Fiction that self-consciously draws attention to its own status as fiction, exploring how stories are made and what they mean.
Metafiction is fiction that acknowledges and examines its own fictional nature. Instead of pretending to be a transparent window into a real world, metafiction reminds you that you are reading a constructed narrative. It might feature a character who knows they are in a novel, a narrator who argues with the author, or a story about the act of writing a story. Metafiction asks the reader to think about how stories work even while they are inside one.
Metafiction teaches you to see the machinery behind every story - including your own. Even if you never write a metafictional novel, understanding the technique makes you a more self-aware writer. You start to notice the conventions you rely on, the assumptions you make about what a story "should" be, and the ways you can play with those expectations. It is the literary equivalent of learning how a magic trick works so you can perform better magic.
A novel about the experience of reading a novel, where "you" the reader become a character trying to finish a book that keeps getting interrupted.
Vonnegut, the author, appears as a character in his own novel and interacts with his creations, demolishing the boundary between writer and fiction.
A labyrinthine novel about a documentary about a house that is bigger on the inside, with layers of editors, footnotes, and narrative unreliability that make the book itself feel like a puzzle.
The final section reveals that the entire novel has been written by one of its characters, retroactively reframing everything as an act of literary atonement.
Metafiction should serve the story's emotional or thematic core. If the self-awareness does not deepen the reader's experience, it just feels like showing off.
Even the most experimental metafiction needs characters the reader cares about and stakes that matter. The meta elements should enhance the story, not replace it.
Metafiction still needs internal consistency. Your rules may be unusual, but you still need rules - and you need to follow them.
Write a one-page story where the narrator realizes mid-scene that they are a character in a story someone else is writing. How do they react? Do they rebel, negotiate, or accept it? Use this as a way to explore what it feels like when fiction becomes aware of itself.