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Genre Vs Literary Work Ink Odyssey Transcript Welcome to Ink Odyssey, a podcast for creative writers. My name is Stephen McCumber, and I am a fiction writer. I’m here to share my experiences and thoughts with you. Being creative people who endeavor to imagine and dream, let’s get started with a little practice, shall we? First, imagine some music, calm and low. Can’t hear it? Try again. [Cue music] Our vessel sails along a great divide in the sea. Waters along our starboard are pale with mottled hues of blue and green. To our port the waters are dark, almost black without the sunlight upon them. The deck jerks and pitches without pattern. Sailing the divide is a dangerous thing, yet it is the only way to gain entrance to a place of great mystery. Look forward, and you just might make it out. Ahead, shimmering in the distance like a mirage, a rainbow of colors sparkle and glisten. If we can stay along the divide long enough, we will gain entrance. We will see the elements of the sea in all their glory and mystery. Can you see it? Are you with me? Good. Get comfortable and let’s talk. Today I would like to talk to you about a great debate in the world of fiction. Genre vs Literary work. Any field comes with camps and parties and sides and divides of all kinds. Within fiction writing, there are several areas of contention among authors. Outlining vs discovering. Traditional publishing vs self publishing. Academically taught vs self taught. Fan fiction. Nanowrimo. There’s a lot. Today’s focus, however, is on literary work vs genre work. I’ll be going over them and breaking it down for you. 1 Ink Odyssey Transcript First, let me take a moment to give you a definition for both so we have some common ground to move forward from. Literary fiction has several boxes it strives to tick before we can count a work among its ranks. One such box is the prose, it aims to have prose that reads more like poetry. Words and sentences aim to have a cadence and rhythm that invoke beauty in and of themselves beyond what meaning they convey. Let’s call this kind of writing metrical prose. Another box is for an original story driven by character rather than plot. Another is that the work must pose a deep philosophical argument about humanity, society, or some other existential question philosophers have debated and argued since the beginning of our species. Let’s leave it at those three for now. Genre fiction has boxes of its own to tick off. The work should follow the rules of the genre it falls under. Those rules are plot based, for example, a romance must end with lovers united. A mystery must end with questions answered. There’s more standard plot points genre fiction has to follow than just the ending, but the point is there’s a general structure it has to follow to become a romance, a horror, or tragedy, so on and so forth. Another thing it strives to do is to be entertaining. There are a few other tidbits to this debate for each side, but they have nothing to do with work itself, rather how that work is perceived. It’s claimed that literary work can be harder to read. Literary fiction claims to be more artistic and pure, whereas genre work is commercial and for the masses. Genre work is accused of being plot driven, formulaic, and a few other things that all mean the same thing, that it has a plot structure it needs to follow. This is like calling cast iron heavy, no shit, that’s how it is, it’s a fundamental part. Literary fiction is labeled as harder to sell, but better for awards. Genre fiction has concrete endings while literary work has more ambiguous endings. We’ll address these later. Some articles claim that genre fiction has a happy ending, but that’s bullshit. Horror is genre fiction, but it doesn’t have a happy ending. Tragedies are genre fiction and their entire purpose is they don’t have a happy ending. I mean, it’s a claim that’s just blatantly untrue. What about the concrete endings and more ambiguous endings? That’s entirely up to the author. Here’s the thing, more concrete endings are appealing because they offer closure. An ambiguous ending leaves us with questions and a bit unsettled depending on just what we leave unanswered. Closure is a pleasant thing to have, and with a lack of it in the actual world, it’s nice to have it in our entertainment. Now, I want to break all this information down for you. I already started with the last bit, but let’s dive in deeper. Genre fiction claims to be more appealing to the masses and easier to sell and meant for commercialism. All that this means is that we create it with the purpose to be entertaining. Which it should be. Why read a book if it’s not entertaining? Literary work appears the antithesis of those things by claiming to be hard to read and sell. Part of that problem lies in the prose, so let’s talk about the differences in that between genre and literary work. First, a definition for prose. Dictionary.com defines it as follows, “the ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse.” In literary work, we try to give it words and sentences that metrical structure you get from poetry and prose. Genre work doesn’t have the requirement, but it doesn’t mean a genre writer can’t do it. It’s a stylistic choice on the author’s part, and it’s not held solely by literary writers or literary work. 2 Ink Odyssey Transcript Why is this important? Because in order for words to gain that metrical structure while maintaining grammatical correctness, it takes an additional level of work on the author’s part. Not only is it another layer of work, but the resulting words are more complex in structure with more obscure words that quite frankly, not everyone will understand. Making it metrical, grammatical, and still delivering an accurate message is not a simple task, and it will cause a book to be harder to read. People not trained in literature may not have the knowledge base or vocabulary to appreciate what they wrote, and it’s not a demerit on the reader’s part. Please understand, I’m not saying literary work can’t be and isn’t entertaining, it just has a level of skill with wordplay required to appreciate it. In 1989 the Oxford English dictionary had 171,476 words in current use, 47,156 outdated words, and about 9,500 derivative words. Do you know 250,000 words? How about the words added in the thirty years since that publication? Medical jargon? Military jargon? Jargon for any profession with a lot of specialized equipment, techniques, terminology, experiences, and other things I can’t think to name. My point is this, the less common the words used, the fewer people who can read it with ease. Unfamiliar words will deter from the experience of the reader, if you can use it in a context that gives it meaning, all the better. A new word now and then isn’t bad, but having to stop reading to look up a definition is a pain, it interrupts the flow of the story and the stream of imagination reading generates. Do this so someone has to look up a word on every page? That’s not fun, and odds are good they won’t recommend it to a friend. The reason it is better for awards is that the people handing out those awards have that knowledge base and vocabulary to appreciate the work of those words. A romance will sell better because it satisfies an emotional need of the reader. Most genre author’s use standard prose because it’s easier to write and delivers the emotional journey to their readers with greater ease. Literary work may claim that metrical prose is a requirement to be literary, but it does not have a hold on metrical prose. We can write a romance with metrical prose, that level of work is a stylistic choice on the author’s part, that’s it. What about the theme? The message? The meaning? Literary works list’s an exploration of the human condition as a requirement, or in different words, a deep philosophical message about the great existential questions of our species. This could include things like what does it mean to be a human being? What is the purpose of society? What value does belief in God bring us? Big questions that really don’t have an answer, just faith in an answer. This exploration of the human condition is a philosophical debate delivered by elements within the story. Here’s the thing, all theme is, is a persuasive argument. I’ll go into this further in a defining work section. For now, let’s keep it about literary and genre work. As with metrical prose, a deep philosophical theme is not limited to literary work. Any genre author can pose these questions in their work, I’m sure many do. Be careful with it though, literary or genre, don’t beat your reader over the head with a message. No one likes that. So what have we covered? Well, literary work requires metrical prose but does not have a sole claim to it.
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