posted
For Christmas I made a wish list on Amazon and asked for a handful of books on writing. I have three shelves full already, but these sounded interesting in one of the lists that Amazon keeps sending me, monthly, I believe. And they allow me to peek at them. You know -- table of contents; first pages; surprise me (a random look inside).
Generally books on writing are either totally worthless or they have some one or two insights worth knowing but not worth buying the book for. But these also had that # new or used from $x.xx so I made a wish list and emailed it to my husband pointing out the cheap possibilities.
Christmas came and so did all of the books I had pointed out.
This one, BREAK INTO FICTION: 11 STEPS TO BUILDING A STORY THAT SELLS, was one of them. Kind of a cheesy title and the authors' names are down at the bottom of the cover in almost mice type. I don't remember how much the used copy was, but I think all of the ones I asked for were under $5.
Anyway, (oh, since I'm going to quote - the authors are Mary Buckham and Dianna Love. Ever heard of either of them? I haven't.) on page xviii they define "Literary Fiction" as this.
Not to be confused with literature, Literary Fiction is based on the reader's belief system that one cannot change their world but they can understand it better. The plot structure of literary fiction does not move toward a specific goal but involves peeling away the emotions and dark secrets of the human condition in an attempt to understand better. The protagonist in Literary Fiction need not grow or change over the course of the story.
I read this as meaning -- Literary Fiction is based on the reader's own belief system that one [the reader] cannot change their [the reader's own world view] world but they [the reader] can understand it [the world at large] better.
What do you guys here think? [italics are mine]
[This message has been edited by arriki (edited December 25, 2009).]
posted
The implication of that statement is that the main character in literary fiction can grow and change, but need not, whereas in non-literary fiction, the main character must grow and change.
I don't think I'd accept that, especially in some of the less sophisticated "adventure"-type stuff I read from time to time---sometimes it's necessary, but (like literary fiction), sometimes it's not.
posted
In my experience when people go to define 'Literary Fiction' (if they are proponents of it) they end up just saying what they value in fiction. (If they are detractors they end up saying what they don't like in fiction.) I find this definition such, which doesn't make it very helpful.
For me in literary fiction the poetry of the language is the most important thing. If you strip away all other elements that is what still passes for literary.
That doesn't mean it will be good literary fiction if all there is is poetry of the language.
posted
Robert, I think what the definition was saying was just what these authors think Literary Fiction povs can do. They CAN "not change" but they can also change. I think you're reading too much into it to think that implies that genre fiction must always have povs who change. You're thinking of James Bond and Conan and other action stories, I surmise. However, I don't think this definition can be extended that far as to exclude those from the ranks of genre writing.
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posted
In my experience, a work of fiction being classed as "literary" (rather than genre, mainstream, whatever) is simply a mater of academic decision. Authors like Atwood, Rusdhie, Calvino, Borges, etc - literary. Atuhors who write similar social/surrealist SF - not literary. Just, y'know, because they are, or aren't.
Basically some critic somewhere decides that author X is sufficiently "literary", and make it so.
In general, "literary" fiction seems to overlap completely with mainstream and genre fiction, but some authors just get put into the "literary" box, as listed above. Why they are chosen over others I honestly have no idea.
posted
A lot of that quote makes no sense to me. But one thing does. What I've learned is that the writers and readers of current literary fiction value prose style, character, and even setting, above plot. Plot is something of a dirty word in those circles. That's what I've come to learn is the main thing. Characters may or may not change. Themes might or might not be explored. But plot can never be the main course.
Straight genre books with lots of plot--science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, thriller, mystery--are all "suspect" to said writers and readers. They are "guilty pleasures." They are "popcorn."
A few literary writers like TC Boyle value plot along with the other elements. But he's a pyrotechnic style man. The real way to see what's what is to go read five or six books in that category and compare them to books outside of it. But I can tell you that the more plot you have and the less "style," the less academic/literary you become.
[This message has been edited by johnbrown (edited December 27, 2009).]
posted
Also what tchernabyelo said. Literary fiction is fiction that some literary critic or academic-type says is literary fiction. Whether it is or not.
I'm reminded of the saga of the writing career of Phillip K. Dick. During his life, he was embraced by the SF community, but met with indifference elsewhere...after his death, he became the darling of the literary set.
Was Dick "literary"? Did he harbor literary ambitions beyond the SF ghetto? Maybe...but so was and so did Theodore Sturgeon, who, near as I can tell, has not been embraced by the literati in the same way.
(And what is it that makes a work of fiction about the creators of superhero comics, or about a guy who wants to be the Latino Tolkien, worthy of winning a Pulitzer...but a work of these guys wouldn't even get a consideration?)
quote:"Not to be confused with literature, Literary Fiction is based on the reader's belief system that one cannot change their world but they can understand it better. The plot structure of literary fiction does not move toward a specific goal but involves peeling away the emotions and dark secrets of the human condition in an attempt to understand better. The protagonist in Literary Fiction need not grow or change over the course of the story."
I would see that definition applying in part to the Modernist school of literature, where self-enlightenment is a common purpose for protagonists, then a plot orients on self-identification complications. Postmodernism, self-awareness and questioning self-identification through perception, often the flaws of perception itself are the complications. Like how optical illusions seem accurate but with closer examination show they're a product of skewed perceptions and processing. Our relationship to reality is itself in question in Postmodern art.
For me, literary fiction is heavily weighted with figurative literary features, rhetorical flair that enhances a story's impact and meaning, and reading requires more in-depth scrutiny to fully appreciate a story's meanings and interpretations. More so for accommodating toward a range of interpretations. Readers of literary fiction enjoy the riddles and puzzles a story presents from telling it slant.
quote:Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--- Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind---
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited December 27, 2009).]
posted
Last year I took an online workshop from a fairly well known creative writing institute that was explicitely focused on "literary" fiction.
The definition of literary fiction that they used in context of the seminar was essentially anything that wasn't genre fiction was literary fiction, so it was pretty open. The instructor did acknowledge that in the wider world there is frequent overlap of literary fiction with the genre categories (and vice-versa). So students were not prohibited from using say, a fantasy story setting, for work submitted in class provided they addressed the principles emphasized in the assignment within the piece.
I'm going from memory here, which could be faulty, but the stronger emphasis in short literary fiction according to the curriculum was on character, voice, and theme; with less emphasis on plot and dramatic structure when compared to the genres. That's not to say any of those elements are excluded from either genre or literary works, but simply a matter of emphasis.
One of the things the instructor did state in the discussion forum was that he felt a number of current literary fiction writers (himself included) fell short too often when it came to plot. I suggested that at some point when plot and dramatic forces become too faint in a work it transitions into more of a "prose poem" than a story, per se, and he agreed with that. But again, that is a characteristic of only a subset of literary fiction (in the context of how the term was employed in the seminar).
quote:I would assume (perhaps mistakenly) that winning a Pulitzer or Nobel automatically MAKES a novel Literature as opposed to merely literary.
Again, it's still a case of somebody pointing at something and saying, "That's literary fiction."
To inflict another example...a lotta stuff has filtered into country music, nominated for, and even winning, awards for the best in the field. When Olivia Neutron-Bomb, who had done some stuff that seemed like country music, won a Best New Country Artist award, and in interviews over it displayed a lack of knowledge of the field or the music, there was kind of an explosion among the Old Guard, the results of which still echo through the field today.
posted
Personally I think most genre labels, "literary" included, tend to break down a good deal when you go to try and strictly define what they are or arent. I guess its more true of some than others...for instance with "fantasy" it mainly gets hairy with he sub genres...but in the end, I don't think the labels are very useful as anything but a shorthand to get certain basic ideas across.
And I think more and more we see stuff that just really defies all the classifications. I'm reading "Perdido Street Station" right now, which could be considered Fantasy, Sci Fi, Horror, "Cross-genre" and various other things all at once.
Basically as has been said in the end "literary" like most genres is whatever people decide it is.
posted
That's a good point, M.E., especially in reference to the "literary" genre which I believe is largely the bucket for fiction that does not fit in an existing genre category (at least I've never been to book store that had a section specifically labelled for literary fiction).
I think the whole genre categorization thing is simply a pragmatic way that publishers and booksellers can make it simpler to match readers with the type of fiction they enjoy and are likely to purchase. At its fundamental level I don't think there's any sort of implicit judgement (i.e., let's put the stuff that we the literary elite like best in the literary fiction category, and disperse all the rubbish onto genre shelves).
Much of the analysis and judging of the genres and the anti-genre (i.e., literary fiction) is done by outsiders who have little or nothing to do with how the works are grouped and marketed for sale.
While it is an imperfect system, I for one am glad they have it. Could you imagine browsing a large book store for speculative fiction where everything is mixed together and shelved by the author's name?
Owasm, I'd bet it's largely is a matter of sales for current works (e.g., Stephen King) or reputation for "classic" literature (e.g., Wells); reputation perhaps linked to it's frequency of appearance in literature curricula. I wouldn't be surprised if a successful film adaptation couldn't do the same. I notice Neil Gaiman showing up on the "general fiction" shelves more recently.
Again, I think it's just an effort to make the stuff accessible to buyers, and when an audience gets large enough it probably also becomes broad enough that it makes sense to locate it in view of general reading crowd. Nothing sinister.
[This message has been edited by dee_boncci (edited December 29, 2009).]
posted
To me -- my opinion and that a of few books that face the problem squarely -- there are only four genres (five with this new definition of literary).
They are -- adventure, romance, mystery, social fiction, and now literary. All other categories are mere window dressing. Sf, fantasy, military, horror, and so on.
The five are a matter of plot (or whatever passes for plot).
There are no genre specific plots for sf. They all come down to the big five. Adventure has been the most frequent plot for sf but we see mystery and even romance plots with an sf window dressing these days. Fantasy? The same with even more of a tendency with some to have romances.
[This message has been edited by arriki (edited December 31, 2009).]
posted
Literary fiction as a market-driven genre categorization has been kicking around since at least the '60s. In general, if possible to generalize, literary fiction focuses more on artistic flair, psychological depth, character depth, social prophecy, intellectual history, moral philosophy, and/or social theory than mainstream genres do, which focus more on plot, structure, and narrative techniques. but there are overlaps and out of category excursions across the board.
Because market-driven categorization summarily attempts to define audience appeal and demand more than accurately reflect and encompass a story's place in the larger scheme of things, I see any effort to globally define literary fiction as a futile exercise.
One or another of the range of literary movements and their coinciding literary analyses movements might interpret all fiction as literary fiction in some vein. A careful, close study of early to mid Twentieth Century pulp fiction might demonstrate it does not meet today's entertainment expectations and demonstrates a wide variety of writing principles that have passed out of favor. However, seen in a historicists' perspective, the canon of pulp fiction is a historical record of an era, and therefore involved at least with intellectual history, and to some extent concerned with social prophecy, moral philosophy, social theory, literary theory, etc.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited December 29, 2009).]
posted
As a reader, I find everything within the written word breaks down into one or the other of just two categories: (1) things I like, which consists of things I liked, and (2) crap, consisting of things I didn't like. Entries in either category have varied considerably over the years.
How do you classify anything? The Lord of the Rings is fantasy, and is usually found in the SF section of the bookstore, but it wasn't written by a writer who appeared in the SF and fantasy magazines, and much of the story represents a degree of research into the origins and nature of language not found in most other fantasies (before and after). The writers of The Sand Pebbles and Empire of the Sun were known for their SF before they published these works; should they, because of their SF backgrounds, be confined to that category?
(Actually, I have a third category: (3) things I know nothing about, which could fall into either category (1) or category (2) if I ever bothered to read them.)
posted
This is actually a fairly good definition of the "literary fiction" genre. Not to be confused with literature per se, indeed. Too bad that many people do.
posted
Thanks Arriki, your four genre idea is great. (I don't think literary deserves a place on that side of the line, most of them tend to be social fiction, but quite a lot of them are romances, adventures are hard to find and I've never found a literary mystery, but I'm sure they exist.) I've decided to adopt it for myself.
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posted
I must confess it's not original with me. But I added to the big three (romance, mystery, adventure) the idea of social fiction as a genre of plot because that includes all those other plots -- self-realization, coming of age -- you know what I mean. And now "literary fiction."
Everything else is a matter of setting and details. Even my own beloved sf.
posted
Hmm, another nonstructural definition of plot. This one oriented on genre around a thematic core, intitiation themes, for example.
There's Aristotle and Freytag's expanded structural definitions. Damon Knight's seven plots oriented on resolution type. Norman Friedman's oriented on forces of antagonism. George Polti's thirty-six dramatic situation plots oriented on emotions. Ronald Tobias' twenty plots oriented on a main action. Phil Parker's ten story-type plots oriented on want, desire, need.
Plots oriented on nine classic conflict types. Thirty-five classic story types with plots oriented around genre categorization and their inherent conventions. Not named anywhere that I know of, there's character oriented plots where a protagonist is either flat or round, static or dynamic, four possible iterations. Also not named anywhere that I know of, there's plot definitions oriented around literary movements, Romanticism, Realism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Modernism, Postmodernism, etc. And of course, Orson Scott Card's plot types oriented around milieu, idea, character, or event emphasis.
I don't believe any given plot can be cliché based solely on plot types. I do believe any given story's plot can take a bit of column A, some from column B, etc., and become a unique combination from a multitude if not infinite numbers of possibility. Experimental fiction, often considered a literary genre and widely accepted under such terms, does just that, not crossover fiction, per se, just stretching the boundaries of convention and exploring heresies of widely touted writing principles.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited December 31, 2009).]
posted
I'm not used to seeing genre categories equated so strongly with plot types. Sometimes the connection is obvious: in the genres of mystery and romance the plot types are pretty consistent within the genre, but in other genres (sci-fi, western, fantasy, horror, etc.) many different types of plot appear within a category.
Of course that facet of the discussion depends on how one categorizes plot, which I've seen presented in systems varying from 1 up to 55 or so plot types in a given construct.
I ran across another definition of literary fiction as a pseudo-genre: fiction that is meant to be primarily artistic in nature (versus primarily entertaining as in the genres). I say pseudo-genre because they divide things into literary fiction versus genre fiction, and don't present literary fiction a genre per se. They mention mainstream fiction as literary fiction that for whatever reason gains broad commercial appeal. Their "popular" genre classifications were mystery, thriller, horror, fantasy, science fiction, western, and romance. "They" are the faculty of the Gotham Writers' Workshop in their book, "Writing Fiction". So there's yet another take on it.
posted
As for genre labels, you've got to allow for shifting tastes. When I was younger, there was a large category called gothics. They were easy to distinguish as artifacts---as a rule, they had covers with a woman alone but frightened in the foreground, and a castle or building in the background with a single light lit in a window. I gather these derive from Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in some way. (I was not a fan of those books or their gothic successors.) These were popular---in the (used) bookstore we ran, they occupied shelving running from the front of the store to the back and then wrapping around the next aisle. They were distinct from romances---these occupied another front-to-back set of shelves, and included several varieties. (SF and fantasy occupied two sets-of-shelves in the back, a much smaller section.) They were popular...but they're gone now. As if they never were. And goth and gothic have other meanings.
I can go into a (new) bookstore today and find, in the romance section, a lot of things that would have wound up in the SF / fantasy section even a few years ago. Tales of time travel, vampires and werewolves, mermaids and such. Why are they romances and not SF and fantasy?
And where's the horror section that vampires and such would have wound up in not long ago? Vanished. (King and Koontz are in the mainstream section now...is anybody else publishing horror?)
posted
Yeah, horror has gone mainstream it appears, at least where it's shelved at the big brick and mortar stores I frequent, although you still see the occasional book labeled "horror" on the spine.
The romance stories you refer to are probably labeled as such because of the primary thread of the stories are a tumultuous boy-meets-girl escapade. The influence of other genre types is probably secondary, possibly trivial. I don't read them so I don't know, but I have seen the cover art of some of them.
Any search for precision or higher truth in genre groupings is probably misguided. As far as I can tell the primary utility is to help fiction buyers browse more efficiently. The world of stories, like color, is a continuum (although multi-dimensional), and like color, it's helpful sometimes to label a range in the spectrum, even if the edges are fuzzy.
Romance, mystery, adventure, social fiction (and, maybe this definition of literary fiction) are distinct plots.
Can you describe any sf. fantasy, horror, historical, gothic, or you-name-it that cannot be revealed to be one of those, or a combination of those plots? These "genres" are genres of setting and details only.
posted
I understand plot from a structural perspective. In that viewpoint, there's a little difference between dramatic comedy's plot and dramatic tragedy's plot. They're essentially the same structure with plot benchmarks occurring in similar orders but slightly different timings.
In the alternative, I see adventure, mystery, romance, social fiction as having distinctive, distinguishable suspense questions that correlate to a plot structure. Adventure, will the quest succeed in achieving a stated goal, Lord of the Rings, Cythia Voight's Homecoming, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; mystery, who done it or solving a mystery, The Maltese Falcon, I, The Jury; romance in the amatory sense, will they or won't they, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Valley of the Dolls; social fiction, a broad base of sociological suspense questions, Farenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-four, The Road.
Literary fiction, a broad base of multiple sourced suspense questions, Far Tortuga, The Shipping News, Mao II, The Secret History.
I don't see those as hard nor fast distinctions. Any one of the above novels could easily fit in one or more other categories with the five or in a host of other genre categorizations.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited December 31, 2009).]
posted
True, arriki. But I don't equate plot and genre across the board. Many genres, such as fantasy, encompass any number of plot types. And many plot types can find a home in different genres. At least that's the way I learned it.
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posted
I'll have to dispute that romance, mystery, adventure, and socal fiction are entirely distinct. Something by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler would likely embrace all four, all at the same time.
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Yes, any single novel can (and probably does) utilize several plots. But the plots are not an sf plot or a fantasy plot or a horror plot etc.. Those are not plots but settings and details.
The first men land on the moon, antarctica, the New World, Atlantis, the Japans -- all the same plot with various details.
X and Y meet and fall in love on the Titanic, in the Pharaoh's palace, a village in Tibet, a doomed starship fleeing Earth's destruction -- again, the same base plot with varying details.
Some one is muurdered in ancient Egypt, New York, the body is discovered outside the Moonbase dome or any other secret that the story must unravel -- same base plot
Same with where the coming of age story happens. Whether it is a tribein New Guinea or among teenagers in California, or the elves in Fantasyland -- same base plot with differing details. All you've changed is the setting.
posted
That book's definition of literary fiction is a little confusing to me - I keep wanting to cut the word 'system'. But I can imagine it both serving the purposes of the book and being utterly confusing to any discussion trying to exclusively separate literary fiction from other genres.
I find the identification of genre to be a bit of a minefield, and also one that can be very emotive among some writers (those literary types are snobs! those genre types are overpaid hacks! i'm being oppressed!) but also a very poignant problem.
Consider you finish your magnum opus, a novel of gripping drama, tragic romance, green aliens, bioengineered crops and a stolen diamond. You want to write the query letter and get an agent (or a publisher/whatever). But most agents specialise in something. Sci Fi. Romance. Stories about wheat fertilisation.
So which do you choose? How do you couch your query letter and synopsis?
It's my opinion you pick what you think to be the strongest genre element and consequently the spot in the bookstore where you imagine your reader (and intended audience) is going to find your book. You write your synopsis, lo and behold, get accepted by someone (eventually, after a bazillion attempts and a few edits), and then what happens?
The agent, you and the publisher talk about the book. A lot. And eventually the publisher decides it's a gardening book. Because their marketing types work out it'll sell twice as many copies there as anywhere else.
Later, a whole bunch of writers get together, discuss it, and can't come to any agreement on how to classify genres because - and once again this is my opinion - the bookshop's genre isn't always defined by writers, it's defined by sales potential.
Which is I suppose just another way of me saying that I think - as with many aspects in art - genre is defined by the reader, many will define it differently, and there's really no 'right' answer, as if there was, academics would stop talking about it.
posted
Let's define the four categores: romance is "boy meets girl" (or "thing 1 meets thing 2"); mystery is "who-done-it?". But then "historical" and "social fiction" would have to be backgrounds, and not plots.
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posted
The categories arriki stated earlier are romance, mystery, adventure, social fiction, and (tentatively) literary fiction. Historical novels fit into one or several of the above.
What if we define social fiction as a coming-of-age story set in the MC's society? It would be more than background, because the plot of social fiction doesn't neatly fit into romance, mystery, or the kind of adventure involving travel or the exploration of a world unfamiliar to the MC(s).
[This message has been edited by aspirit (edited January 02, 2010).]
posted
I'd been thinking of "social fiction" as fiction with some kind of message---say, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Now I'm not so sure---"social" or "socializing?"
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posted
I assumed "social" to mean socializing. This being the kind of story where people just sit around being people. (Which sounds boring, but I put National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation in this category.) A great deal of High School stories are like this too. The basic plot being people get to know each other (or themselves) better.
This is why I think Literary belongs on the side of things with Sci-Fi and Fantasy, because it can be either Mystery, Adventure, or Romance, even though most of them are Social.
posted
I categorize stories with a central sociological premise as social fiction. Social science fiction's hallmark is often fantastical dystopian societies at the center of the drama. Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four is a classic social fiction. For its social prophecy at least, it's also widely considered literary fiction too.
Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter franchise, beginning with Red Dragon, 1981, The Silence of the Lambs, 1988, Hannibal, 1999, and Hannibal Rising, 2006, starts out with a mass murderer mystery, merges into psychological thrillers in the middle two, and on into something completely different in the fourth novel. I don't place the last novel as a mystery, a romance in either the amatory or literary movement sense, an adventure story, or a social fiction by emerging defintions. As an exploration of social theory, I would place it in the literary fiction category, also a psychological thriller.
Not for the faint of heart, Hannibal Rising does well what few novels do, engages through dynamic sympathy with the devil, the protagonist-villain as antihero. An exquisite, well-crafted masterpiece that turns some contemporary writing wisdoms on their ears.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited January 03, 2010).]
posted
I apologize if I'm repeating something already said, but I have been absent for a while and don't feel like reading this entire thread (I did skim through it). I see literary fiction as a style that relies heavily on interpretation, whether it be in motifs or analogies. There is a degree of layering within the story, where two or more meanings can be attributed to the characters, milieu, and/or plot.
This can be social, psychological, historical, etc. Literary fiction crosses all genres. The author's writing ability also typically plays a pivotal role in qualifying for this classification.
posted
Social fiction - in my mind - are the stories that aren't mystery, adventure, or romance. Stories of self-realization, coming of age, those kinds of stories. Sociological/psychological stories.
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