 This question is perhaps best answered by giving a somewhat different account of the generating process. Thus, some creationists (Schiffer 1996, 2003; Thomasson 2003a,b) say that a fictional object comes into being as an abstract artifact not when an author first conceives of it, but only once a certain make-believe process has come to an end, namely, the process in which someone—typically, a story-teller—pretends that there is an individual who is such-and-such and does so-and-so. It is disputable whether this provides a sufficient condition for ficta generation; perhaps something else is needed, such as a reflexive stance on the very make-believe process itself (Voltolini 2006, 2015a). But whatever the right account, another question remains: even if we agree on the nature of the process-type that gives rise to a fictional object, what is the thing that is purportedly generated in this way? What are the identity conditions for fictional objects? Creationists typically do not think that a fictional object possesses the properties that characterize it in the story in which it appears. A fictional object simply has those properties according to the story. It is not true of Holmes, for instance, that ‘he’ (or it) is a detective—only physical objects, not an abstract artifact, can be a detective. What is true of Holmes is that ’he’ is a detective according to the Holmes stories (equally, Holmes is male according to those stories, and so deserving of the masculine pronoun “he”). In general, for creationists the only properties that fictional objects genuinely possess are the properties that neo-Meinongians would call extranuclear or take to be externally predicated: properties like being a fictional detective or being Doyle’s creation or even being a detective according to the Holmes stories (cf. Thomasson 1999). The approach thus fails to account for the idea, mentioned earlier, that there must be a sense in which fictional objects actually have the properties that characterize them in the relevant stories.