Many mediums have used the techniques, including comics, with PROMETHEA being a good example.Īll the Inkheart books, and especially INKDEATH are full of metafiction techniques. In the Wikipedia entry on Metafiction, examples as early as “Don Quixote,” “The Canterbury Tales,” and “One Thousand and One Nights” are cited. While more popular now than ever in history, it’s not a new idea. It’s a sort of mind game, where characters break the fourth wall and talk about knowing they’re in a work of fiction, or perhaps the author of the book appears in it and addresses the characters or the reader directly. We suspend our normal view of reality willingly.Īnd opposed to this is the concept of metafiction, in which the writer, through various techniques, keeps reminding the reader that he is reading a work of fiction. A more traditional description would be “the willing suspension of disbelief.” We all love stories, and if a story is well told it can temporarily convince us of many things we know aren’t possible.
Good writing (of any kind) achieves this by what Neil Gaiman might call telling convincing lies. On the one hand, fantasy succeeds by convincing the reader that things they know can’t be real ARE real, at least while reading the book.
It also represents an interesting clash of literary ideas and techniques. Just finished the third and final book of the Inkheart trilogy, the first two being INKHEART and INKSPELL respectively, and it’s a fine series and a great read.
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