Literary technique, also called
literary device.
Novels and
short stories do not simply come from nowhere. Usually the author employs some general literary technique as a framework for artistic work.
- Author surrogate, a character who acts as the author's spokesman.
- Autobiographical novel, tales of the author's life as seen by the author in fictional form; sometimes significant changes are made. An example is James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man[?].
- Breaking the fourth wall is acknowledging to the reader or audience that what is being presented is fiction.
- Constrained writing, in which artificial constraints, such as "no words containing the letter 'e'", are imposed.
- Epistolary novel, novel in the form of letters exchanged between the characters. Examples include Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
- False documents, fiction written in the form of, or about, apparently real, but actually fake documents. Examples include Robert Graves' I, Claudius, a fictional autobiography of the Roman emperor Claudius; and H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book of evil that appeared frequently in horror fiction and film, written by both Lovecraft and his admirers.
- First-person narrative, the narrator tells her own tale
- Flashback, general term for altering time sequences, taking characters back to the beginning of the tale, for instance.
- Frame tale, or a story within a story, where a main story is used to organise a series of shorter stories
- Historical novel, story set amidst historical events, pioneered by Sir Walter Scott in his novels of Scottish history. Protagonists may be fictional or historical personages, or a combination.
- Magic realism, a form particularly popular in Latin American but not limited to that region, in which events are described realistically, but in a magical haze of strange local customs and beliefs. Gabriel García Márquez is a notable author in the style.
- Narrative, fiction written as if it were related to the reader by a single participant or observer.
- Omniscient narrator, particular form of narrative in which the narrator sees and knows all
- Parody, ridicule by imitation, usually humorous, such as MAD Magazine
- Pastiche, using forms and styles of another author, generally as an affectionate tribute, such as the many stories featuring Sherlock Holmes not written by Arthur Conan Doyle.
- Picaresque novel, episodic recounting of the adventures of a rogue (Spanish picaro) on the road, such as Tom Jones or Huckleberry Finn.
- Roman a clef, a "novel with a key", that is, whose characters and plot are related to real-life happenings
- Satire, "An attack on wickedness and folly", as Samuel Johnson called it, such as 1984 or Brave New World. Not necessarily humorous.
- Stream of consciousness, an attempt to portray all the thoughts and feelings of a character, as in parts of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
- Word play, in which the nature of the words used themselves become part of the work
Authors also manipulate the language of their works to create a desired response from the reader. This is the realm of the rhetorical devices.