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Literary Devices
Deus ex machina, unreliable narrator, breaking the fourth wall โ the tools of storytellers, now standard vocabulary for anyone who watches TV or argues about plot online.
10 entries
Plot Armor
The invisible protection that keeps key characters alive because the story needs them.
Red Herring
A misleading clue planted to draw attention away from the real one.
The Fourth Wall
The imaginary boundary between fiction and audience โ sometimes deliberately broken.
Chekhov's Gun
A storytelling rule: every prominent element introduced in act one must matter by act three.
Deus ex Machina
An external force that rescues the plot, usually too conveniently.
Magical Realism
Literary mode where the impossible appears matter-of-factly in an otherwise realistic world.
Mary Sue
An implausibly perfect character โ usually a thinly veiled self-insert by the author.
Unreliable Narrator
A storyteller whose account the reader cannot fully trust.
Bildungsroman
A coming-of-age story โ a young protagonist's psychological and moral education.
In Medias Res
Starting a story in the middle of the action, with the backstory filled in later.