These words refer to extended works of imaginative prose. Novel is the most specific and exact of these words, referring to any lengthy prose narrative that normally has a plot, characters, action and dialogue, but that does not refer to real people or events: best-selling novels; those who consider Don Quixote the first full-length novel . By contrast, fiction is more general since it is the group word for all forms of imaginative prose, including the short story, the novella and the novel . Since the novel is in one sense the most important form of fiction , the group word is often used with a special pertinence to this one form: a poor year for fiction in that no new major novel emerged.

Romance is more difficult to pin down to an exact meaning. A related word in German is equivalent to our word novel , reflecting the development of the novel out of accounts of fabulous or legendary materials in the Middle Ages. In literary discussions, romance is often restricted to works showing works showing this emphasis on the fabulous or legendary, or it may be used more broadly to apply to novels with a strong mythic or allegorical bent: Malory’s gathering together and rewriting of the Arthurian romances ; Hawthorne’s novels seen as being essentially romances . Contrary to a popular misconception, the word would never in any literary use refer merely to fiction that concerns itself with love affairs.

While story most commonly is an abbreviated way of referring to an established form, the short story , it is sometimes used loosely and informally for any work of fiction with narrative thrust: novelists who concentrate on telling stories filled with physical violence. The word is also sometimes applied to the plot element of any fiction : a brief paragraph summarizing the story of the novel.