The writing glossary
Short definitions with their sources, for the terms that come up when writing and reading long fiction: genre labels, structure beats, prose techniques and serialization vocabulary. Where a term is community-defined or contested, the entry says so. New here? The guides go deeper.
Genres
What the labels mean, from traditional shelves to web-fiction-native tags.
- LitRPG
- Fiction in which the game mechanics are explicit and visible: stat blocks, level-ups, skill trees, status screens.
- GameLit
- The broader umbrella of game-influenced fiction, with or without explicit tracked mechanics.
- Progression fantasy
- Fiction in which the accumulation of power or skill is the primary narrative engine.
- Cultivation
- The Chinese web-fiction tradition of power growth through internal-energy cultivation, with a tiered realm ladder.
- Xianxia
- Cultivation fiction whose protagonists pursue immortality and transcendence, with Daoist and Buddhist framing.
- Wuxia
- Martial-heroes fiction: mortal, peak-human martial artists centered on moral codes and human relationships.
- Isekai
- Fiction in which an ordinary Earth protagonist is transported, reincarnated or summoned into a parallel world.
- Portal fantasy
- The older Western category of travel between worlds: Narnia, Barsoom. The crossing is the obligatory beat.
- Dungeon core
- RoyalRoad-native stories in which the protagonist is, or controls, a sentient RPG-style dungeon.
- System apocalypse
- LitRPG subgenre requiring both an apocalyptic inciting event and functioning system mechanics; the System's arrival is involuntary.
- Slice of life
- Stories of ordinary daily experience with minimal plot conflict; often episodic and open-ended.
- Harem
- A relationship-structure convention: one protagonist surrounded by three or more romantically interested partners.
- Romantasy
- Fantasy and romance structurally interdependent: remove the romance and the plot falls apart.
- Grimdark
- Dystopian, amoral, violent fantasy tone; realism and psychology in place of idealism.
- Sword and sorcery
- Personal-scale violent adventure with morally gray characters; the hero usually still wins.
- High fantasy
- Mythic-toned fantasy in a fully secondary world, at epic scale: wars, gods, world-ending stakes.
- Low fantasy
- Fantasy defined negatively: magic is rare or marginal in an otherwise mundane, human-dominated world.
- Urban fantasy
- Fantasy transplanted into a modern real-world city, with a protagonist who has a foot in both worlds.
- Cozy mystery
- Near-formulaic mystery: amateur sleuth, community setting, fair-play clueing, and no on-page violence or gore.
- Fair-play mystery
- The whodunit's contract: all clues available to the reader, no undisclosed poisons, twins or divine intervention.
- Noir
- Protagonist trapped in a corrupt system, distinct from the tough-but-moral hardboiled detective.
- Cyberpunk
- High tech, low life: dystopian near-future SF with noir tone and morally gray anti-heroes.
- Space opera
- Adventure SF at galactic scale: essentially fantasy in SF trappings, tolerating implausibility for mythic sweep.
- Magical realism
- Fantastic elements in a realistic setting, narrated in a flat, matter-of-fact voice that never registers wonder.
- HEA / HFN
- Happily Ever After and Happy For Now: the romance genre's baseline ending expectation, treated as near-inviolable.
- Status screen
- The LitRPG system message: an in-prose interface element showing stats, levels, skills and notifications.
Story structure
The named frameworks and their beats.
- Three-act structure
- The foundational Western dramatic model: setup, confrontation, resolution, with turning points at the act breaks.
- The Hero's Journey
- Campbell's monomyth and Vogler's practical twelve-stage version: the round trip of departure, initiation and return.
- The Story Circle
- Dan Harmon's eight-step simplification of the monomyth: You, Need, Go, Search, Find, Take, Return, Change.
Prose craft
Point of view, voice and sentence-level technique.
- Point of view
- Whose eyes and mind the story is told through: first person, second, third limited, third omniscient, or rotating.
- Free indirect discourse
- Third-person narration in the character's own voice, without 'she thought' tags; narrator and character merge.
- Iceberg theory
- Hemingway's principle of deliberate omission: the dignity of the prose is in what stays under the surface.
- Purple prose
- Ornate writing that has tipped into overwrought: unearned ornamentation, not maximalism in general.
Web fiction
Serialization vocabulary: platforms, schedules and monetization.
- Web serial
- Fiction published in installments on the open web, chapter by chapter, as it is written.
- Truck-kun
- The self-aware isekai meme: the truck that kills the protagonist so the story can transport them.
- Advance chapters
- The serial monetization pattern: patrons read a buffer of chapters ahead of the free release.
- Cliffhanger
- A chapter ending on an unresolved beat; in serial craft, best varied in type rather than maxed every chapter.