Metafiction

[TheWritingGroup]

Anyone else play with it?

I think having a fictional story inside the story the reader is reading is one example. For instance, in "Both Sides Now," a character reads a romantasy about a concubine and The Conqueror, a sort of Genghis Khan analog.

I kind of like the excerpts of Tale of the Concubine: Glory of the Morning that I wrote, and I'm tempted to write at least a few actual chapters. (It's also a reference to the very real and very ... unusual Morning Glory Milking Farm.

As I wrote in the WIWAW, "Pranked" is a deconstruction of a sort of splinter subgenre of erotica.

Obviously, stuff like Litcon is metafiction. Any others?

 

[BeechLeaf]

A good example is Anna_Roid's Mumtaz and Hamdouna, in which various characters start telling stories inside which various characters tell other stories, and so on to several levels. Because she thought 1001 Nights wasn't enough, so she's added a good few more. And being Anna_Roid, it works superbly.

In my own, various people write erotic fiction, but I haven't (yet?) written any of theirs.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Obviously, stuff like Litcon is metafiction. Any others?

I have a story where a woman recognises an encounter in the street at the beginning of a Literotica story, and is sure that it happened between her and someone she met. So she contacts the author through the Lit feedback function, and discovers that he did indeed write the story based on their encounter. She informs him that she's not at all like the Maddy (Madelyn) in his story, but can they meet, since they both live in the same city?

He of course, being the author, would love to see her again - because she's the real Maddy he met. So they do, and she's Madeline, not at all like the woman he wrote about. But she's intrigued that she's become the inspiration for an erotic story, and she's curious.

The conceit is that I really did meet a Maddy in the street, and the opening sequence of the Madelyn chapter is a true recount of what happened, including the conversation we had, our exchange of names. My character Adam (who appears in a bunch of stories) is very loosely based on me - some other Adam story vignettes actually happened - and he's my fantasy vehicle for action that didn't happen at all.

The story is chock full of meta concepts, because the lead character Adam is simultaneously a character in the stories and the author of those stories, but is a luckier bastard than me, because he gets to bed all these women. Whereas I only write about it!

The Hyacinth House

Which is itself a meta title, as it's the name of a song by The Doors, who's songs often feature in my stories.

 

[NotWise]

The Princess Bride is a film example.

It was my favorite toy for a while. My two Third Ring stories were both told by a storyteller. The middle three parts of A Valentine's Day Mess all feature the two main characters telling part of the story to each other. Abner tells his own story to Peg and Jeanie in Every Girl in Edgarville. Her Dream House is a light-weight example where the MFC relates a series of fantasies to the MMC. There may have been more that don't come to mind right away.

It's harder to write than direct narrative, but the challenge can be interesting. It adds a layer of complexity to the story. That can help readers stay involved. It can also make it harder for the reader to follow.

You have to balance those things for yourself.

 

[AlinaX]

In my story Author of Cuckoldry, the main characters read an erotic story and get to know the author, and eventually also get to known the people that inspired the characters in the story.

 

[lovecraft68]

I use another term

In comics there is what's called an Infinity Cover, a cover within a cover etc... I'm attaching a pic of one.

I decided to do an infinity story in the sense its a story within a story. It opens with a sex scene you then discover is being written by an author in literotica who is doing it for catharsis because he has a thing for his sister. The story delves into his real life and relationship with his sister and as it goes on you get story excerpts mingled with what's happening for real. The author refers to himself as "Story Cole" versus "Loser Cole" at one point.

Did well, but it did seem some readers were a little confused

 

[anthrodisiac]

I love fucking with metafiction. I've done a few in the past, some of my favorite things to work on. The Princess Bride probably wins out for best metafiction. Both the book and the movie are phenomenal.

@BeechLeaf has some nice subtle metafiction in Caligula, or the Modem Frankenstein where the characters look around to see which wall they should be facing. Really appreciated that bit.

 

[Britva415]

The Princess Bride is a film example.

It's a literary example

 

[BeechLeaf]

All sorts of playing around with the writer/reader situation have always appealed to me. As a child what I did was always comedic, so I was quite disappointed when I eventually read Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, a title I loved, and found he hadn't played up the absurdity the way I would have.

In some other thread I've mentioned Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which begins with you coming home with Calvino's new novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and being keen to read it, but it keeps turning into other stories.

Then there's Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, in which the little boy reading the book gets to the point where the story can't continue because the little boy in the story he's reading can't believe that he's actually the little boy in the... oh, I'm sure you all know it.

 

[Britva415]

I would not have guessed that what was meant by "metafiction" was simply "frame stories" and nothing more.

The Wikipedia article on metafiction does include The Canterbury Tales as an example of metafiction, but not because of the frame it provides for sub-fictions. More like for its sort of self-awareness as a fiction, and for its fourth-wall breaking.

Asimov's Murder At the ABA is metafiction for the same reasons. Asimov also includes himself as a character, doing things which are related to the writing of the fiction.

Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is metafiction for reasons way way more than simply being a frame story. The function of the frame in that story serves to lampshade and satirize the act of constructing historical narratives, and to make the protagonist acknowledge her own unreliability.

Cervantes' Don Quixote breaks the fourth wall, which is a metafictional act all by itself, but the narrator does it in order to talk about his own storytelling. It serves to obscure what's real and what's fictional.

Burroughs' Naked Lunch also addresses its own storytelling. Criticizes it. People might disagree, but, personally, I'd say there isn't even a frame story in it. A frame story is not a required common-denominator of "metafiction."

Danielewski's House of Leaves treats the literal, physical book you are literally, physically reading as a McGuffin. And it's an endless "frameception," lampshading the entire concept of a frame story by extending it several layers. At the same time, it deconstructs the various frames by blurring where there edges are.

Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle also has a multiplicity of nested frame stories, also breaks the fourth wall, also lampshades the authorial process, obscures the authorial process by making it unclear whether the Yijing outcomes are character events or the author's own results, and critiques the craft of historicity by using questions of authenticity and counterfeits in the story as a metaphor leading to uncertainty about the narrative itself, at all levels: The meta, the primary, and the sub-frame levels.

I could keep going but there are plenty of other examples you all can find and discuss which have more to their metafiction than simply an unselfconscious Arabian Nights type of construction.

 

[BeechLeaf]

On the analogy of metalanguage and metamathematics, I would take metafiction to mean something that is in some way a fiction about the nature of fiction. There are other works that merely have a frame story, but are otherwise realist in that context: Mary Shelley's The Last Man has someone discovering a story written on leaves (took me ages to work out she just meant pages - I was so confused as it went on and on), and Conrad's The Heart of Darkness has a narrator largely outside it. In fact Frankenstein has various framing/narrating devices too. But these aren't ones where the fictional nature of the fiction intrudes.

 

[SmilingLez]

Anyone else play with it?

I think having a fictional story inside the story the reader is reading is one example. For instance, in "Both Sides Now," a character reads a romantasy about a concubine and The Conqueror, a sort of Genghis Khan analog.

I kind of like the excerpts of Tale of the Concubine: Glory of the Morning that I wrote, and I'm tempted to write at least a few actual chapters. (It's also a reference to the very real and very ... unusual Morning Glory Milking Farm.

As I wrote in the WIWAW, "Pranked" is a deconstruction of a sort of splinter subgenre of erotica.

Obviously, stuff like Litcon is metafiction. Any others?

I have several non erotic meta-fiction flash-fiction stories on other sites. They were fun to write, and keeping each story under 1000 words was the biggest challenge.

I won't submit them to the non erotic section of lit until the mess with my account and mass deletions of previously posted stories have been fixed, along with the pending purgatory bug.

 

[Britva415]

I have several non erotic meta-fiction flash-fiction stories on other sites. They were fun to write, and keeping each story under 1000 words was the biggest challenge.

I won't submit them to the non erotic section of lit until the mess with my account and mass deletions of previously posted stories have been fixed, along with the pending purgatory bug.

That brings up a good point. An artificial conceit like our 750-word stories probably falls into metafiction.

 

[Britva415]

Same with something like Gadsby, a novel written entirely without the letter E.

 

[SmilingLez]

That brings up a good point. An artificial conceit like our 750-word stories probably falls into metafiction.

More like flash fiction (under 1000 words) if you wish to be specific. Under 300 words would be micro fiction.

 

[Britva415]

I am being specific. 750 is a very specific thing we do for a very specific reason.

The point is, it's meta.

Yes, just like 1000 or 300 or whatever. Are those more meta?

 

[SmilingLez]

I am being specific. 750 is a very specific thing we do for a very specific reason.

The point is, it's meta.

Yes, just like 1000 or 300 or whatever. Are those more meta?

You are comparing apples and oranges. As always my opinion, YMMV

 

[SmilingLez]

More like flash fiction (under 1000 words) if you wish to be specific. Under 300 words would be micro fiction.

Forgot to add drabbles (100 words).

Meta fiction does not have a word limit.

 

[NotWise]

Here is the Wikipedia article on metafiction.

 

[anthrodisiac]

That brings up a good point. An artificial conceit like our 750-word stories probably falls into metafiction.

I don't think I'd consider that metafiction. Metafiction is fiction about fiction: breaking the fourth wall, including the author as a character (Breakfast of Champions, The Dark Tower series), characters aware of an out-of-universe omniscient narrator, a story's self-awareness that it's a story and not a straightforward telling of events as if they actually happened, etc. The 750-word stories are within an artificial constraint, but the stories themselves doesn't necessarily contain meta elements, so I wouldn't consider it metafiction using that standard.

 

[MountainLakes]

A few of my favorite series have been metafiction.

One is a Star-Trek series that uses the real-life economic turbulence of the TOS production as a deterministic plot point. Reported actor likes and dislikes were a major influence in writing and filming schedules. Each episode’s cast was determined by jealousy, vanity, and ultimately a reverse auction that conclusively failed the National Auctioneers Association guidelines - multiple times.

Mayberry, Hogan's Heroes, Lucy, Mannix, Batman, Gomer Pyle, I Spy, and The Green Hornet were also filmed at Desilu. So, lots of actors were bribed, tricked, and shanghaied into guest appearances. Or just edited in, film cans were regularly stolen. At times Alexander "Scotty" Scott substituted for his brother Montgomery "Scotty" Scott as chief engineer. There were bizarre "away missions" to Mount Airy, North Carolina; Danfield, New York; and Hammelburg, Bavaria - sometimes to play a forgotten Earth game, tennis, with Kelly Robinson in direct violation of the Prime Directive.

 

[NotWise]

I think you can have meta elements in a story without the story as a whole becoming metafiction.

Using my own story as an example, at the climax of Love is Enough, TJ (a playwright) has Gabby (a ghost) deliver a soliloquy to an empty chair in front of a packed theater. TJ sat in the chair during rehearsals. The soliloquy is a commentary on his own cynical, postmodern world view.

Not sure if it came off as intended, because TJ's characters wasn't that well developed. All the pieces have to fall into place to make something like that work right.

 

[RetroFan]

I use another term

In comics there is what's called an Infinity Cover, a cover within a cover etc... I'm attaching a pic of one.

I decided to do an infinity story in the sense its a story within a story. It opens with a sex scene you then discover is being written by an author in literotica who is doing it for catharsis because he has a thing for his sister. The story delves into his real life and relationship with his sister and as it goes on you get story excerpts mingled with what's happening for real. The author refers to himself as "Story Cole" versus "Loser Cole" at one point.

Did well, but it did seem some readers were a little confused

View attachment 2632375

I remember my brother and sisters and I had a children's story book like that when we were kids. It showed a boy and girl on the cover reading a story book - which was the story book with them (the two kids) on the cover - and of course these kids were reading the same story book and so on ad infinitum. It used to drive us crazy.

With regards to meta fiction, is it different from things like crossovers, shared universes, fiction within fiction, actor and creator allusions and the like?

Using the Scream franchise as an example, say a future Scream 8 started as most of the Scream movies do, with characters being violently murdered by a Ghostface killer or killers. The opening victims are a trio of teenagers who live their lives online; a pretty and popular sister obsessed by social media, her nerdy twin brother obsessed by science fiction and their annoying younger brother, obsessed by online gaming. With their internet down one night and their parents out for the evening, the tech obsessed teens have to order a pizza using a landline phone and watch a DVD, and the DVD they are watching is the original 'Scary Movie' from 2000, before Ghostface (unknown to the trio) murders the pizza delivery girl and uses this situation to gain access to their house, making the threating calls on the landline phone before dispatching the three siblings.

Within the Scream universe there are the 'Stab' movies, fictionalized depictions of the events in Scream, and Scream characters often watch and reference Stab movies, and sometimes real-world horror movies too. But the original 'Scary Movie' with Anna Faris in the lead role is a parody of Scream and other teen slasher and horror movies, like 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' and 'It'. So if characters in a Scream movie are watching the very real 'Scary Movie' parody as opposed to a Stab movie or an unrelated but real horror film like 'Thanksgiving', is this an example of Meta Fiction?

 

[liliput1]

There's a comic inside of The Watchmen.

But my favorite metafiction will probably always be Tusk Love, with honorable mention to the Lusty Argonian Maid.

 

[AStrangeDesire]

BreakTheBar's DM and the Dirty 20s has that 'story within a story' element as it follows the players both inside and outside the game, as they play the characters.
https://www.literotica.com/series/se/494310138