Fiction is writing that tells made-up stories about imaginary events or characters, even if they feel very real. Novels, short stories, and many movies are types of fiction.
It comes from Latin “fictio,” meaning “a fashioning” or “a making,” from “fingere,” meaning “to shape” or “to invent.” At first it meant a shaping of stories, not necessarily lying.
Fiction and “fictional” share roots with “figure” and “feign,” all about shaping or forming something. We often use fiction to get closer to emotional truth, even though the events themselves never happened.
"Fiction" itself is neutral, but fiction as a field has a history of gendered assumptions: women’s writing was often categorized as less serious or confined to certain genres, and male authors were treated as default authorities. Marketing and canon formation have also reflected gendered biases.
Use "fiction" without devaluing genres associated with women (e.g., romance, domestic fiction), and avoid language that treats women’s or gender-diverse authors’ work as niche or secondary to a male-dominated "mainstream."
When discussing fiction, explicitly recognize women and gender-diverse authors as central contributors to literary innovation, not exceptions or side notes.
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