Round #9,834 of Literary vs. Genre, just as pointless as ever

[owlectomy]

Normally I would not get picky about someone choosing to excoriate Dan Brown for being a bad writer, but this is pretty terrible.

It's worth dealing with the difference again, since everyone seems to have forgotten it or become chary of the articulation. Mainly this: that even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That's the way writing works and lots of people who don't write novels don't seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

If you are writing a dirty-realist story full of flat detail about two married people who don't like each other very much, then a certain percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise, no? Read through the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories and tell me that they don't all start to blend together after a while. Can I say that without being all "All literary fiction is depressing and boring and exactly the same!"? I like lots of literary fiction. I think that as writers we are all leaves on a huge tree, with some leaves brushing up against us and some all the way on the other side of the tree and to champion being original and uninfluenced rather misses the point.

FOR EVERYONE, lots of decisions are already made at the point where you start writing, or start thinking about the kind of thing that you might like to write. Your own life experiences and your own reading experiences feed into that, and feed into each other. One person reads classic science fiction and finds something that speaks to them, and that's what drives them to write. Another reads classic science fiction and finds something that speaks to them sometimes, almost, and it's the friction there that drives them to write. And for both of those people, science fiction provides a set of tools and tropes and a way of talking about things. It's not, "Oh, I'm writing science fiction, so I don't have to think about this and that"; it's, "I'm thinking about this and that, and science fiction gives me a way for thinking about those things."

Comments

[oursin]

It's not as though litfic doesn't include recognisable subgenres like 'coming of age story' and the 'fond memories of vagina' one that I linked to the take-down of recently. Or even 'adultery in Hampstead (or similar locale)'.

There's a lot of stuff you get in genre that seems to have vanished from litfic - e.g. crime novels which deal with murder in the context of people's working lives and often have a lot of detail about same. George Eliot didn't have problems with showing Garth being a land agent and teaching Fred Vincy the ropes of same, or Lydgate being a doctor, but somehow the working life (except Being A Writer or equivalent artist) is not something that features much in litfic.

[deborah]

I've always hated how "genre" has become a code word for "books that are neither Western Canon ™ or in the genre of depressing modernist fiction that's vaguely 'experimental' if you call repeating the experiments of the last fourteen Booker Prize winners to be 'experimental'".

It's all genre. And it's all exploratory within genre, even in the most seemingly conventional genre books. Stephenie Meyer completely breaks some genre conventions. So does David Eddings. Meanwhile, Possession was as cookie cutter as any book of its type.

[owlectomy]

If you say that genre is all about audience expectations (as one of my favorite professors said), then it becomes almost completely impossible to write outside of a genre -- even if I buy a book of weird textual experiments, it's because I want to buy a book of weird textual experiments and that's the way the book is marketed at me. I understand the thrill of the book that completely subverts the storytelling expectations I've grown up with -- my high school World Literature teacher confronting us to be honest if we thought premodern Japanese narrative was boring! -- but... if you keep doing it for sixty years, you're no longer being Daring; you're writing in a genre.