We’re going to continue our listing of various terms used in the writing, editing, and publishing industry. If you missed last month’s entry (Writing and Editing Terms #1) or are more interested in Printing Terms or Grammar Terms, you might want to check out those posts. Here we’re going to continue listing expressions that may be new to some writers, this time with addressing how writers write, then a few expressions that focus on story internals, finally finishing off with a few more items to avoid. As the list seems to be even longer yet, we’ll have to save the last few for next month (Writing and Editing Terms #3).
Writing Approach
- Style—Author’s manner of expression including word choice, grammar structures, literary devices, and language use
- Tone—Attitude of author to reader, characters, or events in the story, may be sarcastic, pessimistic, cheerful, etc.
- Voice—Persona author adopts to tell story
- Plotter—Writer who creates a story in a general outline form before filling in the details
- Pantser—Writer who creates a story without pre-thinking (by the seat of the pants)
- Outline—Short bullet points summarising content of story, often used to create TOC
Story Flow
- Beat—Important event or turning point in story, also pause in speech or action
- Action Beat—Description of movement by speaker of dialogue, included in the same paragraph as the dialogue
- Dialogue—Spoken conversation between characters, denoted by quotation marks
- Internal Dialogue—Thoughts of POV character, denoted by Italics
- Dialogue Tags—Indication of who is speaking, may also include Action Beats (also Speaker Tags or just Tags)
- Transitions—Control of flow through story, no action happens without reason
Problems to Avoid
- Mary Sue or Marty-Stu—A character who is able to do everything with unrealistic abilities, usually a stand in for the author (autobiographical, ha!)
- Burly Detective—Over use of reference to characters by description (“the burly detective”) in a futile attempt to avoid using character’s name or pronoun, involves the use of multiple different terms to refer to the same character: Frank, he, her boyfriend, the driver, the sergeant, or the tall, slim man
- On The Nose—Writing style that is too straightforward, also characters that reveal in dialogue exactly what they are thinking or feeling
- Cliché—Over used and trite term or phrase that has lost its power
- Dead Metaphor—Similar to cliché, a metaphor that has lost its intensity due to over use
That’s quite a list, but there’s more to follow. See you next month!