enre fiction and academia, historically, have not been natural bed fellows. Or at the very least, they are rarely presented as such. During my years at university, I experienced an interesting array of responses to the fact that what I write, in its broadest sense, falls into the category of genre fiction. It wasn’t something that was always expected or, necessarily, accepted. Genre fiction is for the masses and falls into that most heinous of categories (as thought by some) of the popular. To many, this immediately makes it a fish out of water in an academic setting.
Interestingly enough, this was not something that I saw in only the faculty, as you may imagine. During undergrad, in every class there would usually be that group of students who subscribed to the notion that by liking something as lofty as literary fiction, and by thoroughly disparaging genre fiction, it made them special and most certainly more intelligent than those lacking the ability to see what they saw. This is a phase that most, hopefully, grow out of. By and large, my classmates were enthusiastic and intrigued, at least a portion of them not realising that they could write genre fiction pieces for something as elite as a university class on creative writing. After all, it was university. Surely we should’ve all been writing something literary.
The fact that there was this kind of rivalry, almost, perhaps even opposition and competition, between literary and genre fiction had never before occurred to me. I knew that a lot of the texts I had studied in school probably fell into the literary category. But I also knew that some texts which we now take to be some of the literary giants were, in their time, for popular entertainment (I think here, of course, of Shakespeare and the serialised pieces of Dickens’ work). The line between the two seemed somewhat blurry to me. The idea that genre fiction was looked down upon as inferior, largely (it seemed) because it was for mass consumption, and was purportedly written with less consideration on the part of the author, seemed a rather infantile position to take. Why did something entertaining and broadly accessible have to be considered lesser? After all, the fact that genre fiction is generally easy to understand and enjoy does not necessarily mean it must be written shallowly.
The moment I became aware of this distinction in academic circles, I made my own resolution to bring as much genre fiction into my tutorials as possible. Not to spite my tutors or irritate the elitists, but to show my classmates that they could do the same if they wished, and to demonstrate to sceptical tutors that they could be wrong and change their minds. I had no intention of changing what I wrote when given the choice simply to make my assignments more palatable to tutors who wanted literary fiction. I was in university to pursue higher knowledge in something that I loved. Compromising my enjoyment for grades wasn’t in the picture. I realised that I had a point to prove. That genre fiction could be just as good as literary fiction, and in the eyes of academics. That the institution could recognise something as unconventional as genre fiction as the equal of the literary fiction they were used to working with.
But why were literary and genre fiction even pitted against each other in the first place? Was it even necessary? Who does this fight serve? To my mind it certainly doesn’t serve the writing.
My tutors have varied from not understanding or liking genre fiction and showing that, to not understanding genre fiction but tolerating the presence of my work, to fully embracing it either when it’s what they love or when it’s not. The latter group have, of course, been my favourite, and I have been lucky to have supervisors who, though my work was not their area, were curious and interested in what I was doing. Their curiosity delighted me. After all, isn’t one of the first tenants of good academia based in curiosity? And to have members of a respected establishment openly admit that they didn’t know something, but they wanted to learn more, was deeply heartening, and a great compliment.
These working relationships have helped me grow as a writer, and, I think prove my very point that these two areas can happily coexist, given the right circumstances. Acceptance rather that division meant that I and my supervisors were able to come together from two very different places, but united by the pursuit of good writing, and the results were spectacular. But this is not simply about the positives. The reasons for the responses from the other end of the spectrum have interested me for a long time. After all, it’s one thing for genre fiction to merely not be your cup of tea, but another to be actively against it, and as I asked above – who does this serve? In a genre fiction class, some of this was explained to me.
I shall start by saying that naturally, no one is obligated to like everything. Everyone has different tastes and that is perfectly normal. When it comes to creative writing classes, and particularly workshopping, however, you do not need to like a piece to work well with it. It is possible to see the skill and value in a piece that isn’t to your taste. It is possible to read and constructively critique that work. The skill in this, as I see it, lies in leaving your ego at the door. We all have our preferences and hang-ups – I personally am like that about formatting, but our personal taste should not be allowed to get in the way of clearly seeing the work and trying to help the writer develop it into its best form. There are things which we may not pick up on or be able to best advise upon due to a gap in knowledge, but the actual writing can still be worked with.
So much for the caveats.
Academia has for many years been linked with what we would call literary fiction more than genre fiction. As far as I am aware, it is only a fairly recent development that areas such as genre fiction and things as modern as game theory have been allowed into the hallowed halls of “serious” universities. In my time I have had many classmates who were devotees of literary fiction in a performative, and almost self-conscious manner. It seemed as though they were proving their credentials as serious writers and academics by demonstrating that they only read Murakami or Joyce, and shunned anything to do with genre fiction.
This is not to say that liking literary fiction, to read or write, immediately makes you an elitist. I have also had many classmates who are in the literary fiction side of things, and they were perfectly lovely and normal people. Discussions with them about their writing and how they interpret work have been fascinating and valuable. However, to my mind, there does seem to be a pull for those who are perhaps a little more predisposed towards arrogance and posturing towards the literary and academia, precisely because of this notion that these things can provide a platform on which to strut and look down from. Such persons would seem to have a vested interest in proliferating this dichotomy of the literary versus genre.
But before I go too deep, what do I even mean by literary and genre fiction?
Literary fiction may be defined as work which is not plot driven – it’s not about the action, it’s about the character and introspection, it’s about exploring the human condition. It is not uncommon for an entire piece to span no more than an hour or even a day of a character’s life, and the end may be left open to interpretation rather than neatly settled with a “happily ever after”. Literary fiction doesn’t have the same amount of rules and expectations as genre fiction, which makes it less predictable, and provides writers with a vast scope in which to experiment. It’s often harder to read and understand, and may be confronting or challenge the reader. It may be helpful to think of literary fiction as something closer to High Art in the sense that it often traverses the frontier of writing, pushing the form, either successfully or not. A result of these elements means that literary fiction is often not very commercial and tends to have a smaller readership.
Genre fiction on the other hand is a huge umbrella term for all works that fall into genres, from fantasy to thriller, and by and large they are plot driven – they’re about the action. We read them voraciously to find out what happened, as opposed to understand the nuance of a character’s thoughts. Genre fiction is meant to appeal to a broad audience, it’s entertainment for the masses, easy to get into and process, and enjoyable. It’s highly commercial. Part of the reason for this enjoyment and ease of consumption is down to the fact that most genres will have some kind of a formula that the writer is expected to follow. Although the reader may not know exactly what will happen, there is a degree of predictability. For instance, in a murder mystery, the detective will eventually catch the criminal, but first there will probably be at least one red herring. We all know and accept this. Genre fiction is also art, but of a different kind – it’s art for the masses.
So on the one hand we have literary fiction, a section of writing which would seem to be designed for deep and thoughtful reading and which is meant to plumb the depths of the human experience. On the other hand, we have genre fiction, which is fast-paced and exciting, easy to read and understand and accessible to all, but perhaps not about to provide you with any deep revelations. What you read is determined by whether you’re there for a thought-provoking session or a fun, if predictable, rollercoaster. It becomes clear quite quickly why academia is drawn more towards literary fiction.
It is no secret that academics and academia can be somewhat prone to navel gazing. Our universities are institutions that protect and encourage academic thought and study, but part of the nature of devotion to a specialisation is to narrow in your focus and to delve deep into your little patch, rather than to maintain a broader overview. This is how academics gain a deep and thorough understanding of their area, and are able to speak with great knowledge on them. However, with such focus, it is a natural side-effect for blinkers to often appear. Academic institutions can become somewhat like ivory towers, with aging academics out of touch with the changes in contemporary life charting the course, and either accidentally or intentionally preventing growth and change.
In addition to this, it seems that there is a degree of investment in the protection of identity. Our identities are more complex than we often think. The things that we like and what they symbolise, the groups we belong to and our politics, what labels we assign ourselves, our friends and their views, our experience existing in society and how we’ve been socialised – all of these feed into our sense of who we are and our self-expression. It is often hard to decouple these things, or to see how all of these beliefs and constructs feed into our sense of identity.
If part of your identity therefore, is wrapped up in the notion that you are perhaps more intellectual than others, and that this is in part linked to the fact that you prefer literary fiction over genre fiction, and the reason for this is due to the fact that literary fiction is less accessible and harder to understand, it would make sense to uphold this notion. In addition to this, if part of your identity is linked with being in a particular group, and part of that group dynamic is about being different to an opposing group, or the Other, then policing this divide and the differences becomes even more of an imperative. If something then challenges an element linked to our identity, it elicits a strong emotional response. What is being challenged is not merely an idea, but who we think we are. It’s not an abstract topic, but something deeply personal. To follow this through, putting energy into the idea that literary fiction is somehow better, more valuable, or more worthy than genre fiction, then becomes something that has a deeply vested interest for some.
When literary fiction is looked up to, and genre fiction something to be looked down upon, this creates a binary. Literary fiction is hard to write, it takes great thought and time, this difficultly is reflected in the prose and its lack of popularity with the masses. To follow the binary, genre fiction must then be easy to write, take little thought and time, and be very easy to read and enjoyed by the masses. However, a binary such as this is simplistic and reductive, hemming in both factions, and producing an extremely unidirectional system of value. This binary precludes the idea that something simply can be written badly, regardless of whether it is literary fiction or genre fiction, regardless of the amount of effort or lack thereof that the author put into it.
With such a binary used to view literary and genre fiction, the differences between them then are not simply about the characteristics of these two subsets of writing. There can be a flow-on effect to those who read, write, and study them. I’ve already discussed the effects on academics and readers. Amongst the writers there can apparently be some jockeying. As it was explained to me in my tutorials, writers craft literary fiction, authors create genre fiction. Writers are the long-suffering geniuses who spend forty years on their magnum opus, which is accessible to and appreciated by only a few, and they spend their days in poverty, unrecognised. Authors bash out their novels quickly, they’re widely read and quickly discarded, and make good money from it, but they’re not critically acclaimed.
All of this, is of course, absolute nonsense. The idea of infighting and competition between writers and authors is unnecessary. The idea that the proponents of literary and genre fiction must fight to declare that their version of writing is better is preposterous. The idea that a piece of literary fiction, which shines a light into an obscure understanding of what people experience, must be worth more than a piece of genre fiction which is well-written and provides excellent entertainment is a fallacy. Each has great worth. Why is insight valued more highly than enjoyment? Beyond the fact that insight may be harder to attain, both are an expression of a writer-author’s skill. Well-written entertainment requires its own skill. One does not need to be more important than the other. Each has its own unique worth, each provides a different kind of value to readers and society. They can and do co-exist.
As I see it, the binary, and its proponents, are what proliferate this idea of us versus them, when it comes to literary and genre fiction. The in-grouping and out-grouping where those who read, write, and study are forced to pick a side and a label, and are immediately corralled into this petty fight that serves no one but those who wish to proclaim, in a strange and elitist version of “holier than thou” that their side is better. The binary only really benefits the literary fiction, which is upheld by putting down genre fiction in comparison.
Anything that requires an opposition to drag down, whose back the victor requires to stand on as platform in order to prove that they are better, is immediately flawed. Whilst I would never go so far as to state that the entirety of even one area of genre fiction, such as fantasy, is universally well written, nor would I do the reverse, and state that all fantasy is poorly written, or, written without much thought. Writers and authors of both literary and genre fiction can be good or bad, and what makes them such is not the area in which they write, but how well they write.
This throws up another can of worms, of course – what is “good” writing? A topic for another time, perhaps, but one that I shall very briefly address. If the reader gains something from the work, either insight or enjoyment, then I would deem the writing to be, at the very least, baseline “good”. Everyone’s version of good will differ, just as our styles differ. There are some empirical methods of measuring “goodness” of a work, but even these can be flexible. Think of Joyce. The rule that sentences must be under such and such a length immediately goes out the window. And yet Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses are considered “good”. But this is certainly a fight or debate for another day.
Now, a piece of literary fiction may be good, and a piece of genre fiction may also be good, if in different ways and for different reasons. And to follow the obvious conclusion, a piece of literary fiction may be bad, just as a piece of genre fiction may also be bad, if in different ways and for different reasons. It is important here to decouple the notion that effort or difficulty immediately equate to quality. Just as it is important to decouple the notion that literary fiction must be difficult to write, and genre fiction easy. These are simplistic binaries, once more, and are traps.
How difficult writing is will vary from person to person. A very critically acclaimed author may find writing as easy as turning on a tap, and yet another may find it something that they really have to work at. For all the difference in their approach and ease, both manage to produce good work. It is true that writing something of great depth will probably pose some thorny problems which may make it harder to write. This can apply to both genre and literary fiction, however. Effort is not the sole province of either one, and difficulty or speed of construction are not a guarantee of a wonderful piece of work.
And so we come back to genre fiction and academia. A preference for literary fiction amongst academics is understandable. There is more meat and ambiguity in the text for them to sink their teeth into. This is simply part of the nature of the text. A disdain for genre fiction, however, is not. Entertainment has its place alongside understanding. Entertainment is a skill that must also be developed and worked at, and this is being more and more recognised as our official institutions begin to welcome and open their doors more to these areas.
For a few years, I wasn’t able to bring genre fiction into most of my tutorials, either in workshops or for assignments. As I remember it, we were discouraged from submitting genre fiction. So I was forced to work on my short fiction (which has greatly benefitted my writing skills) and I was forced to create what would probably be classified as literary fiction. Prior to undertaking creative writing in university, my experiences with writing were limited to pieces for school, writing fanfiction, and writing for my own enjoyment. None of these had the same degree of rigour when it came to the marking and critique aspect, of course, and this forced me to think more about what I was doing, rather than simply doing it because I wanted to.
It was this aspect of consideration and writing with intention that helped me hone my craft, and this is certainly something that is more evidenced in how writing literary fiction, in particular, has been taught to me. Being in an environment that challenged me, where I was unable to rest on my laurels, and rather had to innovate and learn, was vital for my development as an author. I was forced to take in hand my wordiness, to learn how to write with concision, applying the principles of poetry – where every letter and punctuation mark must be used to great effect or not at all – to long length work, and to work with new genres and styles. In short, I was forced out of my comfort zone, and this made me grow.
The result of this was that I brought the skills of my literary work into my genre fiction. I began to write pieces where I was most interested in my characters’ internal growth and struggles, and narrated them at length, whilst they were being propelled by the plot and action. Bringing literary and genre together was what decided me that genre fiction could be just as well-thought out and carefully constructed as literary – that this binary set up between the literary and genre did not actually hold water. I was aware that in some cases I would be fighting against those who thought that genre fiction was something that was quickly run up with nary a second thought given to any deeper elements and I was determined to prove them wrong.
All of this has deeply informed how I write and my process. I learnt to consider what I was doing and to be more intentional, rather than simply writing because of my internal drive to do so. I learnt to examine my work and my process critically, and from that, to learn how best I worked and to have honest self-reflection. During undergrad I took classes in social psychology so that I could better understand people, and therefore better create my characters. Having a natural interest in biology and the sciences has given me a springboard for technically accurate world creation. My general style is one that blends and close and distant omniscient narrator, swooping in and out of my characters, close and personal head hopping twinned with providing macro world views. Being self-taught and mostly oblivious about conventions has also meant I have been less fettered by expectations of genre. I write for me.
Now, of course, I am not driven by a desire to prove the worth of genre fiction to an academic body. I am driven, as I believe many writers and authors are, to create the best work possible. To develop my skills, to learn, and to grow as a person and an author. Do I still seek to create genre fiction that has the same level of dedication and attention to detail as a piece of literary fiction? Yes. This is my approach to writing, genre or literary, and the idea that genre fiction must be less considered and literary as intricately thought out is a false dichotomy.
I highly doubt that I am the first genre fiction writer to have encountered this experience, or to have made the same or similar resolutions. I am certain that there are many genre fiction authors out there who put the same amount of love and care into their work as the writers of literary fiction. We are all in the same business, simply taking different paths. What will be wonderful to see is the broadening horizons of those students in universities, who, like myself, find that they are able to choose either literary, genre, or both, and a new generation of academics bringing fresh perspectives into our institutions of teaching and knowledge.
