Abstract Many people assume that fictional entities are encapsulated in the world of fiction. I show this cannot be right. Some works fiction tell us about pieces poetry, music, or theatre written by characters. Such creations creations, as call them. Their authors do not exist. But does take away we can perform, recite, otherwise generate actual instances such works. This means bring individua...

Within the WHIM project, we study fictional ideation: processes for automatically inventing, assessing and presenting fictional ideas. Here we examine the foundational notion of the plausibility of fictional ideas, by performing an empirical study to surface the factors that affect judgements of plausibility. Our long term aim is to formalise a computational method which captures some intuitive...