I see it as a Drama category

There are some threads here now regarding the struggle of identity between literary, mainstream, contemporary and genre. I wanted this post separate because I feel it is a separate issue. Mods may merge it if they wish.

I have a problem defining what I write because I usually have at least 2 and sometimes more plot elements, and one is usually some sort of "action" plot while the second level, or several levels are relationship and people oriented. Something is happening, and that something is what is in the external life of several of the characters. Some people might call this "genre" but my "action layer" generally would never make it as a genre book. It is usually action about something "every day" if you can think of "The Old Man and the Sea" as a "fishing trip."

I think it is puzzling that you can have a category such as "coming of age" or "tweens" which can cover every plot possibility, and yet get all blocked up when describing literary v. genre. There is a category in movies where my books would work perfectly, and it is what I generally watch when watching film.

I think the category I am thinking of is called "Drama" in movie making. There is Drama, then there is genre (SF, Action etc.,) But in writing, there seems to be only Literary and the ubiquitous "mainstream."

I tend to think my stories (if they were movies) would be something like Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm." There is a plot, there are several sets of characters who all learn something about themselves. -- Is this Literary? No, it is Drama.

Films are different than writing in some ways but not in story telling. Stories like "The Treasure of Sierra Madre," and "The Fight Club" are two very different types of story telling but they are both in the "Drama" category in a video store. Sierra Madre is more like a Western (but takes place in the 20's or 30's) and Fight Club is more SF or Fantasy--

I am really getting to the point where I feel that the definition of main/lit/cont is really that it excludes things like Western, SF, and other genres that are specifically formulated for those genres. I mean, no one calls "Brokeback Mountain" a Western. It is Drama. It was a New Yorker short story.

I've read stories that seem like they are pretty genre that are touted as literary, simply because they are hashed up (chapters done in strange orders) or have other "mystical" aspects. I mean "The English Patient" is a romance novel set in a war zone.

Is the writing in Literary Fiction "better" than that of genre?
Some people think Lit Fic is "fancy" writing, or purple prose. I have seen tons of evidence to say it is streight-forward, solid, terse, unsentimental. Who is correct?

I think this is a great conversation and I am certainly willing to come to the board to read it, but there is a distinct idea floating around that I just don't grasp about literary fiction being something obscure and unreadable, something like people writing while on drugs or something.

A problem is that after the "serials" were published, some of them were merged to become so-called literary classics-- many of the works of Dickens, Twain, and people like Jack London, or even Hemingway were originally magazine or newspaper "stories." I like that you are bringing up the magazines though because the whole idea of Writer's Guidelines has a lot to do with whether something is Literary or Genre. In Genre, there are specific rules that the writer must follow-- like the rules in Romance novels: the male must be older, the heroine must be the viewpoint character, and so on. A literary fiction might be a romance, but it might have (in the case of Lolita) the couple be a school teacher and his much younger student, or a brother and sister-- I think that there are rules to literary fiction as well, but less rules. "Driven by characters" is one, and "of higher-than average writing quality" is another.