This week: Enough grammar. Let's get into what this series of essays is really all about - what words do we use when we talk about words? We're going to start big by discussing a word that encompasses every myth, legend, folktale, and story ever told: fiction. (And then housekeeping, trivia, and footnotes! ) Let’s get into it.
Fiction. It’s a tricky word. On the one hand, it’s the word that tells us a story is made-up. The word we use to say someone is not being completely forthright. The one we use to suggest that this is all in someone’s head, it’s not real. It’s a lie. On the other hand, it’s the word that means that this is a story, just something to entertain us! It’s only a story. Just a story. Nothing but a story.
Here’s a particularly thorough definition from Merriam-Webster to show you what I mean.
1a: something invented by the imagination or feigned
specifically : an invented story
1b: fictitious literature (such as novels or short stories)
1c: a work of fiction
2a: an assumption of a possibility as a fact irrespective of the question of its truth
2b: a useful illusion or pretense
3: the action of feigning or of creating with the imagination
As complete as that is, I suggest that there is something yet missing from that definition, which is whether both parties understand that the communication passing between them is made-up. Consider the case of the movie The Blair Witch Project1. Everything about the marketing of the movie suggested that it was, in fact, a documentary. To the extent that many people were confused when, after the movie’s success, the actors began to appear in interviews. Once that happened, there was a backlash against the filmmakers as the audience felt they had been tricked. In this case, the definition of fiction moved from our usual use of fiction as a marketing category to one of deceit.
To that end, we can trace the start of fiction (in English) as a literary classification to the mid-twelfth century. Prior to this, books and everything in them, was true. Whether they were writing about the lives of the saints or relating the “history” of Beowulf, things written in books were considered to be factual accounts. People understood that there might be embellishment or exaggeration to make a point, but, by and large, if it was written in a book, it was a fact2.
Fiction existed, of course. It is, arguably, one of the defining features of humanity and telling stories has been a part of human history as long as there has been human history. But, until the middle ages, spending the immense amount of time and effort to record something in a book was reserved only for factual records3. Telling stories was reserved for after the day’s work was done, while sitting around the hearth.
And all was well and good until the 1150s when writers looked at what was happening in other countries and languages and began importing and changing those ideas into their own. Soon, works of fiction in which both the author and audience knew that the tale was made-up began to appear on the scene4. Over the centuries, fiction began to take on a greater role in literature and other forms of entertainment, finally culminating in the coining of the word fiction in the early 15th century.
Etymology online traces the evolution of fiction from 13th century French to its use in English as “works of the imagination” in the 1590s. However, its use as a category for books and other media did not arise until the 19th century.
Fiction is, of course, so broad a term as to be next to useless as a categorization. So, instead, we have divided and subdivided it over the years into genres, media, and marketing labels. In truth, this process is ongoing5. Bookstores and libraries give us science-fiction, literary fiction, narrative fiction, travel fiction and so on, while the internet brings about new technologies like interactive fiction. But, in the end, each new hyphenate and sub-category are just another way of telling us, the audience, that this is a made-up story. Do with it what you will.
Housekeeping
Substack, the platform I use to publish this newsletter, has recently rolled out a footnotes feature. I’m trying it out in this issue. Good? Bad? Prefer the old way? Let me know what you think by commenting or sending me an email. I’d love to hear from you.
Sources
I read two articles for most of my information about the rise of fiction in English. They are The Invention of Fiction by Laura Ashe and The Origin of Fiction by Niels Ebdrup.
Trivially Yours
As we all know, the counter-part of fiction is non-fiction, or, all the stuff that isn’t made up. You might assume that it arose in the English lexicon alongside fiction. Turns out, it was first used in 1866 by the Boston Public Library. And now you know.
Stay curious,
J
I hate this movie. Never need to see it again. Ever.
This attitude persists to this day. Which is why the phrase “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” was invented.
And religious texts, but those were regarded as true by the people who read them at the time they were written.
Accounts vary as to which works those were; many scholars seem to agree that tales about King Arthur appeared around this time and that they were understood to be fiction.
As an example, YA fiction was not actually a category in the library when I was a YA. Instead, there was a shelf in the kids’ fiction room for “advanced readers."