An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.
Non-fiction is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to convey information only about the real world, rather than being grounded in imagination. Non-fiction typically aims to present topics objectively based on historical, scientific, and empirical information. However, some non-fiction ranges into more subjective territory, including sincerely held opinions on real-world topics.
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.
In publishing, a note is a brief text wherein the author comments upon the subject and themes of the book and names the supporting citations. In the editorial production of books and documents, typographically, a note is usually several lines of text at the bottom of the page, at the end of a chapter, at the end of a volume, or a house-style typographic usage throughout the text. Notes are usually identified with superscript numbers or a symbol.
Story structure or narrative structure is the recognizable or comprehensible way in which a narrative's different elements are unified, including in a particularly chosen order and sometimes specifically referring to the ordering of the plot: the narrative series of events, though this can vary based on culture. In a play or work of theatre especially, this can be called dramatic structure, which is presented in audiovisual form. Story structure can vary by culture and by location. The following is an overview of various story structures and components that might be considered.
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories, presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
Traditionally, conflict is a major element of narrative or dramatic structure that creates challenges in a story by adding uncertainty as to whether the goal will be achieved. In works of narrative, conflict is the challenge main characters need to solve to achieve their goals. However, narrative is not limited to a single conflict. In narrative, the term resolution refers to the closure or conclusion of the conflict, which may or may not occur by the story's end.
"The Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes' essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work to Text".
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence. Formalism rejects or sometimes simply "brackets" notions of culture or societal influence, authorship, and content, and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourse, and forms.
Narrative criticism focuses on the stories a speaker or a writer tells to understand how they help us make meaning out of our daily human experiences. Narrative theory is a means by which we can comprehend how we impose order on our experiences and actions by giving them a narrative form. According to Walter Fisher, narratives are fundamental to communication and provide structure for human experience and influence people to share common explanations and understandings. Fisher defines narratives as "symbolic actions-words and/or deeds that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them." Study of narrative criticism, therefore, includes form, genre, structure characterization, and communicator's perspective.
The implied author is a concept of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written. In other words, the implied author is a construct, the image of the writer produced by a reader as called forth from the text. The implied author may or may not coincide with the author's expressed intentions or known personality traits.
Fiction writing is the composition of non-factual prose texts. Fictional writing often is produced as a story meant to entertain or convey an author's point of view. The result of this may be a short story, novel, novella, screenplay, or drama, which are all types of fictional writing styles. Different types of authors practice fictional writing, including novelists, playwrights, short story writers, radio dramatists and screenwriters.
The rhetorical modes are a broad traditional classification of the major kinds of formal and academic writing by their rhetorical (persuasive) purpose: narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. First attempted by Samuel P. Newman in A Practical System of Rhetoric in 1827, the modes of discourse have long influenced US writing instruction and particularly the design of mass-market writing assessments, despite critiques of the explanatory power of these classifications for non-school writing.
A feature story is a piece of non-fiction writing about news covering a single topic in detail. A feature story is a type of soft news, news primarily focused on entertainment rather than a higher level of professionalism. The main subtypes are the news feature and the human-interest story.
Fiction theory is a discipline that applies a form of possible world theory to literature. Drawing on concepts found in related theories and psychological ideas such as Parasocial interaction (PSI) and Fictionalism, theorists of fiction study the relationships between perceived textual worlds and reality outside the text. Thus, the primary principle of fiction theory is that the relationships between the speculative nature of fiction and the actual world in which we live are complicated. This further suggests that perceived truths born out of fiction worlds develop a sense of coherency in which they maintain a sense of realism. As a result, this theory offers alternate ways of exploring and asking questions about relations between the fictitious and the actual world.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to fiction:
The three-act structure is a model used in narrative fiction that divides a story into three parts (acts), often called the Setup, the Confrontation, and the Resolution. It was popularized by Syd Field in his 1979 book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. Based on his recommendation that a play have a "beginning, middle, and end," the structure has been falsely attributed to Aristotle, who in fact argued for a two-act structure consisting of a "complication" and "dénouement" split by a peripeteia.
The encyclopedic novel is a literary concept popularised by Edward Mendelson in two 1976 essays referring to a work of fiction with an exhaustive, encyclopedia-like scope and writing style. In Mendelson's formulation, encyclopedic novels "attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge". In more general terms, the encyclopedic novel is a long, complex work of fiction that incorporates extensive information, often from specialized disciplines of science and the humanities. Mendelson's essays examine the encyclopedic tendency in the history of literature, considering the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Faust, Moby-Dick, and War and Peace, with an emphasis on the modern Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. Commonly cited examples of encyclopedic novels in the postmodern period include, in addition to Pynchon, Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations (1991), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). Other literary critics have explored the concept since, attempting to understand the function and effect of "encyclopedic" narratives, and coining the related terms systems novel and maximalist novel.
