Fiction is an art form that uses words and natural language constructions as the only material. The specificity of fiction is revealed in comparison with the types of art that use a different material instead of verbal and linguistic (music, fine arts). Fiction is distinguished from other types of literature by the presence of fiction

Lyrics are a kind of literature that is based on an appeal to the inner sphere - to the states of human consciousness, emotions, impressions, experiences. Even if there is a narrative element in the works, the lyrical work is always subjective and focused on the hero. The characteristics of a lyrical work are "conciseness", "monologue", "unity of the lyrical plot" and "instantaneousness" ("pointiness", "modernity"). Most of the lyrical works belong to poetry.

Drama is a kind of literature that reproduces, first of all, the world external to the author - actions, relationships of people, conflicts, but unlike the epic, it has not a narrative, but a dialogical form. In dramatic works, the text on behalf of the author is episodic, mostly limited to remarks and explanations to the plot. Most dramatic works are written for subsequent production in the theater.

A literary text is considered to be prose in which a separate, independent of the speech rhythm does not invade the language fabric and does not affect the content. However, a number of borderline phenomena are known: many prose writers consciously give their works some signs of poetry (we can mention the highly rhythmic prose of Andrei Bely or rhymed fragments in Vladimir Nabokov's novel "The Gift"). The exact boundaries between prose and poetry have not been the subject of a dispute between literary critics from different countries over the past century.

Prose is widely used in fiction - in the creation of novels, short stories, etc. Some examples of such works have been known for many centuries, but they have developed into an independent form of literary works relatively recently.

The novel is the most popular type of modern prose (however, the novel in verse is also known in literature) - it is a fairly long narrative covering a significant period of the life of one or more characters and describing this period with deep detail. As a common genre, novels appeared relatively late, although already in the late antique time there was an ancient novel, in many respects close in structure and tasks to the modern one. Among the early classics of the European novel are François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1533–1546) and Cervantes' Don Quixote (1600). In Asian literature, earlier works are close to the novel in the modern sense - for example, the Chinese classic novel "The Three Kingdoms" or the Japanese "Genji-monogatari" ("The Tale of Prince Genji").

In Europe, early novels were not considered as serious literature, their creation did not seem difficult at all. Later, however, it became clear that prose can provide aesthetic pleasure without the use of poetic techniques. In addition, the absence of a rigid framework of poetry allows authors to focus more deeply on the content of the work, to work more fully with the details of the plot, in fact, more fully than can be expected even from narratives in poetic form. This freedom also allows authors to experiment with different styles within the same work.

In general, a poem is a literary work that has a special rhythmic structure that does not follow from the natural rhythm of the language. The nature of this rhythm can be different depending on the properties of the language itself: for example, for languages in which the difference in vowel sounds in longitude is of great importance (such, for example, is the ancient Greek language), the emergence of a poetic rhythm built on the ordering of syllables on the basis of longitude / brevity is natural, and for languages in which vowels differ not in longitude, but in the strength of exhalation (the vast majority of modern European languages are arranged precisely So), it is natural to use such a poetic rhythm that arranges syllables on the basis of stress / unstressed. This is how different systems of versification arise.