The phrase "a story device" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a narrative element or technique that an author employs to advance the plot or develop characters.
Example: "The author used a flashback as a story device to reveal the protagonist's past."
Alternatives: "narrative tool" or "plot mechanism".
When Frank Underwood turns to the camera, he addresses the indistinct audience, not the viewer as a character or a story device within his world.
Participant Passive is a relatively new form of story in which the viewer exists in the world as a character, or a story device, but the story does not ask anything of the viewer, or permit them to inform the course of events.
He feels no pain and nothing can kill him, so therefore he's essentially a story device for action sequences".
Steven Spielberg's upcoming NBC TV venture, Smash, suggests a whole new future for the story-within-a-story device.
"Journalists are looking for a story line, a narrative device, that plays out over weeks and months, and there's nothing wrong with that.
The viewer both exists in the world as a character or story device, and has influence over the experienced story.
A "back story" is indeed a narrative device with which we are most familiar from film or TV drama, and the ease of its use in Levy's novel owes something to these media.
Still, marketers need "to be restrained" when visualizing the 3-D elements of their commercials, Mr. Ulbrich said, because overuse and poor use will lead viewers to perceive 3-D as a gimmick rather than a story-telling device.
This is more than a story-telling device.
"Facebook is a story-telling device," said Purdy, the Facebook executive.
Updated at 5.30pm BST 5.10pm BST Petr Krojzl and Kelvin Chappell present "Seamless reading experience across devices" - trying to solve the problem of making it halfway through a story on one device (e.g. mobile) and finishing it off on another (e.g. desktop).
