Techniques of Experimental Fiction

Experimental fiction draws on a recurring set of formal strategies. A single book often uses several at once. The four techniques below are the ones most commonly at work in the JEF catalog, each with examples from writers the press has published.

Metafiction

Fiction that acknowledges its own fictional status. Not as a gimmick, but 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 William H. Gass in 1970, but the impulse goes back to Cervantes.

JEF examples: James R. Hugunin's Finding Mememo, Dennis Vanderspek's A is for Everyone (2021 Patchen winner), Frederick Mark Kramer's Apostrophe/Parenthesis and Ambiguity.

Read the full guide: What Is Metafiction?

Nonlinear narrative

Stories that break chronological sequence, not to confuse, but because the experience being rendered does not happen in order. Trauma, memory, illness, displacement: none of these arrive sequentially, and fiction that tells the truth about them needs a different relationship to time.

JEF examples: James R. Hugunin's Case X, Kate Horsley's Between the Legs (2015 Patchen winner), Persis Gerdes's 99 Waves.

Read the full guide: Nonlinear Narrative in Fiction

Avant-garde literature

Writing that moves ahead of the mainstream to find out what fiction can do that it has not done yet. The impulse is not refusal but ambition: finding the form that fits the experience, even when no ready-made form exists.

JEF examples: Yuriy Tarnawsky's Claim to Oblivion and Crocodile Smiles, Jeff Weisman's "The Greatest Place on Earth".

Read the full guide: What Is Avant-Garde Literature?

Fragmented narrative

Prose built from discontinuous pieces. 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.

JEF examples: Erik Belgum's Collected Stort Shories, James R. Hugunin's Elder Physics, Denis Emorine's Broken Identities.

Read the full guide: Fragmented Narrative in Fiction

Other techniques

• Constraint-based writing (Oulipo): fiction written under a formal rule, such as a lipogram or the prisoner's constraint.
• Collage and appropriation: prose built from found text, news, advertising, and clinical transcription. See Harold Jaffe's Porn-Anti-Porn.
• Autofiction: fiction that uses the author's real life as raw material without claiming to be memoir.

Submit your novel

If you write experimental fiction, the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel is open for submissions through August 31. $25 entry, $1,000 and publication to the winner. Every manuscript read by the editor.

For more on what experimental fiction is and what the press means by it, read What Is Experimental Fiction?