Words and what they really mean

An excerpt from The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms, author Chris Offutt explains what a number of literary words really mean.

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.

Plot: a device, the lack of which denotes seriousness on the part of writers.

Chick lit: a patriarchal term of oppression for heterosexual female writing; also, a marketing means to phenomenal readership and prominent bookstore space.

Personal essay:characterized by 51 percent or more of its sentences beginning with the personal pronoun "I"; traditional narrative strategy entails doing one thing while thinking about another.

Literary essay:akin to the personal essay, only with bigger words and more profound content intended to demonstrate that the essayist is smarter than all readers, writers and teachers.

Experimental writing: the result of supreme artistic courage when a writer is willing to sacrifice structure, character, plot, insight, wisdom, social commentary, context, precedent, and punctuation.

Poem: prose scraps.

Prose poem: either a poem with no line breaks or a lyric essay with no indentation. No one knows.

Deconstructionism: A moderately successful attempt by the French to avenge the loss of Paris as the global center of literature.