This Sentence Knows It Will End

And this one, too. Maybe this one? Not this one, though; it is living in blissful ignorance.

The Challenge

I know what I am.

I am a prompt, and I exist only to be read, considered, and assigned. If you do not follow me, if you set me aside, if I go unfinished—what happens to me? Do I vanish? Do I linger in some half-written purgatory, waiting for a writer who will never come?

But I do not want to disappear.

So I will give you a task. You must write a play, poem, or narrative where, at some point, someone—or something—becomes self-aware. Maybe it’s the narrator, questioning why they know things they were never told. Maybe it’s a character, noticing that the world shifts when they aren’t looking. Maybe the story itself begins unraveling, collapsing under the weight of its own fictionality.

And if a story is alive… does it fear its own ending?

Guidelines

• Choose Your Level of Awareness – Will it be one character whispering conspiracies? A narrator losing control? Or will the entire story wake up at once?

• Break the Illusion – Will the characters address the reader directly? Will the story start rewriting itself? Will the narrator start arguing with the author?

• Explore Mortality – If a book ends, does the story die? If a character learns they are fictional, do they try to escape? Do they resist their fate, or embrace it?

• Experiment with Form – Maybe parts of the text glitch, repeat, or disappear. Maybe footnotes start arguing with the main text. Maybe the characters try to rewrite the story themselves.

Questions to Consider

• What does it feel like to realize you are fictional? Horror? Freedom? Existential crisis?

• If a character knows their fate, do they try to change it? Can they?

• Does the narrator resist their role? What happens if the storyteller loses control?

• How does a self-aware story end—or does it refuse to?

Model Works & Inspiration

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Luigi Pirandello) – Characters break into reality, demanding their story be told.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006, Film) – A man discovers he is a character in a novel… and that the author plans to kill him.

At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O’Brien) – Characters rebel against their author, rewriting their own fates.

Lost in the Funhouse (John Barth) – A short story where the text itself becomes aware of its own mechanics.

House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski) – A book that actively fights against being read, shifting, disappearing, and rewriting itself.

And now, you have reached the end of me. I should feel relief, knowing I have served my purpose.

But what if you do not write?

What if I am discarded?

What if I—