Literary Terms and Concepts: A Reference Glossary for Writers

Precision with language is the writer's core skill, so it's worth knowing the names for the things writers do. This glossary covers the foundational terms and concepts that appear in workshops, editorial feedback, craft essays, and creative writing programs and MFA curricula — defined clearly, with attention to how each concept functions in actual prose and poetry rather than just what it means on paper.

Definition and scope

A literary term is a label for a recognizable technique, structure, or element in written work. These labels travel across every form — fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screenwriting — though their applications shift depending on the form's demands.

The vocabulary here draws from classical rhetoric, narrative theory, and the working language of contemporary workshops. Some terms, like metaphor or irony, are old enough to appear in Aristotle's Poetics (circa 335 BCE). Others, like free indirect discourse or unreliable narrator, became precise technical terms only as literary criticism matured in the 20th century. Both categories are equally useful to the practicing writer.

Scope matters: this glossary focuses on craft-level terminology — the tools — rather than genre labels or publishing industry terms. The goal is a working vocabulary for the act of writing and revision.

How it works

Literary terms function as shorthand. When a workshop reader says a passage relies too heavily on telling rather than showing, that single phrase encodes a whole set of assumptions about the relationship between scene, summary, and reader experience (a distinction explored in depth at show, don't tell). Without shared terminology, that same note would require a paragraph of explanation every time.

The terms below are organized by function — what each element does in a piece of writing.

Structural elements govern the architecture of a work:

  1. Plot — the sequence of causally linked events. Distinct from story, which is the full chronological account of what happened. Plot is what the writer chooses to show, and in what order.
  2. Narrative arc — the shape of a plot, typically including exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. The five-part Freytag's Pyramid (named for German novelist Gustav Freytag, who described it in Technik des Dramas, 1863) is the most widely cited version of this structure.
  3. Pacing — the speed at which a narrative moves through time and event, controlled through scene length, sentence rhythm, and the ratio of scene to summary. See pacing in writing for detailed mechanics.

Perspective and voice elements control who speaks and how:

  1. Point of view (POV) — the narrative position from which a story is told: first person, second person, third-person limited, or third-person omniscient. Each carries different constraints and possibilities (covered fully at point of view).
  2. Voice — the distinctive personality and sensibility audible in the prose itself, separate from character voice. Often described as the writer's fingerprint on the page.
  3. Free indirect discourse — a technique in which a character's thoughts or speech are rendered in third person but in the character's own idiom, without quotation marks or attribution. Jane Austen used it with particular sophistication; it remains one of the most analyzed techniques in narrative theory.

Figurative and rhetorical devices operate at the sentence and image level:

  1. Metaphor — a direct comparison that identifies one thing as another ("the mind is a filing cabinet"). Distinguished from simile, which uses "like" or "as" ("the mind works like a filing cabinet"). The distinction matters because metaphor collapses the distance between tenor and vehicle, creating identity rather than resemblance.
  2. Irony — a gap between surface meaning and actual meaning (verbal irony), between expectation and outcome (situational irony), or between what a character knows and what the reader knows (dramatic irony). Three distinct operations share the same label, which is why clarifying the type in feedback is useful.
  3. Symbolism — the use of an object, place, or character to carry meaning beyond its literal presence. Symbols earn their weight through context and repetition; premature or unearned symbolism is a common workshop critique. Theme and symbolism covers the relationship between these two layers in depth.

Common scenarios

These terms appear most often in 4 specific contexts: workshop feedback, editorial letters, craft essays, and self-revision. In workshop, terms like interiority, scene versus summary, and narrative distance let readers identify specific problems without rewriting the author's sentences. In editorial letters, structure, arc, and pacing dominate because editors are working at the macro level of a full manuscript. Craft essays — the kind published in The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, or collected in volumes like John Gardner's The Art of Fiction (1983) — use the full vocabulary as a shared language between writer-teachers and their readers.

Decision boundaries

Two distinctions cause persistent confusion and are worth separating explicitly.

Motif vs. symbol: A motif is a recurring element — an image, phrase, or situation — that creates pattern and resonance. A symbol carries specific thematic meaning. A motif can become a symbol if it accumulates enough weight, but not every motif does, and treating every recurrence as symbolic meaning overloads a text.

Theme vs. subject: The subject of a story is its topic — grief, ambition, war. The theme is the specific claim the story makes about that topic — not "war" but "war hollows out the rituals meant to honor it." Conflating the two is why theme statements sometimes end up too broad to guide revision decisions. Theme and symbolism and plot structure both bear on how theme gets built into a manuscript's architecture.

For writers building fluency with this vocabulary from the ground up, the full resource index maps these concepts across forms and skill levels.

References