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The term plot can also serve as a verb, as part of the craft of writing, referring to the writer devising and ordering story events. (A related meaning is a character's planning of future actions in the story.) The term plot, however, in common usage (e.g., a "film plot") more often refers to a narrative summary, or story synopsis.
The use of a MacGuffin as a plot device predates the name MacGuffin. The Holy Grail of Arthurian legend has been cited as an early example of a MacGuffin. The Holy Grail is the desired object that is essential to initiate and advance the plot, but the final disposition of the Grail is never revealed, suggesting that the object is not of significance in itself. [8]
Chekhov's gun (or Chekhov's rifle; Russian: Чеховское ружьё) is a narrative principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary and irrelevant elements should be removed. For example, if a writer features a gun in a story, there must be a reason for it, such as it being fired some time later in the plot. All ...
Story structure or narrative structure is the recognizable or comprehensible way in which a narrative's different elements are unified, including in a particularly chosen order and sometimes specifically referring to the ordering of the plot: the narrative series of events, though this can vary based on culture.
An example of a "bonus material" style inner story is the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick; that chapter tells a fully formed story of an exciting mutiny and contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing Moby-Dick—ideas originally intended to be used later in the ...
type is the type of plot element that the subject is. This should be concise and clearly cover what the plot element is. Example: Emergency Medical Hologram would list the "type" as: "A computer program that produces an interactive hologram." owner is used to indicate which type of stories the element appears in. This field should not be used ...
Joseph Berg Esenwein in 1909 published, "Writing the short-story; a practical handbook on the rise, structure, writing, and sale of the modern short-story." In it he outlines the following plot elements and ties it to a drawing, [58] following Whitcomb's prescriptions: Incident, emotion, crisis, suspense, climax, dénouement, conclusion. He ...
A narrative thread, or plot thread (or, more ambiguously, a storyline), refers to particular elements and techniques of writing to center the story in the action or experience of characters rather than to relate a matter in a dry "all-knowing" sort of narration.