Metafiction uses self-reference to draw attention to itself as a work of art, while exposing the

“truth” of a story.

“Metafiction” is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and
systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact. It uses irony and self-reflection to ask
questions and make comments about the relationship between fiction and reality.

In other words, metafiction does not let you forget you are experiencing a fictional work.

Here are 11 metafiction devices you can use in your own writing.

1. A story about a writer creating a story e.g. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, Stephen
King’s Misery and Secret Window, Secret Garden, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, The Counterfeiters
by André Gide, John Irving’s The World According to Garp, Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea by
Michael Morpurgo, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Oracle Night by Paul
Auster, More Bears! by Kenn Nesbitt, and Cy Coleman’s 1989 Tony Award best musical, City of
Angels.

2. A story about a reader reading a book e.g. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende and the film
version, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Elizabeth
Kostova’s The Historian, and The Princess Bride by William Goldman.

3. A story that features itself (as a narrative or as a physical object) as its own prop or MacGuffin
e.g. Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart (which also plays a role in the sequels), The Dark Tower by C. S.
Lewis, Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin’s The Jamais Vu Papers, and Ira Levin’s play Deathtrap (an
extreme example).

4. A story containing another work of fiction within itself e.g. The Laughing Man, The Dark
Tower, The Iron Dream, The Crying of Lot 49, Sophie’s World, A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire,
The Princess Bride, Houdini Heart, The Island of the Day Before, Steppenwolf, The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Man in the High Castle, Heart of Darkness, The World
According to Garp, The Fault in Our Stars, Percival Everett’s Erasure.

5. A story addressing the specific conventions of story, such as title, character conventions,
paragraphing or plots e.g. Lost in the Funhouse and On with the Story by John Barth, The Last
Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic short story, The Ones Who Walk Away
from Omelas, and Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods.

6. A novel where the narrator intentionally exposes him or herself as the author of the story e.g.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Razor’s Edge, Mister B. Gone, The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, Breakfast of Champions, The Plague, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, The BFG
and James and the Giant Peach, The Museum of Innocence, Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring,
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Samuel R. Delany’s Nova.
7. A book in which the book itself seeks interaction with the reader e.g. Willie Masters’ Lonely
Wife by William H. Gass, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, or Don’t Let the Pigeon
Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems.

8. A story in which the readers of the story itself force the author to change the story e.g. More
Bears! by Kenn Nesbitt.

9. Narrative footnotes, which continue the story while commenting on it e.g. Nabokov’s Pale Fire,
House of Leaves, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by
Susanna Clarke, Cable & Deadpool by Fabian Nicieza, An Abundance of Katherines by John
Green, Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer, many books by Robert Rankin, and the
Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett.

10. A story in which the characters are aware that they are in a story e.g., Redshirts by John Scalzi,
Sophie’s World, the Henry Potty parody series, and various works by Robert Rankin.

11. An autobiographical fiction in which the main character, by the last parts of the book, has
written the first parts and is reading some form of it to an audience e.g., Shoplifting from
American Apparel by Tao Lin, Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Definition of Metafiction
If you have ever read a fictional story in which the characters suddenly notice things about the
very book they are in -- for example, they notice the different fonts for yelling or whispering, or
they talk about the end of the story coming up as they get closer to it -- you have read an example
of metafiction.

Metafiction occurs in fictional stories when the story examines the elements of fiction itself. For
example, a story that explores how stories are made by commenting on character types, how plots
are formed, or other aspects of storytelling is engaged in an example of metafiction. Metafiction
can be playful or dramatic, but it always forces the reader to think about the nature of storytelling
itself and how fictional stories are made.

Examples of Metafiction in Books

If you ever read The Monster at the End of this Book as a child, you likely encountered
metafiction without even knowing it. In this book, the character of Grover reads the title of the
book himself and becomes terrified to meet the monster that will be at the end of the book. As you
turn the pages, Grover becomes even more scared, pleading for the reader to stop turning the
pages and even trying to build a barrier that keeps the pages nailed together. Once the reader gets
to the end of the book, Grover figures out that the monster at the end of the book was him!

In The Monster at the End of this Book, Grover is aware of some of the elements of metafiction,
which drives the plot. For instance:

1. He knows that the fictional work has a title, like most fictional work does, and reading it causes
him to freak out.

2. He is aware that when the reader turns the page, that takes the book closer to the end, and he
begs, pleads, and builds barriers to try and keep the reader from turning the pages and moving
along the fictional story.

In both cases, Grover's ability to see these elements that are part of fictional stories are
metafictional examples. Normally, characters cannot tell they are in a story or comment upon how
stories are told and organized, so when metafiction is added to a piece of writing, it can be quite
striking and, in this example, funny.

Meta from the Greek meaning ‘beyond’ and ‘self’. Fiction from the old French meaning ‘arbitrary
invention’. Metafiction, then, is a self-aware creation. Something made up that knows it’s made
up. One of the best known works of metafiction, I would suggest, is If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveler by Italo Calvino, which is a book about the failed attempt of a reader reading a book
called If on a winter’s night a traveler. The chapters alternate between this plot and the opening
chapters of books the reader is reading. The book is aware it is being read.

Of course, it’s not. No book is self-aware. No book understands itself. It is the author, when
writing it, who is talking directly to the reader. True enough of works of metafiction. But then,
doesn’t that apply to all fiction? Is all fiction, by definition, self-aware?

Realism
If you were to just see the phrase 'magical realism,' you might think, 'that seems contradictory.'
After all, how can something be both magical and real? Magic isn't real - or is it? In Latin
America, from which the genre of magical realism originated, there is an attitude among certain
portions of the population that anything can happen. In this way, magical realism is closely
connected to the Catholic religion, which believes in miracles and other spontaneous and
indescribable phenomena. The genre of magical realism is defined as a literary genre in which
fantastical things are treated not just as possible, but also as realistic.

Authors and Examples: Latin America

There are numerous Latin American writers whose works falls into the magical realism genre.
Here are just a few famous examples:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was an incredibly popular author from Colombia. He wrote the famous
novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is an example of magical realism. In the novel,
which takes place over many generations, fantastical things are always happening. For example, a
woman experiences her own personal Rapture, being sucked up to Heaven; another woman is
visited by Death and told that she will die when she finishes the shawl she is working on; and
finally, a baby is devoured by ants. These events, although miraculous, are treated as matter-of-
fact, like they could (and do) happen every day.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez also wrote numerous short stories, including 'A Very Old Man with
Enormous Wings,' which is about a winged man (possibly an angel) who is discovered by two
villagers and made into a spectacle in their backyard, and 'Light Is Like Water,' about a pair of
boys who drown when they turn all the lights on in their house and light pours out of the fixtures,
as if it was water. Marquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.

What is Slipstream Fiction?

Literary theorists have attempted to pin Slipstream down into a single definition, but it doesn't
lend itself to easy categorization. Combining the most innovative aspects of science fiction,
fantasy, horror, magical realism and literary fiction, Slipstream is defined mainly by its tendency
to leave you feeling uneasy -- acting, in its depiction of the surreal, bizarre and downright creepy,
as commentary on the alienation and fragmentation of life in the modern world. The science
fiction author Bruce Sterling, who coined the term “slipstream” as a genre in a 1989 essay, wrote
that it “is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the
20th century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.”

Though Slipstream started in the often-marginalized world of science fiction and fantasy, its
influence has spilled over into popular fiction, evident in the works of bestselling authors such as
Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Junot Diaz, Lauren Groff, Joyce Carol Oates and many
others.

If you still aren't sure exactly what Slipstream means, the best way to get a sense of this hard-to-
place genre is to read some for yourself. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer,
2011.
From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a
corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these
stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in 20th and 21st
century literature.

Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link, 2005.

Link's engaging and funny stories riff on haunted convenience stores, husbands and wives, rabbits,
zombies, weekly apocalyptic poker parties, witches, and cannons. The collection includes Hugo,
Nebula, and Locus award winning stories, and was included on Best of the Year lists from TIME,
Salon.com, and Book Sense.

The City and the City, by China Miéville, 2009.

New York Times bestselling author Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an
existential thriller set in a city unlike any other -- real or imagined. When a murdered woman is
found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for
Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to
conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang, 2010.

The story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more
than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of
software. At the same time, it's an examination of the difference between processing power and
intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.