The Art of Telling — A Creative Writing Salon with James F. Mulhern

For Your Reference

Literary Terms Glossary

Terms we will use across the three units. Working definitions — meant to be useful at the desk, not exhaustive.

Scene: A passage that puts the reader in the room. Time slows; dialogue is heard; objects are seen; small gestures matter.
Summary: A passage that compresses time. Events are reported rather than dramatized. The opposite mode from scene.
Character: Not a description of a person — a want with a body around it.
Desire: What the character wants. The engine of narrative. Can be hidden from the character.
Obstacle: What stands in the way of desire. External (circumstance, another person) or internal (fear, self-deception).
Stakes: What the character will lose if they fail. Need not be life and death, but must be real to the character.
Turn: The moment in a story when something is different from what it was before. Without a turn, the story drifts.
Recognition: What the character understands at the end that they did not at the beginning. Need not be articulated.
Selection: The writer’s central act: what to include, what to leave out, what to put first, what to dwell on.

Voice: The recognizable texture of a narrator on the page: diction, syntax, rhythm, stance toward the material.
Point of View: The position from which a story is told: who sees, who knows, who speaks.
Narrative Distance: The felt nearness of narrator to character — from inside the skull to high overhead. A dial, not a switch.
First Person: An “I” tells the story. Intimate and limited to what the speaker can know.
Close Third: Third-person narration that stays inside one character’s perception.
Omniscient: A narrator who can move freely among characters and know what each is thinking.
Free Indirect Style: Third-person narration that briefly absorbs a character’s phrasing and judgment without quotation marks.
Reliability: The degree to which the reader can trust the narrator’s account. Unreliability is a craft choice, not a flaw.
Disclosure: What the narrator chooses to reveal, withhold, or delay. The engine of pacing and tension.
Filtering Words: Words like saw, heard, felt, noticed that add distance by placing perception between reader and event.

Image: A concrete sensory detail — seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled — that carries weight beyond itself.
Line: The basic unit of rhythm in poetry. In prose, the sentence; in poetry, the line.
Line Break: The most powerful piece of punctuation a poet has. Decides what the eye lingers on and where the breath rests.
Enjambment: A line break that runs the sentence across without punctuation, creating tension between line and syntax.
Lyric “I”: The constructed speaker of a poem. Not the same as the poet — a position chosen and shaped.
Compression: Density of meaning per unit of language. Not shortness. Comes from precision of image, economy of line, and trust in the reader.
Concrete Noun: A noun for a thing the senses can find. Concrete nouns are how poems mean.
Abstraction: Language about ideas rather than things (loss, hope, grief). Necessary in moderation; deadly in excess.

Memoir: The shaping of a slice of a life into literature. Not autobiography (the chronicle of a whole life).
Situation: What happened — the events of the memoir. The raw material.
Story: What it means — the meaning the writer makes of the events. (After Vivian Gornick.)
Double Voice: The two voices speaking together on the memoir page: the younger self living through, and the older self looking back.
Truth of Memory: The truth of what the moment felt like and what it has continued to mean — not the same as the truth of fact.
Reflection: The pattern, the meaning, the recognition the older voice supplies. Distinct from scene.

Revision: Re-seeing the whole. Distinct from editing.
Editing: Fixing sentences at the local level. The last stage of work, not the first.
Early Draft: For the writer. A way of finding what is there.
Middle Draft: Where the writer learns what the piece actually is.
Late Draft: For the reader. Now the work can be polished.
The Cut: The disciplined removal of what does not earn its place. The single most useful revision move.