Making it in contemporary fiction

spentastico said:

Now I don't know the details of your story, of course, but I would consider "magic realism" to fit quite well in the fantasy genre since it's something that we can't normally do in reality.

Click to expand...

The way the unreal parts work are pretty different between the two, and set up different reader expectations. They're definitely distinct genres, though the lines can be blurred sometimes.

Kuwisdelu (or anyone else for that matter), could you offer up some examples of literary fiction that would clearly fall under si/fi, or fantasy. What is it about literary fiction that makes it literary fiction if it has all the genres within it? ao lot quan ao thoi trang cho be ban buon ban buon chup anh studio o ha noi

profen4 said:

Kuwisdelu (or anyone else for that matter), could you offer up some examples of literary fiction that would clearly fall under si/fi, or fantasy. What is it about literary fiction that makes it literary fiction if it has all the genres within it?

Click to expand...

Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Galapagos (many, many of Vonnegut's are sci-fi/fantasy--all his novel are literary fiction)
Towing Jehovah, James Morrow
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (Nebula Award and Booker Prize)

profen4 said:

Kuwisdelu (or anyone else for that matter), could you offer up some examples of literary fiction that would clearly fall under si/fi, or fantasy.

Click to expand...

LillyPu said:

Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Galapagos (many, many of Vonnegut's are sci-fi/fantasy--all his novel are literary fiction)
Towing Jehovah, James Morrow
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (Nebula Award and Booker Prize)

Click to expand...

Great examples above. A few more that quickly come to mind are:
Orwell's 1984 is science fiction.
Thomas Pynchon's novels are generally some kind of historical sci-fi.
Baudolino by Umberto Eco is historical and fantasy.
...etc.

And they're all literary fiction.

profen4 said:

What is it about literary fiction that makes it literary fiction if it has all the genres within it?

Click to expand...

That's kind of like saying "what is it about YA that makes it YA if it has all the genres within it"? It can't just be that the protagonist is young, because there are plenty of adult books with young protagonists. It's something else less definable, in the voice and the pacing.

What is it about literary fiction that makes it literary fiction? Well, it can't just be good writing, because plenty of genre fiction also has stellar writing. It can't just be character-driven, because plenty of genre fiction is also character driven. It's something else that's hard to define, and plenty of people disagree over it. I like literary agent Nathan Bransford's description, which I think sums it up nicely:

In commercial fiction the plot tends to happen above the surface and in literary fiction the plot tends to happen beneath the surface.

Click to expand...

(You can read the blog post for elaboration. It's really good.)

I'd also add that my way of thinking about it is to view "plot" and "story" as different things. The way I think about it is more along the lines of, in literary fiction, "the story happens under the surface of the plot." In straight-up genre fiction, the plot is the story. To me, that's why some works of literary fiction can be described as plotless, at least when plot is put in terms of "events that happen." For me at least, when I write, and why I would call it "literary fiction," is that when I think of the stories I want to tell, I don't think in terms of plot. For me, plot is just a vehicle for the story, but it's not the story itself. But I think a lot of the best (and certainly the most commercially successful) literary fiction tends to have a good plot in addition to a good story.

When you call something "literary fiction," it's about the nature of the story and the writing, not about the content. Notice that genres generally tell you something about the content of a story and what you can expect to happen. A category like literary fiction doesn't do that.

OMG, kuwi. I've never understood how people made distinctions between plot and story before, but your post makes complete sense to me! My stories are definitely under the surface, by design. If folks read strictly for what happens overtly, I'm not the writer for them.

Thank you! I think what confused me before is that folks say it's about character, and my 'hidden plots' are most often about someone's past, which feels very plotty to me.

kuwisdelu - thanks. That is actually a very simple way to understand it. And thank you both for the examples of literary fiction. As it is, I've read several of those books and did not know I was reading literary fiction.
do noi y do noi y do so sinh tron goi quan ao ban buon quan ao ban buon chup anh studio
I am trying to think of a piece of literary fiction (si/fi, fantasy, romance, horror..)that might be, or have recently been, big in pop-culture. Would 'The Time Travelers Wife' fall into that category?

profen4 said:

kuwisdelu - thanks. That is actually a very simple way to understand it. And thank you both for the examples of literary fiction. As it is, I've read several of those books and did not know I was reading literary fiction.

I am trying to think of a piece of literary fiction (si/fi, fantasy, romance, horror..)that might be, or have recently been, big in pop-culture. Would 'The Time Travelers Wife' fall into that category?

Click to expand...

I haven't read it myself, but I think so. I've seen it called commercial literary fiction.

If we're using "literary" to mean "found in the regular old fiction part of the bookstore," then yep, Time Traveler's Wife is litfic.
The Historian: about vampires, litfic.
American Gods: about mythical gods- litfic.*
The Lovely Bones is about a ghost- literary
American Psycho is about a serial killer. Litfic.

Whether any or all of those are upmarket commercial or literary is a whole 'nother bag of nuts, but the problem for me when discussing commercial vs literary vs genre is that the conversation often swerves into "literary novels are for smart people and everything else is for stupid people" territory, which is untrue and unhelpful.



However, I think one can learn a lot by thinking about different kinds of books that are roughly about the same thing.

A boy escapes a crummy childhood, learns magic, finds friends and love, and fights in a war.

That's the plot of Harry Potter, but also The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won a Pulitzer. They are very different books, written for very different audiences, and both have widespread appeal. What made the former a breakout middle-grade success, and what made the latter a literary masterpiece?

I'm pretty sure the answer is more than "adverbs." Maybe not, though.

*American Gods might be in the SF section of the bookstore-- I'm not sure.

HoneyBadger said:

... but the problem for me when discussing commercial vs literary vs genre is that the conversation often swerves into "literary novels are for smart people and everything else is for stupid people" territory, which is untrue and unhelpful.

Click to expand...

Touché

And that's often why those attempting to write literary fiction often err in over-writing. All you see is the 'writing' at expense of the 'story'.

LillyPu said:

And that's often why those attempting to write literary fiction often err in over-writing. All you see is the 'writing' at expense of the 'story'.

Click to expand...

This gets trotted out so frequently, because it's so true.

I think the whole "show vs tell" thing has really changed things for new writers especially. They forget that language can be simple and transparent and still be incredibly cerebral.

Take Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants,' for example.

"They look like white elephants," she said.
"I've never seen one," the man drank his beer.
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I might have," the man said. "Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything."
The girl looked at the bead curtain. "They've painted something on it," she said. "What does it say?"
"Anis del Toro. It's a drink."
"Could we try it?"

Click to expand...

Don't tell us he drank a beer! Show us! Don't tell us there was a bead curtain! Show us!

Making every sentence florid and showy, I think, often detracts from a more gestalt show, and this, maybe is one of the differences between good commercial writing and great literary writing.

HoneyBadger said:

Making every sentence florid and showy, I think, often detracts from a more gestalt show, and this, maybe is one of the differences between good commercial writing and great literary writing.

Click to expand...

I think it really just depends on what's best for the particular story more than anything.

And your own voice, of course.

"Making every sentence florid and showy" is neither commercial nor literary. It's just bad writing.

kuwisdelu, Old Hack- I agree with your points.

I think what I was trying, and failing, to say is better said here.

And yet, day after day we hear Show, don't tell. And there's real fall-out. I see it constantly among my students, who are nothing if not adjective-happy. "The big brown torn vinyl couch." Do we need to know this? We are writing fiction, not constructing a Mad Lib. Yet writers have been told to describe, and so they do so, ad nauseum. It's like the sentence that's used in typing classes--"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Well, this is a good typing sentence (it contains every letter of the alphabet), but it's a bad fiction sentence.

If you ask me, the real reason people choose to show rather than tell is that it's so much easier to write "The big brown torn vinyl couch" than it is to describe internal emotional states without resorting to canned and sentimental language. In other words, "show, don't tell" provides cover for writers who don't want to do what's hardest (but most crucial) in fiction.

Click to expand...

Is there any better way to describe something that I'm classing as a contemporary literary piece? It's literary, but has cotemp. themes and setting. Is it even okay that I do class it as such? Or should I just stick to calling it literary?