Offutt Glossary
I like Chris Offutt’s guide to literary terms, which Harper’s Magazine includes in its most recent issue. Here’s a little sample:
nonfiction: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers.
creative nonfiction: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir.
memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.
novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.
short story: An essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer’s family.
novel-in-stories: A term invented solely to hoodwink the novel-reading public into inadvertently purchasing a collection of short fiction.
clandestine science fiction novel: A work set in the future that receives a strong reception from the literary world as long as no one mentions that it is, in fact, science fiction; for example, The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
plot: A device, the lack of which denotes seriousness on the part of writers.
Isn’t it great? More here. The piece was originally published in Seneca Review.