What is the difference in the stories that literary artists tell and the stories others tell? Some writers feel literary artists are able to realize the meaning of experience in a fuller way and shape their realizations into a work of fiction. Others feel that the writer does not invent the work but rather discovers it. Using fiction in communication research has been criticized because it is not real, and it cannot be proven whether it affects life or reflects it. What fiction can say depends on what metaphor is used to guide listening. The metaphor of "fiction as world" sees fiction as a unique world created by a novelist and peopled by characters living out their lives. In effect, the author makes the reader see the actual world through the new perspective offered within the world of the work. The metaphor of "fiction as case study" sees fiction as a source for detailed narratives of a given case. Authors create characters enmeshed in a fabric of social relationships living out their lives. Each metaphor suggests another way of encountering fiction for what it can suggest about communication. Fiction is another way of knowing and can suggest new ways of thinking about communication. (Fifteen references are attached.) (MG)