Literary Terms - Action

Literary Terms

Action

 

Literary terms refer to the technique, style, and formatting used by writers and speakers to emphasize, embellish, or strengthen their compositions. Literary terms also include the tools of persuasion that writers use to challenge our everyday modes of thinking. Literary terms also include powerful figurative language that writers use to allow us to see the world in new and magical ways. Literary terms have a wide range of application, from the poet’s beauty, to the speaker’s persuasion, to the novelist’s story development. Literary terms are important, as they allow writers and speakers to make comments on society, politics, and to strengthen arguments. Literary terms have the power to create serious, comedic, or whimsical moods via tools of persuasion, poeticism, and wordplay.

Action

Action is the mode, that writers use to show what is happening at any given moment in the story. While dialogue is the element that brings a story and its characters to life, and narrative gives the story its depth and substance, action creates the movement within a story. Writing a story means weaving all of the elements of fiction together. When it is done right, weaving dialogue, narrative, and action can create a beautiful tapestry.

Action is anything that happens in a story. It can be an event, it can be dialogue, it can be reaction to an event or dialogue or even to another character’s reaction.

There are many kinds of actions in a story: physical, social, mental, emotional etc.

Rising action in a plot is a series of relevant incidents that create suspense, interest, and tension in a narrative. In literary works, a rising action includes all decisions, characters’ flaws, and background circumstances that together create turns and twists leading to a climax. We find it in novels, plays, and short stories. Rising action is one of the elements of plot, which begins immediately after its exposition.

Falling action occurs right after the climax, when the main problem of the story resolves. It is one of the elements of the plot of the story, the other elements being exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution. Falling action wraps up the narrative, resolves its loose ends, and leads toward the closure.

Examples of ‘Action’:

1.               The main action of the novel, The Old Man and The Sea, comprises the old man, the demonstration of his fishing skills, his perseverance, his endurance, and his ethos in the face of his enemy as well as his friend, the marlin. The rising action occurs when Santiago succeeds in hooking the fish and killing it, but the falling action occurs when the sharks attack and the old man loses most of the marlin’s flesh.

2.               Major Action in the play, Macbeth, is the struggle within Macbeth between his ambition and his sense of right and wrong. The Rising Actions are Macbeth and Banquo’s encounter with the witches’ initiates both conflicts; Lady Macbeth’s speeches goad Macbeth into murdering Duncan and seizing the crown. Falling Actions are Macbeth’s increasingly brutal murders (of Duncan’s servants, Banquo, Lady Macduff and her son); Macbeth’s second meeting with the witches; Macbeth’s final confrontation with Macduff and the opposing armies