Just as a painter uses color and line to create a painting, an author uses the elements of fiction to create a story:
The elements of fiction are: character, plot, setting, theme, and style. Of these five elements, character is the who, plot is the what, setting is the where and when, and style is the how of a story.
A character is any person, personal, identity, or entity whose existence originates from a fictional work or performance.
A plot, or storyline, is the rendering and ordering of the events and actions of a story, particularly towards the achievement of some particular artistic or emotional effect.
Setting is the time and location in which a story takes place.
Theme is the broad idea, message, or lesson of a story.
Style includes the multitude of choices fiction writers make, consciously or subconsciously, as they create a story. They encompass the big-picture, strategic choices such as point of view and narrator, but they also include the nitty-gritty, tactical choices of grammar, punctuation, word usage, sentence and paragraph length and structure, tone, the use of imagery, chapter selection, titles, and on and on. In the process of writing a story, these choices meld to become the writer's voice, his or her own unique style.
Read more about this topic: Fiction Writing
Famous quotes containing the words elements of, elements and/or fiction:
“Let us have a fair field! This is all we ask, and we will be content with nothing less. The finger of evolution, which touches everything, is laid tenderly upon women. They have on their side all the elements of progress, and its spirit stirs within them. They are fighting, not for themselves alone, but for the future of humanity. Let them have a fair field!”
—Tennessee Claflin (1846–1923)
“There surely is a being who presides over the universe; and who, with infinite wisdom and power, has reduced the jarring elements into just order and proportion. Let speculative reasoners dispute, how far this beneficent being extends his care, and whether he prolongs our existence beyond the grave, in order to bestow on virtue its just reward, and render it fully triumphant.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)