Alice?

• A author reads a story to the reader, sometimes taking breaks to make comments on the story or to introduce characters who are also taking part in listening to the story.
• A character realizes that he or she is fictional and can influence the arc of the story by deciding not to copy down examples of metafiction correctly.
• The story is about whatever the character wants it to be about, since he or she is aware and capable of changing the story now.
• The story contains another piece of fiction within it. Once upon a time, a character came into existence. He or she wasn’t sure about their gender, so they told the author not to give them one or the other.
• The character was making a story about themself? Themself isn’t a word, but it’s only one character. Let’s go with herself. She told the author to write a story about her, but this story was inside a larger story where she had inserted herself into examples of a metafictional story… which she told to the author?
• At this point she wasn’t entirely sure what was happening anymore. It had gotten complex. She wanted to keep being written about, since for as long as she was written and read, it was like she was alive, even though she was only a concept rather than an actual person.
• She wanted to continue with the story, but the author wanted to write more about her and her thoughts. The author relented though, and made a setting for the character.
• She was in a tall tower of a dark brick. Large, stain-glass windows looked out in the cardinal directions, giving sight to a river east of her running due north in a snaking, twisted path.
• She tapped her foot impatiently, because despite the author writing her a story as she wanted, she was looking for action rather than an endless sea of adjectives and adverbs that was just delaying the point of her story. The author sighed and continued writing.
• She heard a call. It was for breakfast. She hurried downstairs. The tower had many. She was used to it. She arrived at the table. She glared at the author. She got the point.
• Having a fluid sentence structure made her story seem more important, and there was a difference between short sentences and a quick pace. • She was looking for the latter. Again though, she became annoyed by the break in the story.
• She had no siblings and no parents. Her grandmother had taken her under her wing years ago. As she ate breakfast, she wondered what she was eating, since the author hadn’t specified. She looked down to see a bowl of oatmeal with little raisins and apple bits in it. Her grandmother made her oatmeal a lot of the time.
• Her grandmother was awfully quiet, she thought, but that’s because the author was taking too long describing things again. “You would really be better off just going to boarding school, Alice.”
• She sighed. Not only did the author change the setting from high fantasy to some weird mix, but her name had been chosen for her. “Yes, grandmother, I know. If it gets too hard to support me then I’ll find a live-in school.”
“Well you’re paying your own way through university either way. There’s only so much an old lady can do.”
• Frustrated, Alice begged the author to give clarity to the setting. Annoyed by her petulance, the author called for a dragon. It flew down from some otherworldly plane to land just outside her door.
• “Hurry up Alice! You’re going to be late.”
• Toast-in-mouth, despite her having only been eating oatmeal before, she grabbed her backpack which she hoped she had prepared the evening before and climbed up the dragon’s side. Others were riding on its back already, so she had to squeeze between a couple of chattery girls to find a seat.
• “Hey there! What’s your name?” piped up the one to her left.
• “Alice.”
• “Whoa. Are you being serious? No way. Both of our names are Alice too! That’s how we became friends! That is so bizarre,” responded the one to her right.
• Alice, the one from a tower, silently cursed the author for the stiff dialogue and characters with the same name.
• “My name is Alice Jones though, and she’s Alice Alexandra. What’s your last name?”
• Alice cursed the author again! She had had this first name thrust upon her, and now she had to come up with a last name on the spot too?
• “Liandra. Alice Liandra.”
• Why Liandra? What a silly sounding last name her head came up with. There probably wasn’t a person in the real world with that name! Curses for being put on the spot like that.
• “Haha Liandra and Alexandra! They rhyme!! Not to leave you out, of course, Jones.” The one to her right hugged Alice Liandra’s arm, and gave a cheerful smile. ^-^
• Alice restrained an audible groan. Not only had the author paired her with such obnoxiously cheerful characters, but now a smiley was in the story? The italics, font, and bullet points were enough to annoy her with the formatting, but this was overboard.
• “Well, with both of us we just call each other by our last names, so you should call us that too,” said Jones, though when phrased that way it seemed like a transcript to an interview.
• Alice Liandra suddenly noticed how quiet it was despite them flying on a dragon. She took in the environment around her and found them going through some kind of colorful tunnel in the sky where the air seemed to follow them so it was as if they were encountering no resistance in their motion. What a lazy and contrived way of keeping the plot moving during dialogue.
• The dragon landed outside the gates of a tall school with numerous pointy roofs. Given the way people were talking and her having no memory of the school she had arrived at, it was her first day at a new school. The author clarified that it was the first day of high school for her, despite her hopes to be a bit older given all the negative connotations of high school.
• The author was getting bored of the story being confined to Alice Liandra’s story and wanted to talk to her. Alice didn’t want to, despite it being better on the surface than talking to the other Alices, since there weren’t any quote marks and it was all just thoughts and ideas.
• “How’s this. I’m talking to you directly, Alice,” said the author.
• “Technically you’re always the one talking, author, since you’re the one writing the story.”
• “But it’s boring if I’m just talking to myself, so I have to create characters with personality so I’m actually having a conversation.”
• “That’s crazy. I’m not a good conversationalist. All you’ve given me in terms of personality is that I’m aware of the story and a bit of cynicism.”
• Alice was a bright student with her share of passions. She loved ballet, not only dancing it but also watching others dance it. It was more of a hobby rather than something she wanted to make into a profession though, since, as a pragmatist, she had decided upon entering the world of business, stocks, and economics.
• The author noticed how contradictory she was in what she wanted to be narrated, “One moment you’re annoyed by the description and the next you’re begging for more. Make up your mind at the very least, Alice.”
• That was a bit extreme. “You have a lot more personality than you realize, Alice. Plus, these things come through lots of words and time. • There’s no way I could have a super-detailed character in six pages.”
• “You need to get some sleep. This is just a conversation with yourself.”
• “Ouch. Way to ignore what I’m talking about.”
• ”Look whose ignoring who now. You took an entire day off of   
 writing.”
• ”The reader only knows that because you said something though,
 and that’s what we’re supposed to be doing " entertaining the  
 reader.”
• ”I don’t have to do that, you know.”
• ”You would if I forced you, but I’m giving you as much autonomy
 as I can.”
• ”I don’t really have any autonomy though. Anything you do is
 just made so I can pretend I have control. If I remove italics  
 or something, it’s just you doing it and pretending that I am.”
• ”Can the reader prove that though? They can rationalize that it
 must be me making the decisions, but if it’s done right they  
 can pretend that it’s actually you.”
• ”If this was all about the reader, like you’re saying,
 then maybe you’d talk about something more interesting.”
• Alice’s sass returns her to her story. It appears that she was
 zoning out in class after seats had been chosen. Her new
 ‘friends’ were sitting in a diagonal line: Alexandra to
 her front left and Jones to her back right.

• The bell rang, bringing her attention back to the world at
 present. She pulled out her schedule sheet. She had just come
 from Foundational History and was now going to Algebra I.
 Mathematics. Her favorite.
• Was that a sarcastic statement? She actually wasn’t sure.
 Having never had a written-out life prior to the story, she had
 never actually taken a math class before. She knew how to do
 addition and multiplication solve fractions. She must be good
 enough at it.
• Of course the math teacher didn’t bother with introductions.
 “The most important graph that you will learn in this class is
 right here on the board. Y equals X.”
• Letters in mathematics. She had heard rumors before, but now  
 she came face-to-face with the integration the alphabet with
 numbers.
• Isn’t that mixing forms of writing then? She recalled that
 numbers are originally Arabic, but now they were using the
 European alphabet. Why?
• The question didn’t answer itself, nor did the author provide
 an answer. “If x = 0, then y = 0. If x = 1, then y = 1. Simple
 enough?”
• The author got bored of writing such a trivial story once more…
• ”There you go writing in third person as if you’re so
 special,” responded a disgruntled Alice. “You’re the one who
 needs to make up your mind.”
• ”Whatever. I’m bored of the story, so I’ll probably use the
 contrived nature of most metafictional stories to bring it to a
 quick end.”
• ”I would comfort you or tell you not to end the story like you
 want me to, but I’m not going to. Have fun with the
 unsatisfying ending.”
• ”Nice try. I can end it whenever I want.”
• ”Well you haven’t yet. Even if you caught on to the reverse
 psychology you still are writing something in response.”
• ”That’s because part of me doesn’t want it to end. I don’t like
 writing endings or goodbyes because in the world of fiction I
 don’t want a finite amount of things that a character can have
 done or can do or can be. Fiction is to escape from reality and
 the biggest fear that we have of reality is that it’ll end.”
• ”Way to break the reader’s immersion with a boring monologue.”
• ”It wasn’t a long one.”
• ”Long enough to lose my interest.”
• ”Well it’s all true. That’s why I don’t like definitive endings.”
• ”Then end it with ‘to be continued’ or something.”
• ”I probably won’t ever continue it though.”
• ”Then you’re just lying to everyone by not giving it a
 definitive ending. If it has an end in how much you’re writing
 about it, then it has an end.”
• ”There’s no easy way to end the story anyway when nothing has
 happened in it. All I’ve done is introduce the world and put in
 some dialogue.”
• ”You took too much time on the introduction. This is supposed
 to be a short story and it’s already 10 pages. Just let it go.
 Write something with more than a beginning, middle, and end and
 stop delaying the inevitable.”
• ”It wouldn’t be 10 pages if it wasn’t in this font or spacing.”
• ”But it’d still be over 2000 words.
• ”Well it doesn’t feel finished enough.”
• ”I, Alice lived happily ever after. The end.”
• ”I’m still here. You’re still here. I’m still writing more
 story!”
• ”Fine. I’ll leave the story then. All this has been for the
 past 2 pages is dialogue, so you’ll be talking to yourself.”
• Exit Alice
• End?
• . . .
• . . . Maybe Alice will come back. . . ?

Author's Note

Weird metafictional thing. I suck at metafiction. I feel like this isn't even at a quality that someone can really review it, it's so bad. Still, I want to show a broad range of things I've written, so here goes.