found family" trope refers to a group of characters thrown together by circumstance (mission, marginality, flight) who end up forming an emotional nucleus equivalent to — or stronger than — a biological family.
Free indirect style
A stylistic technique fusing character and narrator discourse: the character's thought colors the narration without being explicitly reported.
GG
Generation ship / generational narrative
An SF (and more broadly narrative) subgenre covering several generations of one group: world-ship, colony, dynasty. The protagonist changes or shifts in time while the central stake — survive, arrive, transmit — outlasts any single human life.
Gothic (literature)
The gothic novel is a literary genre born in the 18th century that blends oppressive atmosphere, ruined settings, family secrets and psychological terror rather than spectacular supernatural events, and which still runs through contemporary fantasy, dark romance and psychological thrillers.
Grumpy / Sunshine
A romance trope based on a temperament contrast: one lead is gruff, closed, sometimes wounded ("grumpy"); the other is open, expressive, warm ("sunshine"). The arc deepens what makes each necessary and complementary to the other.
HH
Hard magic system
A hard magic system (popularized by Brandon Sanderson) is a magical framework with explicit rules, visible costs, and limits that let the reader anticipate.
Hard SF
Hard SF refers to science fiction grounded in rigorous scientific bases (physics, biology, engineering), restricting its liberties to the plausible or to argued extrapolation.
HEA / HFN
HEA (Happily Ever After) and HFN (Happy For Now): the two endings romance requires as a genre. HEA = lasting happiness; HFN = happy in the present.
Hero's Journey
Theorized by Joseph Campbell and simplified by Christopher Vogler, the hero's journey is a 12-stage narrative pattern (call to adventure, refusal, mentor, crossing the threshold, ordeals, abyss, transformed return, etc.).
Historical timeline
A historical timeline is the reference frieze — internal to worldbuilding — ordering major universe events and letting you verify the story's and characters' temporal coherence.
II
Imaginary geography
Imaginary geography is the construction of fictional space: terrains, climates, borders, routes, cities, whose layout drives economy, war, and culture.
In medias res
In medias res ("into the middle of things") refers to an opening that begins in full action or crisis, with exposition rationed in afterward.
Inciting incident
Inciting incident: the event that disrupts the protagonist's equilibrium and launches the main plot, usually between 8 % and 15 % of the story.
Infodumping
Infodumping: information (worldbuilding, context, technology) delivered in a block that breaks the narration and stops the action.
Interior monologue
A narrative technique rendering a character's stream of thought in real time, with its jumps, contradictions and own syntax.
Internal coherence
Internal coherence is the property of a story whose rules (magical, technological, geographical, psychological) are respected throughout the story.
Internal conflict
Internal conflict pits two psychological forces inside one character: duty vs desire, fear vs ambition, two incompatible values, etc.
JJ
Jungian archetype
Stemming from Jung's analytical psychology and popularized in narratology by Campbell and Vogler, archetypes (Hero, Mentor, Shadow, Trickster, Threshold Guardian, etc.) are symbolic roles characters can occupy.
LL
Line editing / polishing
Line editing is the sentence-by-sentence rewriting phase: rhythm, precision, sonority, fat-trimming. It comes after developmental editing, when the story's architecture won't move anymore.
Literary trope
A trope is a recurring narrative figure (situation, character type, twist) established by repeated use in a genre. Genre-familiar readers recognize and expect it.
Locked-room mystery
A whodunit subgenre where the crime seems physically impossible: sealed room, identified suspects, no exit. The pleasure comes from revealing the "how" as much as the "who".
Love interest
The love interest is the character with whom the protagonist weaves the main romantic arc of the story. In romance, they're a co-protagonist; elsewhere, they're secondary but with full agency.
MM
MacGuffin
MacGuffin: an object or goal everyone chases that triggers the plot without its nature mattering. Coined by Hitchcock. Also spelled McGuffin.
Manuscript
A manuscript is the textual version of a work before publication. In editorial submission, its formatting follows strict conventions (font, spacing, headers) that signal the author's professionalism.
Mary Sue / Gary Stu
Mary Sue (female) or Gary Stu (male) refers to an over-idealized character: skilled at everything, loved by everyone, with no real flaw or cost.
Meet-cute
Meet-cute: the first meeting between future romantic leads, designed to be memorable and carry a friction that signals the dynamic to come.
Metafiction
Metafiction is fiction that becomes self-aware: it comments on its own construction, exposes its fictional author, or deliberately breaks the illusionist contract.
Miscommunication trope
The miscommunication trope (mostly in romance) is a trope where tension rests on a misunderstanding between protagonists: unsent message, misread words, never-stated secret.
Mise en abyme
A literary device that inscribes within a work an element (story, image, scene) that reproduces its structure or theme.
Morally grey character
A morally grey character is a protagonist or love interest whose actions and motivations fit neither classical heroism nor pure villainy: they act on a coherent inner logic that regularly transgresses common moral norms.
NN
NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month (November) is an annual challenge to write 50,000 words in thirty days. It popularized a volume-first approach to the first draft and a culture of collective sprints, but it doesn't replace year-round routine or revision — often longer than the production month.
Narrative arc
A narrative arc is a story's overall trajectory: a progression of states, stakes and transformations that moves from an initial situation to a resolution.
Narrative copilot (AI)
A narrative copilot is an AI assistant contextualized on a writing project, able to analyze, suggest, compare — but always handing the decision back to the author.
Narrative ellipsis
Narrative ellipsis is the deliberate omission of a story segment (time, scene, information). The reader perceives the jump and partially fills it.
Narrative entity extraction
NLP process that automatically identifies characters, places, objects, events, and their relationships in a narrative text.
Narrative knowledge graph
A data structure representing a story's entities (characters, places, objects, events) and their relationships as nodes and edges.
Narrative metaphor
A narrative metaphor is a recurring image or analogical structure that irrigates part or all of a story: an infection figuring a truth, a journey figuring a grief.
Narrative point of view
Narrative POV refers to the position from which the story is told: who sees, who knows, who speaks. It shapes every bit of the reader's access to the story.
Narrative polyphony
Concept from Bakhtin: a story is polyphonic when several narrative voices or consciousnesses coexist without any being hierarchically dominant.
Narrative schema
The narrative schema is a five-stage model — initial situation, inciting incident, rising action, resolution, final situation — that describes the logical progression of a story, from traditional tale to contemporary novel.
Non-linear chronology
Non-linear chronology is a story organized by jumps, flashbacks or fractured structure rather than following the order of events.
OO
Outline (scenario)
A novel outline (scenario) is the detailed plan of the plot — scene sequence, character actions, turning points — that an author drafts before or while writing to structure their story, as opposed to a screenplay meant for a film shoot.
PP
Pacing
Pacing refers to the reader's perception of rhythm: alternation between action and breathing scenes, between information density and silence, which determines whether a story holds or stalls.
Pantser (gardener)
The pantser ('by the seat of one's pants') or 'gardener' (Martin) is a writer who drafts without a prior plan, letting the story emerge through the first draft.
Peripeteia
Peripeteia: a reversal of fortune that swings the protagonist's trajectory. Covers the complications between the inciting incident and the resolution.
Pitch & synopsis
The pitch is a short hook (1–3 sentences) presenting premise and stake without revealing everything. The synopsis is a structured summary (1–5 pages) exposing the full plot, including the ending and major twists.
Plantser
A portmanteau of plotter and pantser, the plantser plans partially (major milestones, ending, main arcs) but drafts detail and surprises during the first draft.
Plot hole
Plot hole: an internal inconsistency — a decision, event, or missing action that contradicts the rules or motivations the story itself established.
Plot twist
Plot twist: a late revelation that reinterprets part of a story, revealing a character or event wasn't what it seemed. Inevitable on reread.
Plotter (architect)
The plotter (or 'architect,' opposed to the pantser 'gardener') is a writer who plans plot, arcs, and main scenes before or alongside drafting, often via synopsis, beat sheet, or snowflake method.
Point of no return
The point of no return is the moment, often at the act 2 / act 3 hinge, where a choice definitively commits the protagonist to resolving the main conflict: going back is no longer an option.
Procedural
A procedural is a mystery that follows step by step the professional investigative routine — police, forensic, legal, journalistic — where the credibility of the craft and the rigor of each stage structure the plot as much as the identity of the culprit.
Prologue
A prologue is an opening scene placed before chapter 1, detached from the story's main timeline or point of view, that sets up a stake, a threat, or a piece of information the rest of the novel will gradually illuminate.
Promise, Progress, Payoff
Promise, Progress, Payoff (Brandon Sanderson) is a triptych of questions for diagnosing plot coherence: what did we promise? how do we progress? how do we pay off?
Proofs
Proofs are the printed or high-fidelity PDF versions of the book, sent to the author and proofreader for orthographic and typographic validation before final printing.
Protagonist
The protagonist is the character whose journey structures the reader's experience: usually the one carrying the main stake and undergoing the central transformation.
Purple prose
Refers to overly ornate prose: piled adjectives, baroque metaphors, complex syntax, rare vocabulary. The story suffocates under the writing.
Query letter
A query letter is the letter sent to an agent or editor to pitch a manuscript: hook, plot pitch, market comps, and professional author bio — all on one page.
RR
Red herring
A red herring is a narrative element — clue, witness, motif — that the author plants credibly to draw suspicion onto a wrong track and make the real reveal more effective.
Redemption arc
Redemption arc: the trajectory of a morally compromised character who earns back integrity through costly choices — one of fiction's most powerful arcs.
Register (level of language)
Register is the stylistic level adopted (casual, neutral, formal, technical). It varies by narrator, character and social context.
SS
Save the Cat (beat sheet)
The Save the Cat beat sheet is a 15-beat narrative structure codified by Blake Snyder (2005), originally for screenplay, widely adopted in publishing (notably via Jessica Brody for the novel).
Scene / Sequel (Bickham)
Model formalized by Jack Bickham: a scene follows goal / conflict / outcome; the sequel that follows runs reaction / dilemma / decision and primes the next scene.
Secondary character
A secondary character holds an important but non-central place in the story. They carry a subplot, act as foil or relay, and advance the protagonist without replacing them.
Self-publishing
Publishing a work by the author themselves, without a traditional publishing house, taking on editing, layout, distribution, and marketing.
Sensory details
Sensory details are concrete elements (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) that make a scene palpable to the reader.
Show, don't tell
A writing principle that invites embodying emotions, traits and stakes through concrete scenes rather than declaring them abstractly.
Slow burn
Slow burn: a romance pacing where emotional and physical milestones are deliberately stretched across the whole story, each earned by a credible obstacle.
Snowflake method
Designed by Randy Ingermanson, the snowflake method grows a novel from a single sentence, expanded into a paragraph, synopsis, character sheets, and a scene-by-scene outline — a typical plotter-architecte tool.
Soft magic system
A soft magic system is a deliberately under-explained magical framework: blurry rules, vague limits, mysterious presence rather than mechanics.
Soft SF
Soft SF refers to science fiction that prioritizes the human sciences (sociology, anthropology, psychology, politics) over technical extrapolation.
Solarpunk
Solarpunk is an SF current imagining ecologically sustainable, politically just, aesthetically organic futures, as a response to dominant dystopian SF.
Space opera
Space opera refers to large-scale adventure SF (galaxies, empires, stellar wars), where melodrama and sweep outweigh technical rigor.
Stakes
Stakes are what's on the line in a scene or in the arc: what the protagonist risks losing on failure and what they can win on success. Without stakes, there is no tension.
Subplot
Subplot: a secondary storyline with its own tension and resolution, subordinate to the main arc. Illuminates, complicates, or contrasts the main plot.
Subtext
Subtext is the body of implicit meanings in a scene: tensions, desires, unspoken matters circulating under the surface of dialogue or action.
Suspense
Suspense is the state of tension that arises when the reader anticipates danger or stakes for a character and dreads or desires a specific outcome.
Synopsis
A synopsis is a structured editorial summary of a novel's complete plot — situation, stakes, twists and resolution — written for an agent, a publisher, or as a revision compass, hiding nothing about the ending.
TT
Technobabble
Technobabble refers to the accumulation of technical terms (real or invented) that simulate scientific explanation without providing one: the reader hears SF without being able to follow the scene's logic.
Technological singularity
The technological singularity is a hypothetical point of self-sustaining acceleration of intelligence (AI, augmentation, post-humanity) that would make the future opaque to current human frameworks. In fiction, it works as a horizon, a threat, or a pivot whose consequences exceed any classic arc.
Ternary rhythm
Ternary rhythm organizes a sentence, paragraph or line of dialogue into three elements of comparable weight (words, groups, clauses), creating a scansion and a rise that lodges in the reader's memory.
Third-act breakup
Third-act breakup: a romance convention where the couple separates near the end (75-85 %), forcing each character to change so the reunion is earned.
Three-act structure
The three-act model organizes a story into three movements — exposition, development, resolution — articulated around two turning points that prevent any going back.
Throughline
The throughline is the stake, question or image that runs through the whole story and to which every scene, even secondary, must be able to attach.
Ticking clock
The ticking clock is the explicit temporal constraint imposed on a plot: a delay, a countdown, a deadline after which a major cost falls.
Timeline
The timeline (or narrative chronology) is the real timeline of a novel's events — dates, character ages, time elapsed between scenes — established by the author to guarantee internal consistency, whether the story is told in order or not.
Traditional publishing
Traditional publishing is the classic model where the publisher funds production, distribution, and marketing, paying the author royalties calculated on net sales.
Try-fail cycles
Try-fail cycles are a progression structure where the protagonist tries, fails, learns, and retries, each cycle changing the equation of the problem.
UU
Universe history
Universe history is the succession of major events — wars, dynasties, catastrophes, discoveries — that shaped the world where the story unfolds. It differs from chronology: it's the causal narrative of the past, not just its dating.
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose account is biased, partial, or false. The reader discovers the distortion gradually, or in a single stroke.
Unreliable witness
The unreliable witness is a character whose testimony is partial, biased, or false — not necessarily the narrator. The distortion serves investigation, tension, or the reveal of a pivot fact — distinct from authorial deception planted as a mere red-herring.
VV
Vanity publishing
A model where the author funds production and distribution through a structure posing as a publisher, which does not select the manuscript and takes no economic risk.
Variable focalization
Variable focalization is a narrative that alternates between several POVs (internal or external), with assumed and structured shifts.
WW
Whodunit
The whodunit is a crime / mystery subgenre centered on the question "who committed the crime?", with a limited circle of suspects and a detective resolving by deduction.
Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding refers to the systematic construction of a fictional universe: geography, history, societies, economy, magic or technology, languages, cosmology.
Writer's block
Writer's block is prolonged inability to write despite wanting to. Causes may be psychological (fear of doing badly), structural (plot hole), or physiological (exhaustion). Diagnosing correctly avoids confusing creative blockage with need for rest or replanning.
Writing bible / codex
The codex (or writing bible) is the internal document gathering stable information about an universe and its characters: sheets, maps, timelines, rules, lexicon. It evolves with the story, not ahead of it.
Writing routine
A writing routine is a fixed temporal and spatial frame that reduces start-up friction: same hour, same place, same tools. It turns writing from an exceptional act into a repeatable gesture, which builds pages over time and cleanly separates drafting from revision.
Writing sprints
A writing sprint is a short session (15–45 minutes) where the author commits to producing text without correcting, rereading, or restructuring. It's a volume tool for the first draft and a targeted antidote to perfectionism that paralyzes premature revision.
XX
Xeno-fiction
Xeno-fiction (or xenofiction) denotes narratives whose protagonist(s) are not human — animal, alien, AI, collective entity — where narrative voice demands a radical overhaul of point of view and worldbuilding, without lazy anthropomorphic projection.