Author Michael Mirolla's audio essay on navigating the mirrors of metafiction

Award-winning author Michael Mirolla has geneously recorded an audio essay titled 'Michael Mirolla on metafiction: Writing that reflects on its own creation' for the On Creative Writing podcast. In this audio essay, Michael explores metafiction, the art of the self-aware story, and what's involved in navigating the mirrors of metafiction.

Author Michael Mirolla

Michael explores the intricate landscape of metafiction—a genre that doesn't just tell a story, but actively examines the tools and tricks of its own creation. In this excellent essay, Michael makes waht can sometimes be a dense subject much easier to understand.

Michael's audio essay traces the history of literature that refuses to pretend it isn't made up, from the 18th-century playfulness of Henry Fielding to the postmodern puzzles of Italo Calvino. Whether discussing his latest novel, How About This...?, or the subversive power of fictocriticism, Michael offers a masterclass on why modern writers are increasingly trading the mirror of reality for a more complex, internal architecture of the imagination.

Michael is the author of more than two dozen novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections. His publications include a novella, The Last News Vendor, winner of the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award, as well as three Bressani Prizes: the novel Berlin; the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue; and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads. His poetry collection, At the End of the World, was short-listed for the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award. His recent works include novel, How About This …?, published in November 2025 (At Bay Press). Find Michael at MichaelMirolla.com and on Facebook. Read Michael's Writers Reveal interview.

Scroll to the end to see Michael's metafictional writing techniques.

On Creative Writing is grateful to Michael for taking the time to supply this audio essay!

The transcript for Michael Mirolla on metafiction: Writing that reflects on its own creation

Navigating the mirrors of metafiction and the art of self-reference

Greetings out there. This is Michael Mirolla, and I'm in control of the mic for this episode of the On Creative Writing podcast. I'm a multiple award-winning author, editor, and publisher who has had the fortune of publishing some two dozen novels, short story and poetry collections, plays, and film scripts. I am also a veteran writer-in-residence with stints at the historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, the Can Serrat Residency outside Barcelona and most recently, the Regina Public Library. During my stay in Barcelona, I published a novella titled How About This?, published by At Bay Press last fall.

Born in Italy and growing up in Montreal, I now make my home on a 30-acre farm along with my dogs, a cat, and sundry engagements outside the town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands area of Ontario. I acknowledge that the land on which I live is situated on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. We are grateful to be able to live and learn on these lands. In this episode, I'd like to talk about a specific kind of fiction: metafiction, what it is, some history along the way, how my latest novel, How About This?, fits into the metafictional universe, and I conclude with the customary advice to writers.

The many genres and styles of fiction

The cover of Michael Mirolla's latest novella, How About This...? published by At Bay Press

As most are aware, there are many types of genres and styles of writing. When it comes to fiction, genres include crime fiction, mystery, horror, romance, fantasy, literary fiction, etc.

Realism and naturalism

For writing styles and approaches, we have several to choose from. There's realism or naturalism, wherein the author imitates the world about them, faithfully describing it for the reader. Works such as Middlemarch by George Eliot—pseudonym for novelist Mary Ann Evans. The writing of Émile Zola and John Steinbeck, for example. In fact, it can be argued that the majority of modern fiction writing falls under this category, although we shall see later that the so-called realistic mode of writing can sometimes be deceiving in terms of exactly what world it is describing.

Magic realism

The second style is magic realism, where an otherwise realistic world is invaded by elements that don't fit that world. Made most famous by someone like Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. An example of a Canadian magic realism would be Yann Martel's Life of Pi. Third is surrealism, which is often mistaken for magic realism, but which has essential differences.

Whereas magic realism introduces elements into a reality that aren't usually connected to that reality, surrealism deals more with imaginary objects and dream states, with connections made in the work of art being produced. Writers such as Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud, and André Breton have been labeled as surrealist.

Speculative fiction

A fourth is speculative fiction. A number of subgenres fall under the speculative fiction mantel: mind of science fiction, alternate history, post-apocalyptic, superhero, supernatural, ghost stories, steampunk, utopian and dystopia—sometimes called "what if" books. Speculative literature changes the laws of what's real or possible as we know them in our current society, and then speculates on the outcome.

Metafiction: the art of self-reference in fiction

And then there is metafiction, or the art of self-reference in fiction, sometimes described as taking magic realism to its extreme. But what exactly do we mean when we say metafiction? What is the theory behind it? How does this stack up to the other forms such as magic realism and naturalism? How can it be used in our writing? American 20th-century writer William Gass is quoted as saying:

"In every art, two contradictory impulses are in a state of Manichean war: the impulse to communicate, and so to treat the medium of communication as a means, and the impulse to make an artifact out of the materials, and so to treat the medium as an end."

An example of 20th-century, and early 21st-century English language creative writing, using the subset that I would call cutting-edge writing, indicates an increasing awareness of the metafictional nature of writing in general. Put simply and without getting too technical, the writing no longer masks itself as an attempt to reflect some "external reality" in quotes. Rather, it recognizes its self-reflective nature.

Put another way, the reality that the work of art presents is not something that exists on its own out there, but is rather something that is constructed during the act of writing. Representational art about the external world gives way to projective art about the internal world. Construction takes the place of imitation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines metafiction as:

"Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literalness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions, especially naturalism and traditional narrative techniques."

An example of this is the writing of the aforementioned William Gass. The Columbia Companion to the 20th-Century American Short Story states that William Gass's metafictional short stories are best understood in terms of their own processes—the world within the word, as Gass says, rather than as a mirror of the external world. Metafiction is concerned more with its own processes than with objective reality and life in the world. What appears to be characters, setting, and plot are not memetic representations of the natural world; they are actually devices for capturing the reader's attention and directing it to linguistic structures of the text's creative process language, repeated rhythms and sounds.

Is English language metafictional writing something new, something native to 20th and 21st-century writing? Not if one includes Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in the mix, originally published in 1749. Tom Jones features an author who talks directly to the reader and contains chapter headings such as, "Containing as much of the birth of the Foundling as is necessary or proper to acquaint the reader with in the beginning of the history," and subheadings the likes of "Containing little or nothing." Here, Fielding goes on to say:

"The reader will be pleased to remember that at the beginning of the second book of this history, we gave him a hint of our intention to pass over several large periods of time, which nothing happened worthy of being recorded in a chronicle of this kind as well."

In his introduction to a 1982 edition of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Leo Bersani analyzes what is often considered an unparalleled exemplar of the realist/naturalist genre and calls it an early, only half-explicit, not-yet-fashionable attempt to locate the drama of fiction in an investigation of the impulse to invent fictions rather than any psychologically, morally, or socially significant content.

Bersani goes on to say that the care with which Flaubert sought to make language transparent to reality consecrates the very opaqueness of language which he dreaded. The implication here is that (in) the art of Flaubert tried to take himself out of the picture and present a reality around and without any interventions—the artery he worked to shape the word into the object, the more he ended up putting up roadblocks to that reality and obscuring the precise objects he wished to capture. And this happened through the very act of dazzling readers with his writing skills and masterful ability to craft a fiction.

According to Paradoxa magazine's Brian Atterbury in his 1998 article, "Metafiction: Stories of Reading Metafiction as Fiction and Doubles as Critique."

In the article, Atterbury goes on to suggest that an instance of literary composition is actually three pieces of writing in one: the tale being told, the tale of the tale being told, and the critique of the tale being told. I would argue that there are many more permutations and combinations that, like Borges's self-referential stories and fictions, where entire universes are reflected in a mirror captured in their hexagonal rooms of the never-ending library, or begun in the "Garden of Forking Paths."

The possible roads to be taken turn out to be infinite. One of these possibilities is that of fictocriticism, first formulated by Amanda Nettelbeck in her 1998 "Notes Towards an Introduction to a Collection of Australian Women Writers." She describes it as creatively combining language normally used either exclusively for critical analysis or fiction. She describes it as a writing practice that makes use of self-reflexive activity: the fragment, intertextuality, the bending of narrative boundaries, crossing of genres, the capacity to adopt literary forms, hybridized writing moving towards fiction, invention, speculation, and criticism.

Fictocriticism and the infinite library

I would argue there are many permutations of this, like Borges’s self-referential stories, where entire universes are captured in the hexagonal rooms of a never-ending library or begun in The Garden of Forking Paths. One possibility is fictocriticism, first formulated by Amanda Nettlebeck. She describes it as creatively combining language either used for critical analysis or fiction. She describes it as a writing practice that makes use of self-reflexivity, the fragment, intertextuality, and the bending of narrative boundaries, crossing of genres, the capcity to adapt literary forms, hybrid hybridized writing, moving towards fiction, invention, speculation and criticism. Deduction explication of subjectivity— interior—and objectivity—exterior.

Interesting to note that fictocritical writing arose from the frustrations of feminist authors at being told what they could and could not write by canonical authorities, many of whom were long gone. As Anna Gibbs points out, it resists the "peremptory dictation of the institutional superego or the policing of the academic discipline, in order to listen more attentively to the range of tones and styles, from tirade to intimidation, from severity to seduction, to the precise and specific modes of the maintenance of authority that was not, after all, monolithic.

Fictocriticism is a way of writing for which there is no blueprint, and which must be constantly invented in you, in the face of the singular problems that arise in the course of engagement with what is researched. It is writing as research, stubbornly insisting on the necessity of a certain process in these days when writing is treated by those who determine what counts as research to be a transparent medium, always somehow after the event, a simple outcome of a research which always takes place elsewhere in the archive, in the field, or with a the focus group, or on the web.

In discovering the self, fictocriticism, blocks an authorial identity. It is writing as research, stubbornly insisting on a process. Elizabeth Patterson describes fictocriticism as a state of flux for writers, elusive of a unifying definition, but with the ability to collapse authorial identity and subjectivy the self into text. According to Michael Taussig, it is writing that exists between the real and the really made up.

The age of experimental writing

But fictocritical writing is only one of the approaches to experimentation in writing. In a 1998 interview, novelist and poet Susan Hawthorne outlined some of the reasoning behind new forms of, and new appraoches to, writing that may be of use to writers who are looking for ways to keep themselves relevant.

She said at the that time, "I think that women at the moment are experimenting more with form and content and style and with genre. The whole thing, I think it's also it's also happening among other groups like black writers, indigenous writers, etc., people coming from cultures which are not currently in dominance. I think that part, part of the reason that's happening is because we haven't had a voice, and the old forms don't necessarily suit us. When you have something different to say than you are forced to say it in different ways. And so you must seek out a form that's going to suit your needs, suit the needs of the text and of the content and the themes that you're dealing with."

Examples of metafictional writers

Whether one calls such writing metafictional, fictocritical, or gives it some other postmodern tag, one must not make the mistake of arguing that is valid only within ivory tower academia. Among the better known examples of such writing are all of Beckett's works, William Garcia's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Robert Coover's Pricksongs & Descants, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. In the latter, O'Brien, a Vietnam War veteran, produces a collection of short stories where he mixes naturalistic and often graphic descriptions of jungle combat with commentary on the necessary invention and fiction found in such war stories, as well as insights from a character by the name of Tim O'Brien.

Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

A very clear and unmistakable example of metafictional writing is Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Here is how the novel starts. “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Rraveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV!' Raise your voice -- they won't hear you otherwise -- 'I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!' Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: 'I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!' Or if you prefer, don't say anything: just hope they'll leave you alone.”

According to Patricia Waugh in her 1984 groundbreaking set of essays, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, metafiction is an elastic term which covers a wide range of fictions. There are those novels at one end of the spectrum, which take fictionality as a theme to be explored, whose formal self-consciousness is limited. At the center of this spectrum are those texts that manifest the symptoms of formal and ontological insecurity, but allow their deconstruction to be finally contextualized or naturalized, and given a total interpretation which constitute a new realism.

Finally, at the furthest extreme can be placed those fictions that, in rejecting realism more thoroughly, posit the world as a fabrication of competing semiotic systems, which never correspond to material conditions. Waugh goes on to ground this approach to writing in what she sees as a worldview that has come into being following the collapse of any canonical views or visions of a set reality, usually a reality based on Eurocentric principles or a variant of those principles as adopted by North Americans.

She states, "Contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures. The materialist, positivist and empiricist world-view on which realistic fiction is premised no longer exists. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that more and more novelists have come to question and reject the forms that correspond to this ordered reality (the well-made plot, chronological sequence, the authoritative omniscient author, the rational connection between what characters ‘do’ and what they ‘are’, the causal connection between ‘surface’ details and the ‘deep’, ‘scientific laws’ of existence)".

Of course, there are plenty of hazards connected to the metafictional path, the most pronounced being the inability and or unwillingness of most of us to accept the notion of identity as, according to Jacques Lacan, simply two mirrors facing each other in the space we call consciousness. Or, as Umberto Eco intimated, a system of signs that allows us to come to an understanding that in turn allows us to pretend to have essence with our existence. Something, in other words, to patch up along the way, as Vladimir says in Waiting for Godot, "They give birth astride a grave. The light gleams an instant, then its night once more."

At the same time, metafiction has an advantage that needs to be seriously considered. Because success does not rely on essences, identities, labels, and identifications on the continued existence of histories and hyphenations, because all that really matters is the ability to manipulate the fictional world and its infinitely rich landscape in all its beauty and hideousness, its fragility and robustness, its mirrors and libraries, because of all that, not even the inevitable erasure of the author of that universe as God can undo the creations themselves. They'll go on without you. That's as close to immortality as anyone will ever get.

Applying the metafiction vision to the page: Michael Mirolla's novel How About This...?

So, how does my latest novel, How About This?, fit in? Let's start with a brief description of the novel and how it is created, constructed. It's a little after the middle of the 21st century. Loving couple Elspeth and Marybeth are both shocked and excited when a stroller with identical twins is left on their back deck with a recorded message that warns them not to try to return the babies, or they could face arrest for kidnapping. Using false starts, footnotes, direct approaches to the reader, lists, questions about who the author, authors might be, possibly a collective of some kind that might not be human, and even a dose of self-criticism at the end of the novel, a self-described critic lashes out at the authors for what he feels are lacunae in their writing, the story unwinds from that point as well, and more work hard to create a family under the circumstances. This becomes even more difficult when they discover the babies come with unusual features that perhaps might explain why they were left in the first place. And it all takes place in a disintegrating world that may leave humans incapable of telling their own stories.

How About This? arose out of my usual combination of interests related to storytelling, more specifically, its future, more typical metafiction. Direct talk to the reader of footnotes. Critical analysis rebuttal. Perhaps a touch of virtual reality, joined with the possibility of AI-inspired writing. And I don't mean the full AI writing at this point, but what AI writing could become with its own world creation. At the same time, I wanted to create a story that at its center had a beating heart, with all that implies in terms of joy and pain and amusement and tragedy, and that reflected some of the concerns and problems of a near future world. To me, that means placing humans in situations that seem familiar in some ways: loving couples, families, parenting, life and death decisions. And not so familiar in other ways: mysterious twins appearing in the night, cell phones issuing trouble, troubling instructions and warnings, ambiguous sexual identities to stretch acceptance, all wrapped in that metafictional envelope.

In an earlier short story collection of mine, The Giulio Metaphysics III, a linked series of stories in the hope of evolving itself into a novel, the creator outright tells the reader that he is manipulating the character. In the first half, Giulio reluctantly does as the creator commands, including visiting a friend he hasn't seen since high school and now dying of AIDS. In the second half, the character rebels against the creator, reflecting, I guess, the existential state of many people today. And just like that existential state Giulio is lost, at one point, unable to even remember his name. In the end, Giulio and the creator become one and the same, trapped inside a glass-enclosed space where they/he must scratch upon the wall to tell the story that has just been told and thus to invent themselves, to invent their history, to invent their identities.

Have a vision, a worldview

Remember that fiction, no matter how realistic, is not an actual reflection of an external world. When writing novels, when writing short stories, you are creating bits and pieces of your own universe that may well touch in places the external world as we know it, but it isn't that world. Fction is bound only by your talent, hard work, and most importantly, your imagination is bound by the way you string together the elements of the language. The more rich your language, the better chance of succeeding. In the end, the trick is to find a balance between that imagination and the final understanding of the novel and or short story by others.

Too much raw imagination can lead to an entirely personal code, something only the writer can understand. Not enough imagination leads to prosaic writing and journalism. Nothing wrong with journalism or historical writing, but it isn't fiction.

I'll end this with that bit of promised advice for writers. Have a vision. The key to be a good writer of fiction be a short stories, novellas or novels. Aside from the usual skills and talents, determination, and never say die attitude, you need a worldview, some way of looking at the world that becomes your philosophy. Ask yourself, what are you trying to get across? What are you trying to achieve?

Writer's need to understand what's been done before

This is where knowledge of what has already been done comes in handy. The 20th was the century of Kafka, Joyce, Barthel, Gass. The explosion of Eastern European writers, the South Americans, Italians such as Calvino. French such as Radiguet, speculative fiction writers such as Stanislaw Lem, Philip K Dick, Harlan Ellison. You're not going to get a more powerful short story than Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream'.

What can you do as a writer that is differrent?

What did these writers do in their writing that was different and made it stand out? Well, aside from craft, competence and brilliance, I believe it was the fact that they created a vision, used pieces of the world, pieces of knowledge, fears, anxieties, self-awareness to create that vision, which in many cases didn't mirror the external world. At the same time, the writing was often predictive, prescient, connected to deeper levels of understanding, of looking at the world, at humans, their position, status in that world. Things such as existential angst, loss of meaning, self-construction and creation, collapsing hierarchies, and what that means. Check out Kafka's In The Penal Colony as an example.

So there you have it. My argument for a metafictional approach to writing is any good. Well, all I know is that it has worked for me and I've had fun doing it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the On Creative Writing podcast. Check me out at MichaelMirolla.com or on Facebook.

Michael Mirolla: Metafictional writing techniques

Based on Michael's audio essay, here are the core techniques and elements used to create self-referential fiction:

• Direct Authorial Address: Talking directly to the reader to break the "fourth wall" and acknowledge the act of reading.

• Self-Reflexivity: Alluding to the artificiality or "literariness" of the work within the text itself.

• Fictocriticism: Creatively combining critical analysis with fictional narrative, often using hybridized forms.

• Fragmentation and Intertextuality: Using broken narrative structures and referencing other texts to bend traditional boundaries.

• Non-Traditional Framing: Utilizing devices like footnotes, false starts, and lists to disrupt the standard flow of a story.

• Internal Critique: Including a "critic" character or a dose of self-criticism within the novel to lash out at the author’s own work.

• Linguistic Focus: Directing the reader's attention to the linguistic structures, sounds, and rhythms of the text rather than just the plot.

• Blending of Identities: Collapsing the authorial identity into the text or having characters and creators become one and the same.