Advanced Craft & Technique
What is an unreliable narrator?
A narrator whose version of events cannot be fully trusted.
What is a haiku?
A short poem with three lines that follow a 5–7–5 syllable pattern and focus on a single moment or image.
What is a foil?
A character who contrasts with another.
A story takes place in a world full of magic, mythical creatures, and quests.
Fantasy.
What is subtext?
Meaning that is implied rather than directly stated.
What is a sonnet?
A 14-line poem with a specific rhyme scheme and a turn in meaning.
What is a dynamic character?
A character who changes in a meaningful way during the story.
A story is meant to make the reader feel scared, tense, or uneasy.
Horror.
What is a motif?
A recurring element that reinforces the theme.
What is iambic pentameter?
A line of poetry with ten syllables arranged in five iambs, each iamb being an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.
What is a character archetype?
A universal model or pattern for a type of character, such as the mentor or trickster.
A story takes a familiar genre and exaggerates it to comment on society or to make a point.
Satire.
What is dramatic irony?
When the audience knows something the characters do not.
What is a quatrain?
A stanza of four lines, often with a regular rhyme scheme.
What is a character’s blind spot?
Something important the character cannot see about themselves, even though the audience can.
A story questions or breaks the usual rules of its genre, such as a detective story where the detective refuses to solve the case.
Genre subversion.
What is in medias res?
When a story begins in the middle of the action rather than at the beginning.
What is a caesura?
A deliberate pause or break in the middle of a line of poetry.
A story shows what a character is like through their actions instead of directly describing them.
Indirect characterization.
What is metafiction?
Fiction that draws attention to the fact that it is fiction.