For as long as humans have been telling stories, they have been inventing new narrative technologies. Classifying these technologies makes it easier to understand how they work and can help us make better use of them in our own lives (as consumers and creators of story).
This list will grow as more users propose new narrative technologies when submitting their experiences to WonderCat.
| Term (links to archive) | Description | Related Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Adaptation | Remaking a work for a different purpose or audience | Poetic Narrative |
| Anarchy Rhymer | A narrative technology that links nonsensical or absurd ideas together with poetic patterns like rhyme or meter. | |
| Breaking the Fourth Wall | When a narrator or character draws attention to the fact that the story is not real | Comic Wink |
| Catharsis | Purging something unhealthy. As theorized by Aristotle, the unhealthy thing was fear. | |
| Conversion Narrative | When a narrator shares their discovery that they were ignorant to a truth they now see | |
| Disagreeing Narrators | Two or more narrators who disagree in their evaluation of the storyworld and characters they convey | |
| Double Alien | A narration technology that shows a narrator making mistakes in judgment while encountering a new culture, but then struggling to decide which culture is best (the familiar becomes somewhat unacceptable and the unfamiliar becomes only somewhat acceptable). | |
| Dream of the World | A narrative that moves between two different worlds, not settling with any certainty which is the “real” world. | |
| Empathy Generator | Allowing the audience to experience the true remorse of a character | Apology |
| Enigma | A plot element that is an impossibility | |
| Epic Simile | A simile that takes a non-human thing (an animal, a plant, etc.) and offers it as a metaphor for the human experience. | |
| Equilateral Love Triange | A love triangle in which neither choice is obviously wrong. Unlike a regular love triange, where one choice is clearly right (or seems right until new information is revealed), this love triangle presents a world in which there is not only one choice for love. | |
| Free Indirect Discourse | A narrator who can ventriloquize a character (often ironically), speaking as them instead of conveying what they actually said with direct quotation. | |
| God Voice | A narrative technology that expresses the power and knowledge of a divine being and the knowledge of subjective human experience. Seen in scripture—“forceful, austere, and unequivocal.” “It allows anyone with a pen to sound like a deity,” making it possible to “touch the minds of audiences with two powerful emotions: wonder and fear” (Fletcher 34). | Human God Voice |
| Gratitude Booster | A narrative technology that expresses gratefulness for a world creator and stretches that into a spiritual gratitude for everything that we see | |
| Grief Releaser | A plot technology that “abandons the usual forward momentum of plots in favor of a drifting, eddying, dilating story that provides us with time to acknowledge our heartache and dwell upon memories of our loved ones lost” (Fletcher 138). | |
| Guilt Lifter | A character who is frustrated with clichéd performances of grief and insists on truly honoring the life of the departed (Fletcher 138). | |
| Hamartia | A situation in which a character is not guilty of a moral crime, but has instead made “a mistake of perception, like a misheard word or a moment of blurred vision” (Fletcher 67) | |
| Hurt Delay | A plot technology in which a character suffers a trauma but doesn’t acknowledge it until later. This places us, the audience, in the position of knowing the trauma before it’s felt by the character. | |
| I need help deciding on a narrative technology term | The option selected when a contributor wants guidance from the WonderCat editorial team when deciding on a narrative technology | |
| I Voice | A narrator who speaks in the first person | |
| I want to propose a new narrative technology term | The option selected when a contributor wants to propose a new narrative technology term | |
| Irony | An incongruity between the literal and the implied meaning | Dramatic Irony, Insinuation, Parody |
| Life Evolver | A narration technology that combines past-tense self-love and present tense self-irony | |
| Logic | A rhetorical technology in which a speaker (perhaps a narrator, if this occurs within a story) works methodically toward an argument, providing evidence for claims presented. | |
| Lucky Twist | A plot technology that arbitrarily assigns good outcomes to characters | |
| Moral Suasion | An appeal to morality in order to influence or change behavior | |
| Narrative without Core Values | A story that holds no stable meaning and would prompt confusion unless the viewer or reader supplies their own beliefs to make sense of it. | |
| Opportunity to Observe | Constructing a story in which characters display many emotions, perhaps unpredictably, encouraging the viewers or readers to observe and recognize the emotions they are experiencing. | |
| Parable | A simple story illustrating a moral or religious lesson | |
| Partial Dopamine | Dissonance that isn’t resolved into full harmony, making readers or viewers crave full resolution (perhaps making it challenging to put the book down or turn the show off) | |
| Pivot into Positive Emotion | Any plot decision designed to generate positive emotions in viewers. | |
| Plot Twist | “The plot twist isn’t a twist. It’s the final link in a chain of untwisted events, where each link connects smoothly with the one before, carrying the story forward without bends or breaks. Yet even though the chain of the story is arrow straight, its final link is so stunning that it feels like a swerve. It overthrows all precedent, delivering us to a destination unexpected” (Fletcher 16). | |
| Poetic History | Rearranging our collective memory to help us relearn where we came from | |
| Poetic Justice | A plot technology of having good things happen to “good” people and bad things happen to “bad” people | |
| Poetic Language | Rearranges usual speech so that we slow down and notice things we wouldn’t notice otherwise. | |
| Reality Shifter | Presenting an alternate reality in the form of an absurd or unrealistic plot, character, or storyworld. | |
| Red Herring | a narration technology that guides the reader to make an errant hypothesis that is then debunked | |
| Revenge Plot | A plot technology that shows a character developing an elaborate punishment for a character who harmed a loved one. | |
| Second Look | A narration technology that revisits something previously narrated to challenge its truth value | |
| Second Method | Dissonance before resolution | |
| Secret Discloser | A technology in which a narrator shares an intimate secret about a character. Sometimes the narrator is revealing their own secret and sometime another character’s secret. | |
| Self-Affirmation | Any statement that supports our self, including a statement made by another person. | Self-Self-Affirmation |
| Shame Reducer | A narration technology that presents a variety of cultural norms in a non-judgmental way, encouraging us to love and feel empathy for these characters | |
| Soliloquy | A narration technology that allows spectators or readers to hear or read the inner conflict of an individual character. | Soliloquy in a Soliloquy |
| Story within a Story | A narration technology in which the character of one story becomes the narrator of another story | |
| Stream of Consciousness | A narration technology that allows the reader to witness the free flow of characters’ inner thoughts | |
| Stretch | “The taking of a regular pattern of plot or character or storyworld or narrative style or any other core component of story–any extending the pattern further. The stretch is the invention at the root of all literary wonder: the marvel that comes from stretching regular objects into metaphors, the dazzle that comes from stretching regular rhythms of speech into poetic meters, and the awe that comes from stretching regular humans into heroes” (Fletcher 17). Also called: metaphor, poetic meter, repetition | |
| Suspense | Revealing some part of the story, but not all of the pieces | |
| Untrustworthy Narrator | A narration technology that encourages you to a trust a narrator who is later revealed to be untrustworthy | |
| Vigilance Trigger | Adding an element to the story that does not fit without explanation | |
| Voice of "You and Me" | A narration technology that positions the all-knowing narrator as one of us. | |
| Wish Fulfillment | A plot technology that shows a character getting everything they want |
| Term (links to archive) | Description | Related Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Almighty Heart | The combination of the secret discloser (a narrative technology in which a narrator shares an intimate secret about a character) with wish fulfillment (a plot technology that shows a character getting everything they want) | |
| Almighty Heart + Satiric Narration | The combination of the secret discloser (a narrative technology in which a narrator shares an intimate secret about a character) with wish fulfillment (a plot technology that shows a character getting everything they want) and a narrator who gently mocks some or all characters | |
| Almighty Heart + Soliloquy | The combination of the secret discloser (a narrative technology in which a narrator shares an intimate secret about a character) with wish fulfillment (a plot technology that shows a character getting everything they want) and soliloquy (a character who reveals a conflict that you have experienced, prompting identification) | |
| Comic Wink + Reality Shifter | When a story has a narrator who winks at the viewer/reader to indicate “this isn’t real” but presents an alternate reality in the form of an absurd or unrealistic plot, character, or storyworld. | |
| Meta-Horror | A narration technology that draws attention to the fact that the story being conveyed is a horror story, complete with all of the typical features present in the genre. It does this by telling a story within a story (A narration technology in which the character of one story becomes the narrator of another story) and breaking the fourth wall (When a narrator or character draws attention to the fact that the story is not real). | |
| Opportunity to Observe + Pivot into Positive Emotion | Constructing a story in which characters display many emotions, perhaps unpredictably, encouraging the viewers or readers to observe and recognize the emotions they are experiencing and then giving that story an ending that generates positive emotions | |
| Partial Dopamine + Perspective of a Child | Dissonance that isn’t resolved into full harmony narrated by a child | |
| Revenge Plot + Soliloquy | A plot technology that shows a character developing an elaborate punishment for a character who harmed a loved one combined with a narration technology that allows readers or spectators to hear or read the inner conflict of the avenger. | |
| Sorrow Resolver | Grief Releaser (stalled plot) + Guilt Lifter (uniquely grieving character) |