What Is 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. What changed in the twentieth century was the willingness to treat that self-awareness as the subject of the work itself, not just a rhetorical garnish.
Here's what metafiction actually does in practice, with examples from writers published by the Journal of Experimental Fiction.
The Book That Can't Find Its Own Author
James R. Hugunin's Finding Mememo: A Book in Search of an Author 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. The absence of a stable authorial presence isn't a stylistic choice you can separate from the content — it is the content. Hugunin spent decades as a photo critic before turning to experimental fiction, and that background shows in how precisely the book frames the question of what it means to make something.
When the Form Is the Argument
Dennis Vanderspek's A is for Everyone — winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel — 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 the children's primer was never designed to carry.
This is metafiction as structural argument. The reader's familiarity with the alphabet book is part of the material. When every path leads back to the beginning, that's not an error in the map — that is the map.
The Narrator Who Doubts His Own Existence
Frederick Mark Kramer's Apostrophe/Parenthesis opens the New York cycle by introducing Federigo, a character conceived as the imagined grandson of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities. From the first page, the narrator's reality is unstable: he is a fiction inside a fiction, aware of his literary genealogy, navigating a New York that is both specific and permeable to imagination.
The sequel, Ambiguity, extends this — built entirely around the narrator's uncertainty about whether he exists at all. Not existential angst. Actual ontological doubt, rendered in prose that treats the grammar of uncertainty as its primary formal tool.
Kramer's cycle asks: what is the relationship between a character's self-knowledge and the text's authority over them? That question has no answer that doesn't also be a novel.
What Metafiction Is Not
It's not cleverness for its own sake. The worst metafiction is the novel that keeps winking at you — look, I'm a book! — without earning the gesture through what the self-awareness reveals.
The best metafiction uses the awareness of fictionality to say something that couldn't be said from inside a conventional narrative frame. Hugunin uses it to examine the ethics of reconstruction. Vanderspek uses it to interrogate inherited forms. Kramer uses it to ask whether a character's interior life can coexist with the author's authority over their fate.
Those are not abstract concerns. For anyone writing fiction that takes the form seriously, they're the actual problems on the page.
Techniques to Try
- The unreliable frame: Introduce a narrator who is conscious of being narrated. Let that consciousness create gaps the reader has to fill.
- The foregrounded form: Choose a form the reader already knows (alphabet book, footnote apparatus, case file, letter series) and let the mismatch between form and content generate the work's central tension.
- The author surrogate: Place a figure in the text who stands in for the writer — but give them incomplete knowledge. What can't the author-figure see about the story they're telling?
- The recursive loop: End where you began, but with the beginning now carrying the weight of everything the reader knows. The loop doesn't cancel the journey — it reframes it.
If You're Writing Metafiction
The Journal of Experimental Fiction has published metafictional work since 1986. We've seen every version of the unreliable narrator, the recursive frame, the author who enters the text. What we're looking for is not the technique — it's what the technique makes possible that straight fiction can't.
The Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel is open now 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.