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One of the great things about being an aspiring writer in the pre-indie publishing era was that it was easy to bracket out questions of things like “market” and just focus on the “work” itself. After all, figuring out the market was what publishers were for, assuming you could get an agent or publisher to read your stuff. If these gatekeepers didn’t let you in, so much the better, because now you have an entity to blame for not giving you your shot.

But once “literary” or “serious” writers realize how easy it is to publish their own work these days, one of two things tends to happen. Either they resign themselves to obscurity—reasoning that really the most important thing is to just “get the work out there”—or they start to take adjectives like “genre,” “commercial,” and “page-turning” a little more seriously.

Having spent many years aspiring to be a “serious” author, I now find myself in the second camp. At the same time, I have realized that the works that have moved me most in recent years have come straight out the genres of fiction that I loved when I was a kid, but which were implicitly off-limits for anyone with literary aspirations. The best examples I can think of lately come from television: My wife and I have been watching The Walking Dead and Jessica Jones which are both quintessentially genre fiction (horror/sci-fi and superhero fiction respectively) and some of the most compelling explorations of character and 21st century issues that I’ve seen.

There is of course more to be said, but it’s time to get back to actually writing books. In the meantime, here some posts on the subject that I’ve been mulling over.

“At Long Last, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Have Infiltrated the Literary Mainstream,” Joe Hill,Wired Magazine:

Adams hopes The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy will prove that readers don’t have to choose between wild concepts and literary quality. Good sci-fi and fantasy deliver both, which is what makes them so hard to write.

“Why We Should Rethink the Term ‘Literary Fiction,’” Michelle Richmond, Submitable:

Spacemen and spies are not the enemy of good literature. Novels in any genre can be literary if the writer pays close attention to craft.

“A Better Way to Think about the Genre Debate,” Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker:

The thing is that genre doesn’t have to be vexing. It can be illuminating. It can be useful for writers and readers to think in terms of groups and traditions. And a good genre system—a system that really fits reality—can help us see the traditions in which we’re already, unconsciously, immersed. As it happens, there is such a system: it was invented by the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, and laid out in his 1957 masterwork, “Anatomy of Criticism” … In his view, the world of fiction is composed of four braided genres: novel, romance, anatomy, and confession. “Pride and Prejudice” is a novel. “Wuthering Heights” isn’t: it’s a romance, an extension of a form that predates the novel by many hundreds of years.

Finally, a quote from Milan Kundera discussing “kitsch” that I just remembered the other day:

For the French, the opposite of real art is entertainment. The opposite of serious art is light, minor art. But for my part, I never minded Agatha Christie’s detective novels. Whereas Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Horowitz at the piano, the big Hollywood films like ”Kramer vs. Kramer,” ”Doctor Zhivago” (poor Pasternak!) – those I detest, deeply, sincerely. —Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

The post What I’m Thinking About This Week: Genre vs. Literary vs. Mainstream vs. Commercial vs. Kitsch—What Makes Great Fiction? appeared first on The Novel Project.