Creative Writing Vocabulary

This is a set of flashcards designed to help students review key concepts and vocabulary related to creative writing, including imagery, diction, figures of speech, and elements of fiction, based on the provided lecture notes.

Creative Writing

Any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics.

Sensory Imagery

The use of descriptive language to create mental images, engaging a reader's five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.

Visual Imagery

Engages the sense of sight, including descriptions of color, size, shape, lightness, darkness, shadows, and shade.

Gustatory Imagery

Engages the sense of taste, including flavors (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami) and textures related to eating.

Auditory Imagery

Engages the sense of hearing, often using sound devices like onomatopoeia and alliteration to create sounds in writing.

Olfactory Imagery

Engages the sense of smell, often using similes to compare scents to common smells.

Tactile Imagery

Engages the sense of touch, including feel, textures, and sensations; also includes differences in temperature.

Kinesthetic Imagery

Engages the feeling of movement, dealing with full-body sensations experienced during exercise or other activities.

Diction

The careful selection of words to communicate a message or establish a particular voice or writing style.

Formal Diction

Uses grammatical rules and proper syntax; often found in legal documents, business correspondences, and academic articles.

Informal Diction

More conversational and often used in narrative literature; representative of how people communicate in real life.

Colloquial Diction

Expressions connected to informal speech, generally representing a particular region, place, era, or period.

Slang Diction

Very informal language or specific words used by a particular group of people; often heard more than seen in writing.

Poetic Diction

Driven by melodious words that identify with a particular subject reflected in a sonnet, and make a musical, or agreeable, sound.

Figure of Speech

A rhetorical device that achieves a special effect by using words in a distinctive way.

Alliteration

The repetition of an initial consonant sound.

Anaphora

The repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.

Antithesis

The combination of two different elements to attain equilibrium or balance.

Apostrophe

Directly stating or calling a nonexistent person or an inanimate object as though it were a living being.

Assonance

The repetition of vowel sounds in the structure of sentences or lines.

Chiasmus

A sentence or line structure where the second half of the statement is balanced against the first.

Euphemism

The use of subtle and nonoffensive words to conceal or replace offensive words in a statement.

Hyperbole

An overstatement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.

Irony

A statement or situation where the meaning is contradicted by the appearance or showing the concept.

Litotes

An understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by opposing its counterpart.

Metaphor

An implied comparison between two dissimilar things that have something in common.

Metonymy

A word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated.

Onomatopoeia

The use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.

Oxymoron

The combination of contradictory or incongruous words.

Paradox

A statement or proposition that leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.

Personification

The utilization of inanimate objects or abstraction to associate with human qualities or abilities.

Pun

A statement with a double meaning, in some cases on various faculties of a similar word.

Simile

The comparison between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common using like or as.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part is used to represent the whole.

Understatement

Intentionally making a situation seem less important than it really is.

Technique

A way of carrying out a task, especially the execution or performance of an artistic work or a scientific procedure.

Poetry

A literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas using distinctive style and rhythm.

Form

The physical structure and system of a poem.

Element

Part or aspect of something abstract, especially one that is essential or characteristic.

Traditional

Synonym of 'conventional'.

Theme

The lesson about life or statement about human nature that the poem expresses.

Persona

The speaker or narrator of the poem.

Tone.

The attitude expressed in a poem that a reader sees and feels.

Poetic Line

A group of words that form a single line of poetry.

Stanza

A section of a poem named for the number of lines it contains.

Enjambment

When there is no written or natural pause at the end of a poetic line, so that the word-flow carries over to the next line.

Verse

A line in traditional poetry that is written in meter.

Meter

A pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Rhythm.

The basic beat in a line of a poem.

Foot

A unit of meter.

End Rhyme

Has same or similar sounds at the end of words that finish different lines.

Internal Rhyme

Has same or similar sounds at the end of words within a line.

Rhyme Scheme

A pattern of rhyme in a poem.

Assonance

The repetition of vowel sounds within words in a line.

Consonance

The repetition of consonant sounds within words in a line.

Alliteration

The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words.

Onomatopoeia

Words that sound like their meaning.

Refrain

Line or stanza repeated over and over in a poem or song.

Setting

The time and place where a story or poem takes place.

Point of View

The person narrating a story or poem.

Characterization

The development of the characters in a story or poem.

Found Poem

A form of poetry where new poems are created using existing text.

Tanaga

Filipino peom which consists of four lines with seven syllables each with the same rhyme at the end of each line. (7-7-7-7 syllabic verse, with commonly an AABB rhyme scheme).

Diona

An ancient form of Filipino poetry that is composed of 7 syllables for every verse/line, 3 verses/lines for every stanza, and has a single rhyme scheme.

Haiku

A Japanese poem written in three lines followong the Five Syllables, Seven Syllables and Five Syllables.

Acrostic Poem

A poem where the first letters of each line spell out a word or phrase vertically that acts as the theme or message of the poem.

Sonnet

A poem that has 14 lines and follows a specific rhyme scheme.

Concrete Poem

A poem that uses words to form the shape of the subject of the poem.

Lyric Poem

A short poem that usually written in first person point of view and expresses an emotion or an idea or describes a scene.

Cinquain

A five-line untitled poem, where the syllable pattern increases by two for each line, except for the last line, which ends in two syllables (2,4,6,8.2).

Narrative Poem

A form of poetry that tells a story.

Figurative language

Achieves a special effect by using words in a distinctive way.

Mood

The overall feeling or atmosphere of a piece of writing.

Theme

The main topic or subject of a story or poem.

Motif

Patterns or recurring elements in a literary work.

Fiction

Literature in the form of prose.

Intertextuality

Complex interrelationship between a text and other texts.

Genre

Category of literary composition.

Plot

The main events a play, novel, movie, or similar work.

Device

Literary or linguistic technique that produces a specific effect.

Setting

The time and location in which a story takes place.

characters

The people who take part in the story.

plot

The logical arrangement of events in a story or play.

conflict

The opposition of forces which ties one incident to another and makes the plot move.

Point of View

The angle from which the story is told.

Theme.

The author's underlying meaning or main idea that he is trying to convey through the story.

Tone.

When you speak, your tone of voice suggests your attitude, both to the people you are addressing and to thing you're talking about.

plot device

An object, character, or concept introduced to advance the storyline or plot.

Flashing arrow

A technique used to focus the reader's attention to a detail that is important.

red herring

A plot device that distracts the reader’s attention from the plot twist.

Deathtrap

Where a character's end/demise is assured.

Reverse chronology

A technique where the story begins at the end and works back toward the beginning.

‘In medias res’

Where the narrative starts in the middle of the story instead of from its beginning. Flashbacks are often used.

Vision

Where characters are given a vision either from past or future.

Dream sequence

A plot tool device that is a series of dreams which allow the character to see events that occur or have occurred in another time

Analepsis

Events from before the current time frame.

Prolepsis

Shows events from the future or has the effect of time travel.

Prophecy

The premonition a character experiences as to the future and future events that may happen.

Foreshadowing,

Hints and suggestions of what's yet to come in the story.

Cliff-hanger

An abrupt ending that leaves the plot incomplete, without denouement.