This post was mentioned on Twitter by Storytellers: New post: the happy death of “genre vs literary” in the days of the Technorenaissance (http://cli.gs/NsEPs) http://cli.gs/NsEPs...

I’d be willing to bet Lyle wouldn’t mind, and also that those who know him well might have a hard time keeping track of everyone in other pop culture lime lights. Nice catch on details, but sort of off on relevance to the topic.

Sorry, but I’ve read a LOT of good books over the last few years and many of them were by new authors. They didn’t all suck, and they weren’t all written for third graders. In point of fact, Justine herself is fairly new to the scene, has a sophisticated style and writes to adults – both publishers and marketers got her books on the shelves.

The fact that the biggest marketing pushes go to the Da Vinci Codes and Twilights isn’t any different now from other time periods, as far as I can see (and I’ve seen a bunch of them). The crunch, obviously isn’t helping the cause of the writer, but to say that because of it only low-brow dreck hits the the shelves just isn’t accurate.

Sorry, but I pretty much stopped reading this piece after that line.

Marketing and sales of books has nothing (or virtually nothing) whatsoever to do with ‘love of the book’ and everything (or almost everything) to do with the money and the market. Publishers are so squeezed these days that the only things they are putting on the shelves are sure-sellers – which is absolutely not any kind of guarantee of quality, genre-ness or literariness, regardless of how you define either of those terms.

What makes it to the shelves (and the big screen and the little screen) these days are works that, for the most part, will appeal to the LEAST common denominator. In other words – trash and garbage that is chosen because it is comprehensible to those with the equivalent of a 4th grade reading and comprehension level.

So what does ‘literary’ mean? At the far end of the spectrum it means ‘beholden to no one’. Literary fiction, unlike genre fiction, is allowed to aspire to art: to be a work defined by itself as opposed to market demands or consumer expectations. As an author you have the right to go as far out on that plank as you want — even to the point of writing a work that only a handful of people may ever understand.

But…you’re not obligated to. You can pull back a bit, sink your teeth into a plot, and STILL flex every literary muscle you’ve got.

Or you can pull back even more and write in a genre. Raymond Chandler wrote detective novels, yet it’s really hard to keep him out of the literary conversation.

So there’s a continuum here, and there’s an overlapping of the terms, and it gets very sticky when you try to nail it down or sort it out.

Which is why I gave up trying to categorize and just give thanks that there are so many options.

– Sully

You’ve struck a chord that I’ve plucked many times in the past. I like your sort of twist on it though, explaining to those who specifically set out to write formulaic genre crap in an artless fashion that they are wasting their time.

It’s fiction – in point of fact, it’s all fantasy. Some is good, and some is not. Some is art, and some is crap. Some is literary, and if literature isn’t literary – um – it’s not literature, right?

I would go a step further with this, though, because nothing irritates me more than artsy, poseuriffic litfic. If you set out to write something “literary” and that is what you have in mind, if you are consciously shooting for that literary fiction niche (whatever the hell it actually is) you are in the same boat as the guy trying to write a zombie novel without worrying over quality or craft.

You should write what needs writing – what feels important. You should write it in the manner / fashion it feels best leaving the tips of your fingers. You should – in fact – just write, if you are a writer and quit worrying so much about what KIND of writer the world will perceive you to be. The world, in general, isn’t all that perceptive anyway.

DNW