Ok, this is about as off topic as it gets, but roleplayers tend to be fairly creative, so...

I'm writing a dissertation on the different elements of story. It will take the form of 7 short stories of roughly 500-1,000 words each, and one of 3,000. Each of the 7 will take one of the seven sins as theme.

The main drive, though, is to take apart the basic building blocks of a story. I want to divide it into 7 sections, 7 things that are essential to every story, or at least most. So far I have:

Plot.

Dialogue.

Characterisation (Everything that shows the personality other than dialogue, such as body language, facial expression etc)

Setting.

Atmosphere.

Perspective/tense (ie 1st person present)

I need a seventh. It has to be something that can be relatively isolated (as in you can write a very atmospheric piece, or one that is told exclusively through description of the place - bloodstains etc) and that is present in 90% + of all prose. Dividing one of the current 6 into 2 is viable if you can think of a good way to do it.

If anyone can come up with an answer, I WILL love you forever. If there's anything unclear, say so and I'll explain further.

My degree kinda depends on this. I need a rough draft by christmas.

Thanks in advance.

SpawnofWeevil.

Ye hurt yer what?

No seriously i'll help but I think you need to elaborate a little more clearly on what you need.

Inspiration for a short story written entirely about .. what?

Here is what I thought the parts of a story traditionally were:

Exposition, building action, climax, denouement.

Why not use one of those?

It will be seven stories, one written through the medium of each. I'll give examples.

Dialogue - Likely a phone call. Things that aren't actually said by the character (he said gruffly, she said while walking to the door, she twisted the phone cord in her fingers etc) will be kept to a minimum and ideally removed completely. The story will unfold through the conversation.

Setting - I'm thinking the scene of a murder. There will be little action, but merely the 'camera' of the description slowly moving through the room, detailing bloodstains, footsteps, maybe a torn letter, an overturned chair, an empty box of tissues, that kind of thing. As well as the actual room itself. Strategically showing more and more of what happened until all is revealed.

Characterisation - all body movement, descriptions of facial expressions etc. Basically a story consisting purely of emotes, with a few lines of dialogue here and there. A man luring a young woman out of a dance hall and into an alley where he kills her.

Perspective and tense - a story about a man who possesses other people's bodies in an attempt to reach immortality. It will skip from 2nd present, 1st future, 3rd future, 1st past etc, hopefully managing all potential permutations.

And so on. The stories themselves are easy, I just need a seventh 'angle'. It has to be something that can be the medium for a whole story, remaining relatively constant throughout (which is the problem with your suggestion, you can't really have a climax without the exposition and if I did, I'd probably need another story focused on the exposition to balance it). It also needs to be something I can single out. You need to be able to tell the angle instantly - this is clearly the plot story because there has been nothing but actions and no character development, for example. I'm using a fairytale style for that - 'and so the princess went off into the woods to find the evil witch', nice and straight-forward plot with no extraneous bits.

Obviously, all the stories will have a plot, and they'll all be set somewhere, and there'll be some dialogue in all of them etc, but the focus needs to be something that can be clearly ...focused on.

So it's not so much a short story written entirely -about- X, but written entirely -in- X, if you see what I mean?

Does that make any more sense?

spawnofweevil

Plot.

Dialogue.

Characterisation (Everything that shows the personality other than dialogue, such as body language, facial expression etc)

Setting.

Atmosphere.

Perspective/tense (ie 1st person present)

Pace. You can't have forgotten pace! Whether it's the stand 5-point story arc or some wacky invention of your own, you have to have a certain pace to the story and its telling or else it's all over the place and doesn't keep anyone's attention.

I know it may be a hard one to right about at first, but give it some consideration and maybe something will spring to mind.

An alternative would be separating Perspective and tense. A story can be very different if you isolate one and vary the other. While they are related, you may be able to work with each independently to bring up the desired effect for your 7 part project.

Actually, Bear reminded me of another possible approach. I guess an appropriate term for it would be medium.

Regardless of your feelings for stories told in the comic or graphic novel format, it is a very viable approach to storytelling. I am not sure if you yourself are artistically inclined, weevil, but that could be an interest option for your project. You could also look at current surge of popularity of manga graphic novels in the US.

There is something appealing to many about the mix of words and still images. Sort of that middle ground between the novel you read in bed before sleep and that movie you catch with a friend on the weekends.

Anyways, just food for thought. Hope it helps you get the gears moving.

How about:

Layout - the way text has been arranged into paragraphs, sentences etc. to make the text a little more interesting for the reader (Varying sentence and paragraph lengths won't only make the page more visually appealing, but can do neat things like raise and lower tension, highlight parallelisms, and probably loads of other stuff which this Sciences nut doesn't know or remember anything about)

Idea/Theme - Not the best proposal from me, but you will probably find that most prose is written with the intention of portraying some message. You might be able to make one of your stories particularly thematic, perhaps?