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Techniques of Experimental Fiction
Four formal strategies that recur across the JEF catalog, each with examples from writers the press has published.
Experimental fiction draws on a recurring set of formal strategies. A single book often uses several at once. The four below are the ones most commonly at work across the 99 titles in the JEF catalog, with examples from each.
Technique 01
Metafiction
Metafiction is fiction that knows it's fiction and says so out loud. Not as a gimmick. Not as a postmodern parlor trick. As an honest account of what writing actually is: a human being arranging language into a shape that pretends to be a world.
The term was coined by critic William H. Gass in 1970, but the impulse is older. Cervantes let Don Quixote read books about himself. Laurence Sterne stopped Tristram Shandy mid-sentence to argue with the reader.
The Book That Can't Find Its Own Author
James R. Hugunin's Finding Mememo puts its premise in the title. Hy Grader, called Mememo, falls from a balcony and the book that follows tries to reconstruct who he was. But reconstruction requires an author, and the author is part of what's missing. This is metafiction at its most structurally rigorous: the text enacts the problem it describes.
When the Form Is the Argument
Dennis Vanderspek's A is for Everyone (2021 Patchen winner) uses the alphabet as its scaffolding and then subverts it. Every letter routes back to 'A.' Inside that recursive loop, Vanderspek layers surrealism, digression, and direct address until the form of the children's primer becomes a vehicle for something it was never designed to carry.
Technique 02
Nonlinear Narrative
Every story begins somewhere. The question is whether 'somewhere' has to mean the beginning. Nonlinear narrative refuses the contract of chronological order, not to confuse, but because the experience being rendered does not happen in sequence. Trauma, memory, illness, displacement: none of these arrive sequentially.
Illness as Structure
James R. Hugunin's Case X puts its narrator inside a Tomotherapy radiation machine and keeps him there for thirty treatments across six weeks. Each chapter is a treatment. On the surface that's a perfectly linear structure. But inside each treatment, time fractures.
Geography as Temporal Distortion
Kate Horsley's Between the Legs (2015 Patchen winner) moves geographically: a couple travels from location to location, and each location carries its own temporal logic. Past and present bleed through each other as the couple moves, and the relationship's history gets reassembled out of order by the reader, never by the narrator.
On Method
The techniques on this page are not a taxonomy. They are tools. A single novel can use all of them at once, and the best experimental fiction usually does.
Technique 03
Fragmented Narrative
A fragmented narrative is not a broken one. The word 'fragment' carries a sense of loss, but in fiction, fragmentation is often the most accurate available form. Some experiences do not have centers. Some identities are constituted by gaps.
When Language Itself Fragments
Erik Belgum's Collected Stort Shories announces its method in its title: the typos aren't errors. They're a formal statement.
The Fragment as Medical Record
James R. Hugunin's Elder Physics is an illustrated novel built almost entirely from monologue. Gerald and his son trade glancing, witty talk about aging, time, and memory, and the structure of that talk is fragmentary by design.
Technique 04
Docufiction
Docufiction takes documentary sources, real events, court records, news reports, clinical transcriptions, and rebuilds them as fiction. The writer doesn't invent the material; they select, rearrange, and recontextualize it.
Harold Jaffe's Forty-Year Project
Harold Jaffe wrote docufiction longer than most writers have been writing anything. Porn-Anti-Porn is one hundred and ten docufictions that hold the body in pain and the body in pleasure inside the same frame. OD: Docufictions was built around the overdose deaths of thirteen real personages. Goosestep took the apparatus of fascism as its documentary source. Across six JEF titles, Jaffe built the most sustained body of docufiction work in American letters.
If you write experimental fiction
The Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel is open for submissions through August 31. It's for unpublished novels in English that do something the form hasn't done yet. Entry is $25. We read every manuscript ourselves.
Open now through 31 August
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The Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel. $1,000 and publication by JEF Books. If you have written the book you had to write rather than the book the market was asking for, we want to read it.
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