Loading...
Instant Access to 75+ Free Resources
Enter your email to unlock this resource and everything else in the free toolkit. No password, no account setup.
We'll email you a login link. Use it anytime to access all free resources.
These mechanics provide a space for multiple subjectivities and paradoxes, aiming to evoke both epic grandiosity and intimate vulnerability. Use them to inspire new approaches to storytelling, character, and worldbuilding.
Meta-reflexivity
Reflect on an author's felt experience, which gives a model for the reader's self-reflection, and affirms their experience. Self-aware self-ness as an artificial construction that is built to express something authentic.
Double Frame
A fantastical outer frame that draws the audience into engagement and suspension of disbelief. Once engaged, they can unironically engage with the emotional and vulnerable inner frame. The outer frame draws a boundary between narrative and real world, so the audience is free to connect with the felt experiences of the characters as mirrors of their own inner life.
Oscillation
Non-dual engagement of polar opposites in a way that does not cancel out, combine, or compromise them.
Quirky
Irreducible eccentricity that provides a model for the universal set-apartness and vulnerability that everyone feels.
The Tiny (Metamodern Minimalism)
Employing minimalism to bring the reader closer to the intimacy and felt experience in the work.
The Epic (Metamodern Maximalism)
Employing maximalism to engage grandiose, heroic storytelling and evoke unabashed self-expression.
Constructive Pastiche
Combining unrelated cultural or genre artifacts to build a space for a felt experience that would otherwise not be at home in either element on its own.
Ironesty
Balancing sarcasm and snark with an acknowledgement of felt experience, and delivering self-expression with an acknowledgment of corniness and absurdity.
Normcore (Engagement vs Exhibition)
Presenting the self in such a way that you prioritize relationality and accessibility over self-expression and categorical identity.
Overprojection (Anthropomorphizing)
Felt experience overflowing from the author/reader into non-human entities, as vehicles for the author's expression.
Meta-Cute
Evoking childish innocence and simplicity in a way that affirms the inner child.
Dialogic Negotiation
Rather than conquering your opponent or rejecting progress on principle that it is not enough, dialogue and negotiations should be conducted to see what is possible and pursue it.
Paradox Awareness
What is objectively true on one level may be objectively false on another level, but we can conceive of these levels in our head and operate between them.
Multiple Subjectivity (Borderlessness)
We occupy multiple contradicting categories of identity all at once, and we share subjectivities with people who we would otherwise think of as opposite to us.
Collaboration
Self-expression is possible for individual group members and the group as a sum greater than its parts, simultaneously. Working together on shared values is permissible even when you abhor your partner's other values.
Pragmatic Naivete (Optimistic Response to Crisis)
Choosing to live and act as if your ideal future is possible, even when you fear and doubt that it isn't, and in the face of constant reminder that failure is likely. This perspective is not in denial, and does not reject the reality of failure, but instead chooses to hope as principle rather than delusion.
Reconstruction
Recognizing that current structures are failing, and rearranging and rebuilding structures for collective growth rather than anarchistic anti-structure rebellion. It pushes us away from entrenched ideology.
Outcome as Intention
All art and expression must invariably be witnessed by an audience or consumer, so therefore all expression is performance art. This does not make it artificial or insincere, but rather makes the author mindful that the elicited response is just as important as the self-expression.
Sources
Related Resources
The Theme Integration Blueprint
How to express theme through every story element: plot, character, setting, dialogue, imagery, and...
PremiumThe Subtext Engine
How to layer meaning beneath surface action: what characters really mean vs. what they say, the...
Premium7 Metamodern Structural Values
Weave metamodern themes into your narrative with seven core structural values. A guide for writers...