Useful vocabulary terms for advanced fiction students

1. English 492-01 Jamie Lyon Spring 2018
Useful Vocabulary
Front Story and Backstory. Most short stories use some combination of front story and
backstory, which are also sometimes called horizontal and vertical movement. Horizontal
movement, or the front story, keeps the narrative going forward—it’s the series of events about
which the writer writes. Vertical movement, or backstory, goes below the surface, to comment
on the events that make up the horizontal movement and/or to give the reader necessary
background.
Luminous Details. These are the striking, unique-as-you-can-make-them details about people,
places, things, and events that help authenticate to the reader the truth of your stories. You must
employ these details if you are going to persuade your readers to come with you on your
narrative journey.
The Thing and The Other Thing. You can also call this plot and story, or plot and theme. The
Thing is the sequence of events that make up a story (dinner with family; traumatic injury; death
of colleagues), and The Other Thing is what the story is really about (a young boy’s relationship
to his mother; having patience for your own body; longing for stasis).
The Objective Correlative. One way to point your reader in the direction of The Other Thing is
to use the objective correlative, or a set of physical objects that represent a feeling or emotion.
Preferably, these objects should arise organically from the events of your story.
What Weighs the Most. You’ll hear me use this term to refer to the most important thing in a
story. All stories have a most important thing, and everything else in the story has to serve that
most important thing.
Patterns. These are narrative devices that repeat more than twice over the course of a story in
more than one context. Some people would call them motifs. Patterns serve several functions.
Authentication. A good pattern will help you persuade the reader. That is, it will make it
easier for your reader to come along with you, especially if you’ve got some super weird
shit going on. Consider, for example, the phrase “As you wish” in The Princess Bride. Its
prevalence in the opening scenes makes persuasive (that is, it authenticates) the premise
that Buttercup can recognize Westley by his use of this phrase alone. If we’d never heard
him say that to her before, we’d be like “wth are you even doing” when she throws
herself down a hill after him. (This is also an example of a luminous detail.) Consider
also the rant about capes undertaken by Edna the super-suit designer in The Incredibles.
If we hadn’t heard in such emphatic detail about all the terrible fates brought about by
capes, we would have shaken our heads in disgust when Syndrome’s cape sucked him
into the jet engine because that is a deus ex machina and therefore a load of crap (unless
you’re a Greek playwright, which you aren’t).
Reinforcement of Ideas. They can foreshadow, or hint at some event that’s coming up.
They can reinforce an idea, as in JoAnn Beard’s remarkable essay “The Fourth State of
Matter.” In that essay, the writer talks about space at the very beginning of the essay,
when she’s standing outside while her elderly dog relieves herself. She does the same

2. English 492-01 Jamie Lyon Spring 2018
thing at the end, after a shooting that leaves several of her colleagues dead, and because
we’ve read about the intervening events, we see space differently in the context of the
narrative. You can think about this like the chorus of a song
Most Excellent Sentences. Please remember always that revision is your friend. Sometimes, you
can’t help but write slack, lackluster sentences, because that’s all that’s available. I find
sometimes that I must write a bad sentence in order to write a good one, which is to say, I won’t
know what the good sentences is supposed to look like until I’ve seen the bad one. A multitude
of revision strategies are available to you. Refer to the article by Cynthia Newberry-Martin in the
“Resources” section of our Blackboard site for more intel on this. I also like to employ four
distinct strategies, which we’ll talk about in class: using internal rhyme, or the repetition of
sounds within words; making your sentences short and choppy; using deliberate run-ons; and
deploying unexpected words.
Strong Verbs. Verbs are the most important components of sentences. You can improve your
writing right now by choosing strong, specific verbs. Don’t say “eat” when you mean “devour.”
Don’t say “jump” when you mean “lunge.” Thesaurus.com is an excellent resource for any
writer, but in particular the one looking to up her verb game.
Denotation and Connotation. Related to word choice is the notion of denotation and
connotation. Denotation is the literal, dictionary definition of a word; connotation is what the
word implies in the mind of the reader. Think, for example, of all the words you know for
“woman.” “Lady” implies propriety, uprightness, class. “Chick” implies youth, a certain
coolness. Gal, girl, lass, damsel, miss, ma’am, she, skirt, sweetheart, babe, bag, arm candy,
matron, cougar, dame, ditz, pigeon, shorty—you get the idea. Words carry cultural, historical,
and social weight, and if you let them, they can work pretty hard for you.