Reading a work of fiction is a great way to explore some of the places you may never visit in person. You can travel to the moon, for instance, or swim with dolphins, or even go back in time. The best novels are not happy accidents, though—they are carefully assembled by authors who deeply understand the art and craft of storytelling. Before you take the module exam, use this lesson to review the literary elements that make great novels work and the reading strategies that can help you navigate a good story, one chapter at a time. Start by reading the summaries on the slides below, which should remind you of this module’s main topics.

What You’ll Read Next

Throughout your high school years, you will be required to read all sorts of texts, including many novels. Modern novels may be easier to read and seem more directly connected to your own experiences, but classic literature has its advantages as well. Classic novels have “stood the test of time”—that is, many people still read and enjoy them, even though they were written long ago. This usually means those classic novels tell really interesting stories. Of course, you’ll still get to read novels that were written especially for people your age. These YA, or Young Adult novels, may end up being some of your favorites; in fact, many YA novels are well on their way to becoming classics.

Reaching New Heights

If you’re a goal-oriented sort of person, you may want to think of reading a classic novel as climbing a mountain. You’ll gain your footing during the novel’s exposition while learning about its characters exploring its setting. Then, as you read about events that form the story’s rising action, you’ll start to feel the suspense building toward the climax—the novel’s most exciting scene from where you can see how the story will most likely end. On your way “down the mountain,” the events that form the novel’s falling action will help you understand how the conflict and its outcome have affected the characters. Your final destination is the novel’s resolution, a brief section that explains how the story ends.

The Center of It All

A novel’s characters are often what make its story so memorable. That’s because novelists devote much of their time and talent to making characters seem real to readers. In a classic novel, you can expect to encounter both direct and indirect forms of characterization, and you’re likely to see many different types of characters. A good novel’s central characters are generally round, or well-developed, and also dynamic, or constantly developing—they change in some significant way by the end of the story. Classic novels often contain many flat and static characters as well—characters who appear too briefly to be fully developed. If you can recognize the types of characters in a novel and pay close attention to the round ones, you can more easily see how the events are connected to the story’s message or theme.

Struggle and Strife

Conflict is what makes a story work as a story. It’s also what makes reading a novel exciting. Once you understand a novel’s conflict, you keep reading because you want to know what will happen to the characters and how the conflict will affect them. If you’re the least bit curious, you can’t help but wonder how the conflict is going to be resolved. As you should have learned in this module (if you didn’t already know), literary conflicts can take many forms, and the best novels contain multiple types of conflict. You should also know by now that understanding a story’s conflict can help you predict how a story might end—or at least some of the many possible endings.

Learn a Lesson

In a well-written novel, you meet characters who—by the end of the story—learn from their experiences and grow or change in some way. Noticing how characters change can help you identify the story’s themes—the big ideas suggested by the way characters respond to events and how they are affected by them. Various other clues can help you recognize a novel’s larger meaning, including symbols, allusions, and even the novel’s title.