Literary Fiction is a Myth:
Apr. 23rd, 2014 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scribal_goddessWhy Creative Writing Teachers Should Encourage Reading and Writing of Genre Fic
First off, literary fiction is a myth, and I mean that both figuratively and literally. The western tradition of writing comes not from what we think of as realism in the realm of literature, but from a mythical and allegorical understanding of the world. Some of the earliest literature that most students are exposed to is Homer’s Odyssey and Illiad, (some students get to read Virgil’s Aneid and the Epic of Gilgamesh as well,) which contains magic, action, interpersonal relationships, contradictions, people’s political and philosophical thoughts, improbable adventures, romance, horror, gods, fate, and long sea voyages. It’s also one of the world’s best-known works of fanfiction. (After all, Homer did not invent the stories of Odysseus or Achilles any more than Hesiod invented all the stories of the Olympians. Homer is just who we attribute the composed and written versions to.)
Most “literary” fiction that is presented to students as a classic has similar elements, yet escapes being labeled as “genre” fic because it’s old, or written by famous people. Just going down my own high school required reading list – Frankenstein and Dracula are both in many ways horror and adventure novels, Great Expectations (actually, anything by Dickens) is a long, slice-of-life type soap opera with adventure, mystery, and supernatural elements, Romeo and Juliet is actually just a stage adaptation of a much older tragic romance, (Shakespeare is the world’s most famous author of fanfiction in the English language,) The Scarlet Letter is essentially a work of magical realism with some psychological horror, The Great Gatsby is yet another tragic romance with slice of life and soap opera tendencies, and Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 are all sci fi.
All of the above were not written to fit the specifications of “literary” fiction as imposed by English teachers: they were all written for the mass market of their day. Any teacher who insists that “fantasy,” doesn’t sell should be banned from teaching anything with magical or supernatural elements, such as Dracula, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, and many works of Edgar Allen Poe, to name just a few staples of the middle and high school English curriculum. (They’re also living under a rock, since many of the best-selling franchises of the 90’s and the first decade of the 2000’s have been fantasy or sci fi, a genre which also includes superheroes somewhere along the spectrum.)
Thus, there is no “true” literary fiction, although many English Teachers, including at least one that I had in high school, would like to tell you that only slice-of-life, horror, and action are literary. One theory that I have is that the prioritization of horror and action over, say, fantasy and romance, is an attempt to glorify genres that are currently dominated in the cultural imagination by male authors, and dismiss genres that are popularly considered to be feminine, but that’s a rant for another time. Now I can move on and talk about how Creative Writing Teachers (many of whom are would-be authors themselves,) are hamstringing both their own and their students’ literary chops when they attempt to narrow students’ focus to “literary” fiction.
Most teachers and authors will admit that all novels have characters (people or thinking beings presented by the novel,) and a plot (events that happen in a specific order, often proceeding via some chain of cause and effect.) Most novels have conflict (herein defined as “reasons why the book is longer than ten pages,” or “things that prevent one or more characters from achieving goals right away,”) although some people will find examples where conflict is either absent or hardly noticeable. Many novels also include other structural furniture, such as setting, tone, symbolism, allegories (symbolism on steroids and a mission), description, character interaction, minor plot arcs, scenery, and, if your name is Melville, whole chapters describing rope. The first three things are the important ones however, and it is my opinion that genre fic helps develop the necessary writing muscles for authors to pull them off.
Character:
Character is, essentially, the application of amateur psychology to paper by aspiring writers, which sounds much, much scarier than it actually is. No human being is ever 100% certain of how the world is experienced by another individual. We’re all alone in our own heads, so what we do every day of our life is we extrapolate other people’s emotions and motivations and desires based on the evidence that they give us, be it what they say or the way they walk. As a species, we’re surprisingly good at it… actually, given that there are over seven billion people on earth, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.
One of the most common praises I see of famous authors of “classic literary fiction,” is that the author was “a student of the human condition,” or something along the same lines. This makes me think that character is extremely important in writing, no matter the genere. However, it’s pretty close to impossible to study humans well if you aren’t exposed to some variety in them, and all the genres provide different methods of showing us ourselves in a mirror. Sci fi, Fantasy, and Horror all show us humanity taken way out of its comfort zone, where our normal reactions and paradigms are often invalid. Romance and Adventure show us humanity’s desires and often its inner failings. Most genre fic struggles, in some way, with what professors call “fundamental human questions,” such as what is moral, why humans exist, what makes people get up in the morning, and how people deal with what they perceive as alien to themselves.
A secondary aspect of character, since it deals with people in quantities greater than one, is society, and this is where fantasy and sci fi, along with legends, folklore, fables, tall tales, and regional humor become tremendously important. Every author is a product of their own contemporary society, but legends and fables will tell you how past societies on earth thought, and fantasy and sci fi will tell you how societies can think, assuming you change the circumstances a little. It’s not a coincidence that many groundbreaking science fiction works have been lauded as being inspirational or progressive in their own time – when you write about a world fundamentally different from our own, you get the opportunity to lift yourself and your characters out of the rut of “this is the way things are,” and think about the way things could or should be. And humanity needs that.
Plot:
Things happen. From a pure science standpoint, if things didn’t happen (like chemistry, physics, cellular respiration, the expansion of the universe, that sort of thing,) you wouldn’t be sitting there reading this. More to the point, however, is that once you have character, the characters will eventually need to make a decision, and do or not do something for some reason that you get to determine. To determine this, you need to not only know how your character thinks and why they make decisions, but also the outside factors that mean they have to make a decision in the first place, and what happens after that.
Maybe that was a little obtuse. Plot is the cause and effect of a bunch of decisions by a bunch of different people. It’s influenced by character, and character in turn is often influenced by past events in the plot. (For some precognitive characters, it’s influenced by future events in the plot.)
In order to write plots well, it’s good to practice writing genres that focus on events happening in a clear, sequential order for easily identifiable reasons, such as mystery and action. Writing mystery will help you juggle the decisions of characters while they’re off-screen too: after all, you need to know when, where and why Colonel Mustard shot Mr. Body even if your main characters never figure it out. Action, which often emphasizes the actions of vast conspiracies, corporations, armies, or political parties, provides a second avenue for stringing together cause and effect, helping teach authors how to handle the faceless mob that is the portion of humanity whose names you don’t know yet. Romance is also good for stringing together cause and effect and keeping it tied in with character development – in well-written romance, characters A and B do not fall in love because the author waves their fingers over the keyboard and has them fall into bed, but because they get to know and understand one another over a period of time.
Conflict:
Conflict is intricately tied to plot in most people’s minds (it’s pretty hard to have a plot with absolutely no conflict, and even the most fluffy of slice-of-life stories have moments where characters come into friction or are prevented from immediately reaching their goals,) but if we’re still following the descriptions of plot, character, and conflict I already laid out, it’s really the intersection of characters and events. Things happen, and people react to them. Without conflict, we get very uncomplicated novels… but we also don’t get genres (or lit fic), since most genres presuppose that there will be conflict in the story.
Action: The character went to exotic places and fought/survived/explored.
Fantasy and Science Fiction and all the things in between: Evil (or at least their enemies) were conquered by the character in some form.
Romance: Characters A and B (and possibly C or more) either fell in love, had sex, or both.
Horror: The protagonists are dead or terrified and now the reader may be as well.
Mystery: The criminal was still around when the cops showed up and was immediately arrested and confessed everything.
… Okay, “The detective discovered the criminal’s identity and modus operandi, collected evidence, and the criminal was arrested.”
Obviously, there are works in each genre that defy my five second generalizations, but all of the genres I’ve listed are based on the idea that conflict is inevitable. The action protagonist is not guaranteed survival, the conquering of enemies, or knowledge of new places, the fantasy protagonist is not simply triumphant in battle, made the ruler, the most skilled at x, y, or z… actually, I could go on here about many different fantasy and sci fi plots, since fantasy and sci fi tend to encompass all the other genres. Yet again, a discussion for another day.
The point is, each genere has a different strength in teaching aspiring writers how to handle conflict. Romance can be boiled down to a conflict wherein two or more people who initially do not share motivations (or don’t know that they share motivations) interact and eventually know enough about each other that they understand each other’s character and motivations, though whether or not this does anything but lead to more conflict is up to the author. Horror is a conflict where people confront their emotions (fear being most common,) and forces outside of their control. Mystery is a strategic conflict where the detective character learns more about past events by investigating, and action is all about characters achieving individual goals, whatever that may be. Fantasy and sci fi take such conflicts and make them new to us by making them alien: perhaps a romance is built on the interpersonal conflict when two aliens from different planets need to learn each other’s cultures in order to be together, a horror novel is based on the terrifying things that people do to each other when they gain superpowers, a mystery is made more mysterious when people can enter and exit a locked room by teleportation, or an action novel has a protagonist uncovering an ancient conspiracy to obscure the origins of Archimedes’ inventions and the fate of his mathematical works.
When you restrict yourself or your students to the widely accepted canon of classic literature, and pretend that it’s somehow essentially different from genere fiction, you’re lying to them by omission, removing historical context and placing classic literature on a venerated, but ultimately useless pedestal. When you restrict your writing or that of your students to “lit fic” or to the generes that you have deemed appropriate, you’re lying to yourself as well as them by making false dichotomies, and you’re not only crippling their love of writing and reading, but their very ability to write.
TLDR; If you teach "literary fiction" as being both completely seperate from and better than "genre fiction," you're doing it wrong. If you say that "It's that way because that's how literature is taught," you're committing a variety of logical fallacies, foremost among them being appeal to authority. If you say that my essay is essentially wrong because I have a degree in science instead of literature, you're technically launching an ad-hominem argument in conjunction with your appeal to presumed authority. And since anyone with access to wikipedia can sit here and play spot the fallacy as well as I can, it's time to start thinking critically about why people revere literary fiction so much (besides that they're taught to in school.)
First off, literary fiction is a myth, and I mean that both figuratively and literally. The western tradition of writing comes not from what we think of as realism in the realm of literature, but from a mythical and allegorical understanding of the world. Some of the earliest literature that most students are exposed to is Homer’s Odyssey and Illiad, (some students get to read Virgil’s Aneid and the Epic of Gilgamesh as well,) which contains magic, action, interpersonal relationships, contradictions, people’s political and philosophical thoughts, improbable adventures, romance, horror, gods, fate, and long sea voyages. It’s also one of the world’s best-known works of fanfiction. (After all, Homer did not invent the stories of Odysseus or Achilles any more than Hesiod invented all the stories of the Olympians. Homer is just who we attribute the composed and written versions to.)
Most “literary” fiction that is presented to students as a classic has similar elements, yet escapes being labeled as “genre” fic because it’s old, or written by famous people. Just going down my own high school required reading list – Frankenstein and Dracula are both in many ways horror and adventure novels, Great Expectations (actually, anything by Dickens) is a long, slice-of-life type soap opera with adventure, mystery, and supernatural elements, Romeo and Juliet is actually just a stage adaptation of a much older tragic romance, (Shakespeare is the world’s most famous author of fanfiction in the English language,) The Scarlet Letter is essentially a work of magical realism with some psychological horror, The Great Gatsby is yet another tragic romance with slice of life and soap opera tendencies, and Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 are all sci fi.
All of the above were not written to fit the specifications of “literary” fiction as imposed by English teachers: they were all written for the mass market of their day. Any teacher who insists that “fantasy,” doesn’t sell should be banned from teaching anything with magical or supernatural elements, such as Dracula, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, and many works of Edgar Allen Poe, to name just a few staples of the middle and high school English curriculum. (They’re also living under a rock, since many of the best-selling franchises of the 90’s and the first decade of the 2000’s have been fantasy or sci fi, a genre which also includes superheroes somewhere along the spectrum.)
Thus, there is no “true” literary fiction, although many English Teachers, including at least one that I had in high school, would like to tell you that only slice-of-life, horror, and action are literary. One theory that I have is that the prioritization of horror and action over, say, fantasy and romance, is an attempt to glorify genres that are currently dominated in the cultural imagination by male authors, and dismiss genres that are popularly considered to be feminine, but that’s a rant for another time. Now I can move on and talk about how Creative Writing Teachers (many of whom are would-be authors themselves,) are hamstringing both their own and their students’ literary chops when they attempt to narrow students’ focus to “literary” fiction.
Most teachers and authors will admit that all novels have characters (people or thinking beings presented by the novel,) and a plot (events that happen in a specific order, often proceeding via some chain of cause and effect.) Most novels have conflict (herein defined as “reasons why the book is longer than ten pages,” or “things that prevent one or more characters from achieving goals right away,”) although some people will find examples where conflict is either absent or hardly noticeable. Many novels also include other structural furniture, such as setting, tone, symbolism, allegories (symbolism on steroids and a mission), description, character interaction, minor plot arcs, scenery, and, if your name is Melville, whole chapters describing rope. The first three things are the important ones however, and it is my opinion that genre fic helps develop the necessary writing muscles for authors to pull them off.
Character:
Character is, essentially, the application of amateur psychology to paper by aspiring writers, which sounds much, much scarier than it actually is. No human being is ever 100% certain of how the world is experienced by another individual. We’re all alone in our own heads, so what we do every day of our life is we extrapolate other people’s emotions and motivations and desires based on the evidence that they give us, be it what they say or the way they walk. As a species, we’re surprisingly good at it… actually, given that there are over seven billion people on earth, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.
One of the most common praises I see of famous authors of “classic literary fiction,” is that the author was “a student of the human condition,” or something along the same lines. This makes me think that character is extremely important in writing, no matter the genere. However, it’s pretty close to impossible to study humans well if you aren’t exposed to some variety in them, and all the genres provide different methods of showing us ourselves in a mirror. Sci fi, Fantasy, and Horror all show us humanity taken way out of its comfort zone, where our normal reactions and paradigms are often invalid. Romance and Adventure show us humanity’s desires and often its inner failings. Most genre fic struggles, in some way, with what professors call “fundamental human questions,” such as what is moral, why humans exist, what makes people get up in the morning, and how people deal with what they perceive as alien to themselves.
A secondary aspect of character, since it deals with people in quantities greater than one, is society, and this is where fantasy and sci fi, along with legends, folklore, fables, tall tales, and regional humor become tremendously important. Every author is a product of their own contemporary society, but legends and fables will tell you how past societies on earth thought, and fantasy and sci fi will tell you how societies can think, assuming you change the circumstances a little. It’s not a coincidence that many groundbreaking science fiction works have been lauded as being inspirational or progressive in their own time – when you write about a world fundamentally different from our own, you get the opportunity to lift yourself and your characters out of the rut of “this is the way things are,” and think about the way things could or should be. And humanity needs that.
Plot:
Things happen. From a pure science standpoint, if things didn’t happen (like chemistry, physics, cellular respiration, the expansion of the universe, that sort of thing,) you wouldn’t be sitting there reading this. More to the point, however, is that once you have character, the characters will eventually need to make a decision, and do or not do something for some reason that you get to determine. To determine this, you need to not only know how your character thinks and why they make decisions, but also the outside factors that mean they have to make a decision in the first place, and what happens after that.
Maybe that was a little obtuse. Plot is the cause and effect of a bunch of decisions by a bunch of different people. It’s influenced by character, and character in turn is often influenced by past events in the plot. (For some precognitive characters, it’s influenced by future events in the plot.)
In order to write plots well, it’s good to practice writing genres that focus on events happening in a clear, sequential order for easily identifiable reasons, such as mystery and action. Writing mystery will help you juggle the decisions of characters while they’re off-screen too: after all, you need to know when, where and why Colonel Mustard shot Mr. Body even if your main characters never figure it out. Action, which often emphasizes the actions of vast conspiracies, corporations, armies, or political parties, provides a second avenue for stringing together cause and effect, helping teach authors how to handle the faceless mob that is the portion of humanity whose names you don’t know yet. Romance is also good for stringing together cause and effect and keeping it tied in with character development – in well-written romance, characters A and B do not fall in love because the author waves their fingers over the keyboard and has them fall into bed, but because they get to know and understand one another over a period of time.
Conflict:
Conflict is intricately tied to plot in most people’s minds (it’s pretty hard to have a plot with absolutely no conflict, and even the most fluffy of slice-of-life stories have moments where characters come into friction or are prevented from immediately reaching their goals,) but if we’re still following the descriptions of plot, character, and conflict I already laid out, it’s really the intersection of characters and events. Things happen, and people react to them. Without conflict, we get very uncomplicated novels… but we also don’t get genres (or lit fic), since most genres presuppose that there will be conflict in the story.
Action: The character went to exotic places and fought/survived/explored.
Fantasy and Science Fiction and all the things in between: Evil (or at least their enemies) were conquered by the character in some form.
Romance: Characters A and B (and possibly C or more) either fell in love, had sex, or both.
Horror: The protagonists are dead or terrified and now the reader may be as well.
Mystery: The criminal was still around when the cops showed up and was immediately arrested and confessed everything.
… Okay, “The detective discovered the criminal’s identity and modus operandi, collected evidence, and the criminal was arrested.”
Obviously, there are works in each genre that defy my five second generalizations, but all of the genres I’ve listed are based on the idea that conflict is inevitable. The action protagonist is not guaranteed survival, the conquering of enemies, or knowledge of new places, the fantasy protagonist is not simply triumphant in battle, made the ruler, the most skilled at x, y, or z… actually, I could go on here about many different fantasy and sci fi plots, since fantasy and sci fi tend to encompass all the other genres. Yet again, a discussion for another day.
The point is, each genere has a different strength in teaching aspiring writers how to handle conflict. Romance can be boiled down to a conflict wherein two or more people who initially do not share motivations (or don’t know that they share motivations) interact and eventually know enough about each other that they understand each other’s character and motivations, though whether or not this does anything but lead to more conflict is up to the author. Horror is a conflict where people confront their emotions (fear being most common,) and forces outside of their control. Mystery is a strategic conflict where the detective character learns more about past events by investigating, and action is all about characters achieving individual goals, whatever that may be. Fantasy and sci fi take such conflicts and make them new to us by making them alien: perhaps a romance is built on the interpersonal conflict when two aliens from different planets need to learn each other’s cultures in order to be together, a horror novel is based on the terrifying things that people do to each other when they gain superpowers, a mystery is made more mysterious when people can enter and exit a locked room by teleportation, or an action novel has a protagonist uncovering an ancient conspiracy to obscure the origins of Archimedes’ inventions and the fate of his mathematical works.
When you restrict yourself or your students to the widely accepted canon of classic literature, and pretend that it’s somehow essentially different from genere fiction, you’re lying to them by omission, removing historical context and placing classic literature on a venerated, but ultimately useless pedestal. When you restrict your writing or that of your students to “lit fic” or to the generes that you have deemed appropriate, you’re lying to yourself as well as them by making false dichotomies, and you’re not only crippling their love of writing and reading, but their very ability to write.
TLDR; If you teach "literary fiction" as being both completely seperate from and better than "genre fiction," you're doing it wrong. If you say that "It's that way because that's how literature is taught," you're committing a variety of logical fallacies, foremost among them being appeal to authority. If you say that my essay is essentially wrong because I have a degree in science instead of literature, you're technically launching an ad-hominem argument in conjunction with your appeal to presumed authority. And since anyone with access to wikipedia can sit here and play spot the fallacy as well as I can, it's time to start thinking critically about why people revere literary fiction so much (besides that they're taught to in school.)
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no subject
Date: 2014-04-24 09:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-24 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:01 pm (UTC)Like a lot of human categorization and labeling - it's not real at all. It's just a way for people who are into status and hierachy to note their status in their imaginary hierachy.
Like the time I googled myself and found someone saying that Valley was their favorite Sims story and asking what Sims stories other people read, and two snobs in training replied all "Ugh, we only read real books here."
no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:15 pm (UTC)There are so many reasons that I'm not an English major, and the fact that I'd be thrown out for these sentiments is only one of them. :)
no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:26 pm (UTC)Ooooh, I'd like to read a thing about a guy being possessed by an evil interdimensional hotel if it was done right.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 03:10 pm (UTC)(And this has no relation to the fact that I'm putting off a paper right now by writing a short story type thing that's actually also enabling me to put off finishing my mystery. I think I've leveled up in procrastination.)
I can't take my school's lit mag, it makes me laugh so hard I almost pee.
From what I've heard of the plot, it needed some heavy editing in the beginning (the plot didn't start until a third of the way through the book,) and the protagonist started out as something of an asshole. *Sigh.* Personally, I think it was a great idea, but the main problem is that the author felt compelled to write the main character as a "literary protagonist," meaning a rude, pretentious, and sexist straight white dude who thinks his problems are of great importance. (He gets marginally better on the sexism.) If they hadn't been aiming for literary pretensions and had just written a character for the plot without bothering to make him "representative of the human condition," I think they would have had an excellent novel. At least the Russian guy was legitimately just a nice dude in over his head in a fucked-up world.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 08:10 pm (UTC)Yeah, I've read some "literary" stories where I just cringe at the characters because they are thoroughly unlikable. Which hey, you know, I specialize in writing antagonists. But my antagonists may be evil, but they aren't bad people. Ugh.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 10:05 pm (UTC)Dunno if I have a specialty, based on what I manage to get done, but actually finishing things can only improve when I no longer have surprise papers to write.