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."