Heh. I'm rereading The Secret Country books right now.
Have you read Michael Ende's The Neverending Story? Deeply influential on me as a kid, and deeply metafictional.
It's anime, not fiction, but Princess Tutu is also deeply metafictional. A writer was telling a story, he died before it was through, and his characters escaped the tale--but he's still, even though dead, trying to get the story going again, and trying to control it. He finally resorts into bringing in a new character--and along the way changing a duck into a girl who herself can change into a magical ballerina--but of course, she does things he doesn't expect, too.
Both Neverending Story and Tutu do it well. But both also make very clear that this is metafiction from the start.
In my current book (Secret of the Three Treasures), I have a character who very self-consciously tells the story of her life as it's happening--and uses that story to help turn herself into the adventurer she dreams of being, rather than the ordinary suburban kid everyone else sees. There world of story isn't separate from our world, but it does change how she interacts with our world. In telling her story, she helps make it the story she wants it to be.
I love books where the characters get to interact with the story. I think the tricky (but also fun) thing is, you then have to figure out how the story world and our world relate to, and influence, one another.
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Have you read Michael Ende's The Neverending Story? Deeply influential on me as a kid, and deeply metafictional.
It's anime, not fiction, but Princess Tutu is also deeply metafictional. A writer was telling a story, he died before it was through, and his characters escaped the tale--but he's still, even though dead, trying to get the story going again, and trying to control it. He finally resorts into bringing in a new character--and along the way changing a duck into a girl who herself can change into a magical ballerina--but of course, she does things he doesn't expect, too.
Both Neverending Story and Tutu do it well. But both also make very clear that this is metafiction from the start.
In my current book (Secret of the Three Treasures), I have a character who very self-consciously tells the story of her life as it's happening--and uses that story to help turn herself into the adventurer she dreams of being, rather than the ordinary suburban kid everyone else sees. There world of story isn't separate from our world, but it does change how she interacts with our world. In telling her story, she helps make it the story she wants it to be.
I love books where the characters get to interact with the story. I think the tricky (but also fun) thing is, you then have to figure out how the story world and our world relate to, and influence, one another.