Literary Devices

Not just for the literary.

Every writer, from fiction to nonfiction, genre writer to poet, uses literary (aka narrative) devices to add depth to their books.

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But they are not as daunting as your English professor led you to believe. If you think of writing as building blocks, and a book is an accumulation of words, sentences, and paragraphs, then it’s the literary devices that give your book dimension.

Literary devices connect persons, places, things, senses, colors, or attributes in uncommon yet clarifying ways. Those connections create depth, emotion, and resonance in your writing.

For example, it’s one thing to write —

The man was six foot eight, with broad shoulders and dark brown eyes.

It’s another to write -

The man stood like a brick wall before me, his charcoal eyes burned into me.

Both are sentences. Both describe the character. The first is flat — one dimension. The second sentence uses both a simile and a metaphor which adds depth and emotion, bringing the sentence to life.

How many literary devices are there? There are as many literary devices are there are ways to make uncommon connections. The authoritative website literarydevices.com lists well over 100¹.