Chapter One - Introduction:

You want every story you write to hit readers in the feels. 

You know about plot-conflict-resolution. You know show-not-tell. 

But there’s one technique you might not know: meta-fiction is a technique that allows you not only to make your stories stand out, but also provides a framework for plotting that hooks your readers emotionally.

The truth, though, is that understanding meta-fiction requires more than just the definition.

For one thing, there are many branches of the technique used for different purposes; that’s why I will focus on one example of meta-fiction and break it down with what I consider to be the greatest use of the idea in modern fiction. Steven Moffat penned the most successful series of Doctor Who using the technique, and as we take apart the mechanics of that story, we’ll arm ourselves with an idea of how to use it that allows us to put emotionally-engaging stories together in a way that other writers might not be able to.  Geronimo!

 

[Insert YouTube Video Here] 

 

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1.2 - What is Meta-Fiction? 

Meta-Fiction is the art of writing a story which knows that it is a story. Unlike traditional forms of narrative, meta-fiction encourages the reader to engage with the idea that what they are experiencing is a fiction. The uses of meta-fiction can range from humour, where narrative conventions are parodied “from the inside”, to more insightful comments on the nature of story-telling itself. For an example, a fourth-wall-break, where the audience is addressed in a direct manner by the characters inside the story, is one of the most blatant ways to use meta-fiction. 

1.3 History of Meta-Fiction:

Like all good and pretentious ideas, meta-fiction gained steam in the post-modern era.   

Although works such as Don Quixote riffed on the idea of the narrative being a fiction as far back as the fifteenth century, the technique came to life in the middle of the nineteen-hundreds. As William H. Glass, who coined the term, said it: writers in the twentieth century understood the conventions of narrative greater than ever before, and as such had a greater desire to comment on it. Techniques such as including a novel within the novel, or characters who are aware they are in a story, became more used than ever, as writers sought not just write stories, but to write stories about stories. 

Over the years, the technique has found most success as a form of comedy; the fourth-wall-break is the most common of these (Deadpool is a highly meta-fictional script), but any story that pokes fun of the conventions of its own narrative is doing the same thing. A detective film that makes fun of the idea that “the butler did it”, is being meta-fictional about the usual detective stories we see.  

The form we are going to discuss today, though, is more empowering than comedic. 

To understand this use of meta-fiction, we have to know what fiction we’re going to be meta about: 

1.4 - History of the Text:

Doctor Who is an extremely cool and well-funded TV show. 

Oh, alright, fine, I’ll be honest about it. 

Doctor Who is a long-running British science-fantasy show that began in 1963 and has delighted audiences for almost sixty years since with its family-friendly tone, space-and-time adventures, and battles against monsters who are definitely not just a bloke covered in spray-painted bubble-wrap.  

There are a handful of conventions to the show that Moffat used in his meta-fictional masterpiece, and knowing these will be crucial to understanding how we can use the technique to play on the conventions of other stories, including our own. Don’t worry, though, there won’t be a test: 

• The Doctor is our hero, and he does what he wants.  The titular Doctor is an alien adventure out to have fun, who travels time and space just having a lark at will. 

• The Doctor has a human companion who he takes on adventures. This is most often an attractive young woman, because even alien adventures bow down to marketing demands. 

• The Doctor travels in a magic box called the TARDIS. His time-machine, the TARDIS, is a strange blue police box on the outside, but a massive futuristic ship on the inside.  

These three conventions, among others, have been instilled into the show for so long that they have made Doctor Who into as much of a legend as a story: children in the sixties grew up with that blueprint, and then became adults and had children, and those children grew up with them, too. 

It’s worth noting than any fiction has such conventions: if you want to write about a bank-robber, for example, then the conventions of a heist exist: the anti-hero behind the job, the ticking time-bomb, the grizzled professional on his last job before retirement. Doctor Who, though, has conventions that are now a shared cultural memory. This provides the most fertile ground imaginable for meta-fiction, and Moffat’s use of the technique is instructive. He uses what I call “the agony of fiction”: finding three different layers in which all fiction, on a meta-level, has tension within it, and solving them all in a piece of writing that is as empowering as it is cathartic. Let’s get into how he did it: 

 

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Chapter Two – The Agony of Fiction:

The biggest conflict in any fiction does not exist between the characters: it exists between the audience and the text, because the latter has a habit of abandoning the former. We don’t exist in the world of fiction, which can entertain us for a moment but not influence our reality. This is a gold-mine of emotion present at the heart of all fiction, and Moffat uses it to perfection in a way we can learn from: the first step is to understand the core relationship between the audience and the text. 

2.1 - The Audience is a Character:

People first interact with Doctor Who when they are a child. After they’ve finished screamed about wanting more fish-fingers, they’re sat down to watch the show for the first time. For many, it’s a magical moment.

The Doctor crashes into their life, mad and adventurous, with his magical box, and sweeps the real world away. This is the core of the relationship between audience and text: it starts at childhood, with happiness.

So, Moffat starts his first series with a new character, a child named Amelia Pond, the Scottish girl in an English village, and he throws the Doctor into her life so she can be swept up in that same magic that touches the audience. The idea here is to start the agony of fiction with the ecstasy first: if we don’t relate to how the story at hand is desirable, then how can we care for the meta-fiction of its distance? 

Observe how this dialogue does all that. Amelia is characterised as a British child, innocent and yet with an instinctive intelligence, smart enough to ask mad questions and young enough to buy the answers. The situation is heightened, an adventure with fun whimsy but clever tension, too: 

DOCTOR: I’m wet, I’ve been in the swimming-pool. 

AMELIA: You said you were in the library. 

DOCTOR: So was the swimming-pool. 

In their first exchange, Moffat has already captured the conventions of Doctor Who, and placed the audience as a character in the narrative. People at home will either relate to Amelia or remember being her: meta-fiction has begun. This first step is a simple one to achieve: if you are writing about a bank-robbery, think of the audience’s connection to a story of a bank-robbery. They will likely be adult, looking for an escape from a boring life in the battered pages of a heist story, more interested in the adventure of the narrative than moral implications. Bang, you have your protagonist! The next step is to address the agony of fiction in a way that relates to your story. Moffat does this well: 

2.2 - The Distance of Fiction:

The fact that stories are distant from us is always painful, but even more so for a children’s show. At some point, all of the children who were swept away by Doctor Who become adults and the magic of their childhood becomes a distant, even embarrassing memory. This is the first, and most usable, stage of Moffat’s agony of fiction: stories can leave us behind. And just as the audience will grow up and be abandoned by the text of Doctor Who, Amelia grows up and becomes Amy, an adult with a job and a boyfriend, and the Doctor has abandoned her. Meta-fiction is providing natural emotional drama here: by understanding the relationship between audience and text, “The Eleventh Hour” creates strong emotion. To continue our example, the next step in our bank-robber story is the protagonist feeling abandoned by the stories of heists they have read in their dog-eared novels: as much as they want to connect to the fiction, it seems that fiction does not return the feeling.   

2.3 – The Story Saves the Day:

Of course, this is not enough to write a plot for you; meta-fiction is not a magic button. If you set up a character with the audience in mind, though, and use the gap between them and the fiction they love/exist-in as an emotional backdrop, then it can provide a great catharsis when the audience-character is allowed to fully enter the conventions of the form. This is something Moffat does well. 

He uses a clever technique to kick the idea into gear: in the first act, young Amelia gave the Doctor a unique apple with a pattern cut into it. At the end of the second, The Doctor (for whom the last ten years have been just five minutes), returns it. This moment – where an object from the first act is used as a symbol of the main text/audience relationship returning for the third – is an obvious hit. 

For the audience, it is a meta-fictional rush where their initial bond with Doctor Who is celebrated as being real and important. It’s also instructive and easy to apply: all your protagonist needs to do is implement the adventurous techniques they first read in that battered old heist-novel in the third act, and the audience will recognise the emotional beat that validates their perspective. This is a strong use of meta-fiction. From there, as it happens in “The Eleventh Hour”, your audience-protagonist can enter the narrative completely. Amy enters the TARDIS, flies off for adventures, and the text is once again bound with the audience. The first level of the agony of fiction is now solved. 

 

[Amy in the TARDIS scene] 

 

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Chapter Three – Fiction Does Not Exist (or Does it?): 

So, there we go, right? That’s meta-fiction, and how to use it, with a good example. Great blog, Steven, I will now subscribe to your email list, comment, share the blog, and hire you at a high fee. 

Well, no (but do all those things, anyway). 

Moffat’s version of the agony of fiction goes deeper than how stories can abandon us.  

In the finale, he will destroy the story on every level it’s possible to do so, and ask what’s left. 

The next level of the agony of fiction is simple: stories just aren’t real. 

Here’s how he uses meta-fiction to solve it.  

3.2 - Narrative Convention Destruction: 

If “The Eleventh Hour” was a meta-fictional gas oven, then “The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang” is the great fire of London. The idea is not just to sever the relationship between audience and text, but to destroy the conventions of the text on every level. This is level two of the agony of fiction.  

After all, the most painful conflict in any story is the same: the fact that it isn’t real.  

To address this agony of fiction is a big step, though, and will require heightened plot. It may not work in a rom-com. If you’re willing to swing big, though, then go ahead: destroy all narrative conventions. Trap the Doctor, the freedom-lover, into a prison that you can’t even escape by dying. Kill the companion. Have her own lover shoot her dead. And the magic box? Explode it completely, and have the explosion destroy time and wipe out any past story events, too. When all conventions are destroyed, the narrative ceases to exist both in-universe and out of it. A meta-fiction collapse. 

If we apply this to our bank-robbery idea, then this is the realisation that all bank-robberies in history have been staged traps, that all the participants have been tricked and sent to jail, that all of the ticking time-bombs were fake, and that even our protagonist has fallen for it and accidentally been giving information over to the police. The idea of “the bank-robbery" story no longer exists.  

I told you it was a big swing.  

3.3 – The Story is as Real as the Audience

So, there’s just one person left who can save the day: the audience, of course.  

If meta-fiction is about knowing that a story is a story, then there has to be someone to experience it. The character that we created to symbolise the audience’s relationship to the text must be the one to resolve the second layer of the agony of fiction. The empowerment of the audience is vital. 

So, Moffat ends it where it all began: little Amelia, the Scottish girl in the English village, left staring up at the darkness where the story used to be. She never meets the Doctor; she never experiences the text. We are confronted with a single stark fact: we live in a universe without Doctor Who.  

The story isn’t real. All that exists is the audience. 

So, the audience saves the day. Little Amelia is the one who instigates the resolution, setting off a chain of bootstrap-paradoxes (or, Moffat-loops, as they were known on-set) that allows the Doctor to escape the prison from the outside, and the resolution moves from there: dead-Amy is revived by the prison, and the prison is flown into the explosion of the TARDIS, with one of the few slices of the universe pre-TARDIS-destruction used to “re-boot” reality into the way it was for little Amelia.  

It’s therefore not just the audience that is empowered here, but their perspective. The universe is reborn as “Amy’s universe”, the way she saw it, the way it was to her. The resolution on a meta-fictional level, then, is simple: the story might not exist, but your perspective on it does. It’s part of your universe and your reality, and that’s enough. Bear in mind that meta-fiction is the one technique that allows you address this, most fundamental agony of fiction. And you can do it too! 

The key is to return the conventions of the text through the actions of your protagonist. 

In our example, the protagonist can break the jailed-up bank-robbers out of trouble using all the conventions we discussed earlier: the time-bomb, the professional, and himself, now the anti-hero. 

It is his, and the audience’s, perspective on the text that has allowed it to be victorious - with one twist. The Doctor didn’t make the jump. In the new universe, he never existed. There is no story, except that that Amy believes in. He has become what he always was: the dream of the audience.  

 

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Chapter Four – Meta-Fiction About Meta-Fiction About Meta-Fiction: 

Well, surely, that is the furthest meta-fiction can go, right?  

I mean, what agony of fiction could possibly surpass the idea that stories aren’t even real?! 

A simple one: they’re not useful.  

A fiction might stay with us, our perspective on it might make it real, but... what’s the point? Aren’t you better off armed with factual books about the inflation rate of Germany during the eighties? 

4.2 – The Battle for the Audience:

Well, not according to Moffat. The final act of his meta-fictional odyssey is simple: the adult world, brought to a dramatic conflict with the world of dreams. He sets all this at Amy’s wedding, and what could be better? A wedding is the perfect half-way point, after all. It symbolises the fairy-tale, the romantic, the fictional, the ideal, yes; but also, the domestic, the real, the adult. It is the perfect stage for the final conflict in the agony of fiction – do we even need stories, once we grow up?  

Of course, we do! 

Amy knows something is wrong. The fiction she loves is distant, non-existent, nothing more than a simple old story. But it hurts; she cries with sadness at her own wedding. It’s clear that a world where the audience exists but the stories are relegated to their most base form is not enough. 

So, she chooses the story. Not with any dazzling plot, but with simple defiance: all the adults at the wedding think Amy has an imaginary friend. They think that Doctor Who is a story she should have grown out of, stopped believing in - stopped needing. But Amy stands up to the real world, and demands the world of fiction: she believes in Doctor Who, and she needs that story as part of her world. This is Moffat writing a love-letter not just to his favourite show, but to his favourite audience: the text and the reader need each other to exist in full, and both of them should be proud of that. And of course, The Doctor appears. She has, as has been set-up, remembered him from the brink of time. All of the agonies of fiction are now resolved. Amy flies off into the TARDIS, takes her husband, and the story goes on like brand-new.

This final stage is simple to replicate: we need to show that the world of fiction that our protagonist fell in love with is necessary. Even if it’s the murky adventures of bank-robberies, if he needs that adventure/fiction to be a part of his life, then it should be. Who’s to say that he can’t embark on a series of new adventures with the friends he broke out of jail, bringing all those conventions of the text to life as he takes a time-bomb and a grizzled professional to go and live the life he read about in all his favourite books? After all - we’re all stories in the end. Just makes it a good one, eh? 

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Chapter Five – Examples of Meta-Fiction: 

If this blog has given you a taste for meta-fiction, then here’s some other examples of the form: 

5.2 - Prose Examples of Meta-Fiction: 

• Don Quixote: One of the world’s most famous novels, Cervantes plays on the stories of mythic chivalry and romance that dominated the time period in the shape of the hapless, would-be-adventurer who aims to be a knight with his trusty mule in tow. 

• The Eyre Affair: One of the more blatant examples of meta-fiction on this list, as characters literally enter the world of Jane Eyre to prevent the story’s corruption. 

• The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A post-modern novel that drips with literary meta-fiction, disguising parts of the plot as short stories published by the “author”. 

5.3 - Script Examples of Meta-Fiction: 

• Extras: A show which features a show-within-a-show and therefore is able to comment on the nature of making television and reacting to celebrity within itself. 

• Dracula: Moffat also brought a meta-fictional angle to his version of Dracula, questioning why the story of the vampire has changed so much over time.  

• Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace: Like Extras, this presents itself as a show-about-a-show, acting as a special edition of a fictional television show that released in the eighties but failed to fetch an audience anywhere outside of Peru.  

 

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Chapter Six - Conclusion: 

So, there we have it. If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this blog, then first of all, go and have a lie-down. Secondly, though, you can now claim to have a working knowledge of meta-fiction, the core techniques and history of the technique, to a full example of how it can be used not just to satirise, but to celebrate a narrative form, and empower your own audience in an emotional way. 

Maybe your next story will be a meta-fictional one! Use the ideas here in your own writing, and come back to comment how you found them. If you want more blogs like these delivered fresh to your door every week, then don’t forget to sign up to my email list or just pop back in sometime. 

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