Elements of Short Fiction - King's College



Elements of Short Fiction

Fiction is a movement. A story is a story because it tells about a process or a change. The essential movements of fiction:

A man’s situation changes.

He himself is changed in some way.

Our understanding of him changes.

Plot: the arrangement of the action, an imagined event or series of such events.

The plot of a story can usually be traced with the five essential parts we find in Drama: exposition, rising action, crisis, falling action, and resolution/conclusion.

1. Exposition: gives necessary background information, including characters, situations, time, place, relationships, etc…

2. Rising action: complication; events that complicate and intensify the situation or complicate the conflict or introduce new ones.

3. Crisis: climax of story; the point in the story where the action stops rising, reaches its pitch, and starts falling.

4. Falling action: begins untangling the complications of the rising action.

5. Resolution/Conclusion: the point of the story in which an initial conflict is resolved or brought to a logical conclusion

3. crisis

2. rising action

4. falling action

1. exposition 5. resolution

How to Perceive Fictional Plottings

1. Look at beginnings and endings.

2. Isolate the central characters.

3. Note the stages in all important changes. (If a character has moved from one situation to another, or one state of mind to another, the steps leading to the completed change should be illuminating. Through them the reader can get to "how" and "why," but "what comes first.)

4. Note the things working against the movement of the story. IE: if the story moves toward a marriage, consider what things delay the happy occasion. Also, note if the protagonist, the central character, vs. the antagonist and the forces working on him.

A person may be in conflict with

1. other persons; 2. society or nature; or 3. himself/herself

5. Note carefully characters or events that seem to make no contribution to the plot or its movement. What is their job?

Suspense: two devices for achieving suspense:

1. to introduce an element of mystery

2. to place the protagonist in a dilemma

Importance of Artistic Unity: essential to good plot

Does the story hold together? Is it a concise whole? Are there any details which could be eliminated or which need further explanation?

Devices of Plot Manipulation: chance and coincidence

What forces are at work in the lives of the characters?

Other Basic Elements of Short Fiction:

Symbol: a word or phrase, usually denoting a concrete object, that "stands for" or refers to something else, often an abstract concept or quality, and allows related and nonliteral meanings to come into play. In most cases, symbols depend on common understandings in the ideologies of a text and a reader; a symbol is not, therefore, an "objective" element of a literary text. Symbols are generally read figuratively; that is, they compare or put together two unlike things. A reader may read a text symbolically or figuratively, just as a text can be read literally.

Simile: an explicit comparison, often signaled by like or as.

Metaphor: an implicit comparison or identification of one thing with another unlike itself, without a verbal signal but just seeming to say "A is B."

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