There's a moment in Sarah Manguso's The Guardians when she writes, "I try not to make anything up, and I fail every time." I get giddy when I come across lines like that - when the writer is not only making a meta-move, but one that troubles truth and fiction, the nature of genre itself.

How long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily who we are?

When I admire a writer, it's for the recognizable palette - Hemingway's minimalism, the dialogue, those isolated bar scenes. But with each story or novel, he shows me something different within the framework he's built - like noticing that there's a chair in the corner I didn't see in another story.

There's a moment in Sarah Manguso's The Guardians when she writes, "I try not to make anything up, and I fail every time." I get giddy when I come across lines like that - when the writer is not only making a meta-move, but one that troubles truth and fiction, the nature of genre itself.

Nick Flynn is another writer I admire - his fragmented sections, his playfulness with genre, his urgency. The palette in his work is his style, a voice that is singular, and that's what I think writers should strive for, to have a style and a voice that is only theirs.

Simply put, meta-writing is writing that is self-conscious, self-reflective, and aware of itself as an artifice. The writer is aware she's writing, and she's aware there's a reader, which goes all the way back to Montaigne's often-used address "dear reader," or his brief introduction to Essais: "To the Reader." It can be done in a myriad of ways.

We read the world - television, movies, songs, books - and the people in it through the lens of our own lives.