Metafiction Makes You Choose

I began my most recent novel certain that it would be my last. I had one more story I needed to tell, and then I was calling it quits. I’ll be the first to admit that, over the years, my feelings had soured toward the world of publishing, and how it worked or didn’t work. Currently, due to my historical fickleness, I love publishing again, but back then I thought it would feel pretty great to shit talk publishing on my way out of publishing. Because not only am I fickle I’m also sort of petty, apparently. And so I reached for the storytelling tool that lets you get away with the most shit talking ever: metafiction.

(Reclaiming Alternate History.)

I’d always thought of metafiction as an intrinsically destructive form. It’s all about interrupting narrative expectation. Rug pulling. Using stories to comment on stories. In a way metafiction is a form of anti-story. If a story’s effectiveness is judged in part by how immersed you are, or by how deeply you empathize with a character, metafiction is the force that flattens you out. It says, this story is the same as all stories, and it’s only a story, and why choose to believe any of it?

It seemed like the perfect tool to give the industry a piece of my mind. I’d write a book that was an anti-book, a metafiction about books and about publishing itself that would deconstruct it all but not be as boring as that sounds. It would be a work that took the meaning of everything and turned it upside down and showed how no, none of it meant anything at all—but it would also still somehow entirely engross you. It was like a legacy idea. A statement idea. Anyway, that’s the book I set out to write.

But you know how the moment you put a character on a page they will want something, like to get a glass of water or to murder a vicar or some shit, and right away you have to decide if they get to do it or not, because that’s the only really interesting part about storytelling, and then suddenly you’re inside the story all the way just getting elbowed around with everyone else and all your plans for legacy statements and grievances redressed are forgotten as you try to figure out what the hell these characters are even talking about? That happened to me.

I used all my novelist wiles on the meta parts—and yes I may overestimate the extent of my wiles but I do have some—to write a book about a science fiction novelist with Temporal Dysphasia, a disorder I made up so that Larry, the writer, would be unable to process time, which would let me get away with chapters out of order and page numbers that read "infinity," and timers always going off at self-referential moments in Larry’s backpack. I used all the metafictional shims I knew about to pop a reader out of their dream immersion and let me make my big points about publishing’s demise.

But it was just… in the middle of the first scene Larry had a meltdown and I realized, ahh, poor thing, he’s just hungry, he’s just a hungry, hungry science fiction writer like all the rest of them, a little malnourished, and I discovered I felt really sorry for him. With his churro habit and his feud with his 90-year-old mother and his publishing dreams. Larry just wanted to write a great science fiction novel, but then Earth was invaded by giant snails and he had to make a sacrifice. All he wanted was to matter. All he wanted, eventually, was a hug.

You cannot, it turns out, write a story about a man who wants a hug and also write an anti-book. Or I can’t. I do lack those wiles.

What I ended up with is stranger than what I set out to make, and more honest. The metafictional machinery is all still there. The novel eats itself at the end. But it’s entirely the story of Larry’s battle against mind controlling aliens over the fate of the Earth, and it’s entirely dedicated, to the very last page, to the power of story. The book turned out to be about how nothing in Larry’s life, not petty score settling, not a publishing industry in decline, not story eating aliens or metafiction itself was more powerful than a story he himself chose to believe.

And that is, I came to see, the one thing that metafiction does better than any other form, even though it pretends to do the opposite. By interrupting your dream, by refusing the contract, by reminding you again and again that a story is only a story, it makes you choose to care anyway. It strips out the autopilot of genre so you’re no longer just being swept along, you’re actively fighting to get back in. And once you fight that hard for something as openly, defiantly, even insultingly fake as professional-grade metafiction, whatever feeling you find waiting for you on the other side is pure as driven snow. It’s entirely yours. The book did not trick you into it. You chose. You chose story.

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