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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.
Short stories make use of plot, resonance and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. [citation needed] The short story is sometimes referred to as a genre. [2]
The plot is usually placed in a self-contained section (designated by == Plot == or sometimes == Synopsis ==). By convention, story plots are written in the narrative present—that is, in the present tense, matching the way that the story is experienced. [2] If it makes the plot easier to explain, events can be reordered. [3]
If there is no plot summary, use the tag {} and if the plot is insufficient, {}. If real-world context, impact, or analysis is missing from the article, take a few minutes to add it. (Reminder: Encyclopedias are, by definition, tertiary sources. The literary analysis must be independently sourced, verifiable and balanced.
Science fiction writer and critic Damon Knight, in his 1956 collection In Search of Wonder, says that the term may have originated with author James Blish. [1]: 26 Knight went on to coin the term second-order idiot plot as a narrative "in which not merely the principals, but everybody in the whole society has to be a grade-A idiot, or the story couldn't happen".
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.
For example, the film Citizen Kane starts with the main character's death, and then tells his life through flashbacks interspersed with a journalist's present-time investigation of Kane's life. The fabula of the film is the actual story of Kane's life the way it happened in chronological order, while the syuzhet is the way the story is told ...
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").