The Power of Meta-Fiction

Sarah Beth Durst has written a delightful fantasy novel - Into the Wild - which details the adventures of fairytale characters ... who have escaped the fairytale.  I'll post a proper review, soon ... but, in the meantine, I wanted to say a little about "meta-fiction," in general...

What is "meta-fiction"?  Well, it's fiction in which the story is in some sense about the very telling of the story.  You could have characters escaping from one story into another - as in Durst's novel - or discovery of a novel within a novel that tells the story of the first novel ...

There's something intellectually delicious about this.  Indeed, any time there is any action around the boundaries of stories - whether from characters leaving stories (also seen  in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero), or between stories and external realities, you usually have something good and important on the pages or the screen.  In fact, in Schwarzenegger's case, this meta-energy may have spilled over into his successful political career...

I guess my own novel, The Plot to Save Socrates, is a little meta-valent ... Certainly since Sierra Waters sent me that letter...