Creative Writing

109 flashcards by MentisLibrary

The craft of fiction and creative nonfiction: point of view, scene and summary, dialogue and subtext, character and structure, prose style, revision, and the vocabulary used in workshop and submission.

What does point of view actually decide?

Who is telling the story, how much that teller knows, and how close the reader is allowed to stand to a character's thoughts. Every other choice on the page follows from it.

First person

A character narrates from inside the story, using I. The reader gets voice and intimacy but can only know what the narrator knows, notices, and is willing to say.

Third person limited

The narration stays outside the character grammatically but inside their perception: only what this one person sees, thinks and knows reaches the page.

Third person omniscient

A narrator who is not a character in the story, can move between minds, jump in time, and comment. It is a voice in its own right, not a neutral camera.

Second person

The narration addresses the reader as you, placing them in the role of the protagonist. It creates immediacy and unease and is hard to sustain at length.

Objective point of view

The narration reports only what a camera and microphone could catch: speech, action, surfaces, with no access to any character's mind.

Free indirect discourse

Third-person narration that takes on a character's diction, judgments and rhythms without quotation marks or a tag, so the character's voice colors the narrator's sentences.

Psychic distance

The measurable closeness of the narration to a character's consciousness, from a wide sociological remove down to the inside of a thought. A skilled writer moves along that scale on purpose.

Head-hopping

Shifting between characters' interior thoughts inside a single scene with no break or signal, so the reader loses track of whose experience they are in.

Unreliable narrator

A narrator whose account the reader comes to distrust: through self-deception, ignorance, madness, or deliberate lying. The story is the gap between what is said and what happened.

Filter words

Verbs of perception, saw, heard, felt, noticed, realized, wondered, that place the character between the reader and the event instead of putting the reader in it.

Retrospective first person

First person told from a later vantage, so there are two selves in the book: the one living the events and the one narrating them, who knows how it ends.

First person plural

A narrating we that speaks for a group, town, class or generation, so no individual is fully accountable for the telling.

Multiple point of view

A novel divided between two or more viewpoint characters, usually one per chapter or section, each restricted to what that person can know.

Scene vs summary

Scene renders events moment by moment in a continuous stretch of time, with speech and action. Summary compresses time and reports what happened, covering weeks in a sentence.

What has to be present for a passage to be a scene?

A specific place, continuous time, characters who want something, and a change in the situation by the end. Take any one away and it becomes summary or description.

When should you summarize instead of dramatizing?

When time has to pass, when information is necessary but not dramatic, when an action repeats, and when a scene would only restate what the reader already knows.

Show and tell

Showing renders an experience the reader can infer from; telling states a conclusion. Good prose alternates, using telling for speed and transition and showing for what matters.

Exposition

The background a reader needs, history, relationships, rules of the world, delivered so it does not stop the story.

The significant detail

One concrete, specific particular chosen because it carries meaning, rather than a general description assembled from many.

Setting as pressure

Treating place, weather, season and social world as forces that push on the characters, rather than as a backdrop described before the action begins.

Beat

The smallest unit inside a scene: one exchange, one action, one shift in the balance between characters. A scene is a sequence of beats that add up to a change.

Flashback

A scene from earlier in the story's chronology inserted into the present narrative. It needs a clear entry, a reason the present moment triggers it, and a clear return.

In medias res

Beginning in the middle of the action rather than at the chronological start, so the reader arrives with questions and is given the context later.

How do you handle a jump in time or place?

With a white-space section break, a short transitional summary, or a first line that orients the reader in the new time and place within a sentence or two.

Pacing

How fast the reader experiences time, controlled by the ratio of scene to summary, by sentence and paragraph length, by white space and by how much is withheld.

What makes written dialogue different from real speech?

It removes hesitation, repetition, greetings, small talk and most of the words. It is speech compressed until every line does work: revealing character, advancing the situation, or both.

Subtext

What the characters actually want and mean underneath what they say. Most good dialogue is two people talking about something else.

Why is said the best dialogue tag?

Because readers skip it. It disappears into the rhythm and simply attributes the line, leaving the words themselves to carry the tone.

Action beat

A small piece of action attached to a line of dialogue instead of a tag, which attributes the speech and shows what the speaker is doing at the same time.