How a story is built

Word	What it means
Conflict	The struggle that drives the plot. Character versus self, another character, nature, society, or fate.
Protagonist	The central character whose struggle the story follows. Not necessarily likeable.
Antagonist	The opposing force. It need not be a person.
Exposition	The opening situation — who, where, when, and what the normal state of things is.
Climax	The point of greatest tension, where the conflict turns and the outcome is decided.
Resolution	How things settle afterwards.
Direct characterization	The narrator telling you what a character is like.
Indirect characterization	Showing it through action, speech, thought and effect on others. Stronger evidence in an essay.
Foil	A character whose contrast highlights another's qualities. Need not be an enemy.
Dynamic / static character	One who changes internally over the story, and one who does not.
Point of view	Who is telling it and how much they know: first person, third limited, third omniscient, third objective.
Setting	Time, place and social conditions. It matters most when it shapes what characters can do or believe.

Internal versus external. Character versus self covers doubt, guilt, temptation and divided loyalty. Many strong stories run an internal and an external conflict at once, and the external one is often a way of dramatising the internal.

The climax is where it is decided, not where the noise is loudest. A quiet decision can be the climax of a violent story.

Flashbacks. The useful question is why it appears where it appears. One placed just before a decision usually tells you what is really driving the decision.

Indirect characterization is better evidence. “She was generous” gives you nothing to analyse. A character quietly paying someone else's bill gives you an action, a motive to infer and a quotation to use.

Foils. A cautious friend beside a reckless protagonist is a foil. The contrast is what makes the protagonist's qualities visible, so writing about the foil is often the clearest way to write about the protagonist.

Dynamic characters. The change has to be in understanding, values or self, not merely in circumstances. Showing what caused the change is almost always a better paragraph than showing that it happened.

Point of view	Access	Effect
First person	One character's thoughts, from inside	Immediate and intimate; limited to what they know and will admit
Third limited	One character's thoughts, from outside	Closeness with some distance
Third omniscient	Every character's thoughts	Breadth; the reader can know more than anyone in the story
Third objective	Actions and speech only	Detachment; the reader must infer everything

Setting is doing work when moving the story somewhere else would break it. If it would change nothing, the setting is scenery, and there is little to say about it.

Symbolism needs a pattern. One appearance is a detail. A concrete object recurring at moments that link it to an abstract idea is a symbol, and pointing to the repetition is what makes the reading persuasive rather than imposed.

• Summarising the plot instead of analysing choices.
• Treating first person as automatically unreliable. Show the gap.
• Calling a character static because nothing happens to them. The test is internal change.
• Asserting a symbol from a single mention. Find the pattern first.