Is there such a thing as "literary chick lit"?

Question: why do we limit things to "chick-lit"? This may be answered in other places, but it kind of bothers me that there a limits as to which gender "should" read this book.

Is Chick-lit something pubishers actually descirbe books as? If so OP, I think you have a literary Chick-lit novel on your hands.

As far as I'm concerned genre is first and foremost a marketing tool and in some cases a scholarly tool. Writers ought not to concern themselves with it.

That said, my impression of "chick-lit" is that it's a type of commercial, "pop" lit, which pretty much disqualifies it from being literary.

Is Austen "literary chick lit?" Bronte? I mean the term "chick-lit" is kind of gibberish as far as I'm concerned.

cmi0616 said:

As far as I'm concerned genre is first and foremost a marketing tool and in some cases a scholarly tool. Writers ought not to concern themselves with it ...

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... unless, possibly, they want eventually to be, you know, "published"?

cmi0616 said:

Is Austen "literary chick lit?"

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Nope ... just mistakenly considered so, by some, on account of having been published over 200 years ago.

cmi0616 said:

Bronte?

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Which one?

cmi0616 said:

I mean the term "chick-lit" is kind of gibberish as far as I'm concerned.

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I suspect this was the observation you really decided to bump a 2011 thread (whose most recent post was 9 months ago) to make?

I would definitely avoid the term "chick lit" these days, but I have a related question.

Let's say I want to write a commercial novel about non traditional women with snarky, irreverent voices: Women who cuss. Women who write slash fanfic. Women who sound a little like Amy in Gone Girl. Women in the Mary Gaitskill mode, but with a more commercial plot (I'd consider her literary).

In my experience, voices like this are rarely heard in either chick lit or women's fiction, which might lead me to avoid placing the book in those genres. But my experience is not so recent. Mainly I'm familiar with the shopping-and-dating novels of the 1990s and the upmarket, family-oriented stuff like Jodi Picoult and Chris Bohjalian. I'm not writing either of those things.

So, if "upmarket women's fiction" is the correct designation for "literary chick lit," can it also accommodate "edgy women's fic"? Is there even remotely a market for such a thing outside the YA category?

I have no particular desire to put the book in a "this is for girls" box. I'm just wondering if such a genre designation would be useful (market wise) or even possible.

alexaherself said:

... unless, possibly, they want eventually to be, you know, "published"?



Nope ... just mistakenly considered so, by some, on account of having been published over 200 years ago.



Which one?



I suspect this was the observation you really decided to bump a 2011 thread (whose most recent post was 9 months ago) to make?

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This thread was on page 1 of the literary forum. I didn't check the dates to see how old it was, though I'm sorry for whatever personal distress my commenting on this thread caused you.

A good amount of the literary fiction women write is marketed as chick-lit or romance anyway. Jenn Crowell's new novel about bi-polar disorder and child custody in the UK just got reviewed as a romance. With that in mind, I don't think a writer should pander to a marketing idyl, especially since, in this case, if it's good enough it will unfortunately be sold as "women's fiction" anyway. Unless she's just trying to make money, in which case, writing a novel is probably the wrong way to go about it.

I think a writer should write the best novel she can write, and worry about selling it after the final draft is written.

You disagree, though?

Plenty of people think about their market before even starting the novel, and I see nothing at all wrong with that.

veinglory said:

Plenty of people think about their market before even starting the novel, and I see nothing at all wrong with that.

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Depending on what "think about their market" means exactly, I might be inclined to agree with you.

My only real concern is when "will this sell" becomes a part of the writing process, especially if you're writing literary fiction, because unlike, for instance, the thriller genre, these books are supposed to have something to say, they're supposed to take time to read. How can you have something to say if what really motivated you to write the book was that you might make some money off it? Once you view literature as a product (which it is once you submit it for publication, but the writer mustn't think this way prior to finishing the final draft) as opposed to a craft, your message is bound to get diluted in the pursuit of finding a larger audience.

Once you view literature as a product (which it is once you submit it for publication, but the writer mustn't think this way prior to finishing the final draft), rather than a craft, your message is bound to get diluted in the pursuit of finding a larger audience.

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I don't think so. I think you write to be read. Selling is an aspect of being read.

I mean, it's not. You can write blogs and hand out pamphlets or shout from the rooftops. But if you want to be read -- widely read -- you have to sell what you're writing. That's not new -- writers have always written to be read, and to be read they had to be sold. And if you're not writing to be sold, then you're limiting the scope of your readership.

I don't know whether that's what you meant. But if you want to be widely read, then you have to write something that can be widely read.

whiporee said:

I don't think so. I think you write to be read. Selling is an aspect of being read.

I mean, it's not. You can write blogs and hand out pamphlets or shout from the rooftops. But if you want to be read -- widely read -- you have to sell what you're writing. That's not new -- writers have always written to be read, and to be read they had to be sold. And if you're not writing to be sold, then you're limiting the scope of your readership.

I don't know whether that's what you meant. But if you want to be widely read, then you have to write something that can be widely read.

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I would think that if the point of fiction was to have as many readers read your stuff as possible, all writers would try their luck writing for TV instead--nothing, after all, does what you're describing better than TV. Most of it is so easy, and so swallowable, that our mass consumption of it is kind of inevitable.

I think, obviously, there has to be a reason why somebody else besides the writer would want to read a novel, short story, etc. But beyond that, do you really mean to suggest the mark of good fiction is it's mass appeal?

I think Dickens wrote his books to be able to be serialized. I think Shakespeare added elements to his plays to appeal to the widest possible audience.

I think London and Hawthorne and Faulkner and Poe all wrote for to bring in the largest readership they could. I think Ibsen changed the end of A Dolls House for at least some of its showings to make it amenable to the audience. I think Fitzgerald tried writing for the movies.

I don't think of writing as a high-minded pursuit. I think of it as telling stories to which people can relate, and if a piece is to be considered great, anyone who can read well enough ought to be able to pick it up and want to keep reading. It shouldn't be an exercise in symbolism or allegory or require a treatise on "what the author meant." Good writing ought to be concise, but it also ought to be clear. It ought not necessarily pander to the masses, but it ought to appeal to them.

I think a lot of those claims (especially where Shakespeare and Fitzgerald are concerned) are debatable, but that's neither here or there, because ultimately, you can't apply cultural standards from centuries ago to today.

Writing doesn't have to be some sort of intellectual exercise in literary theory, and forgive me if what I've said up to that point was interpreted that way. I think literary fiction, however, not unlike a good piece of literary theory, needs to say something that is debatable, interesting, and revelatory.

I'm not inclined to touch the "what the author meant" part of your argument because it means weighing in on the intentional fallacy/"Death of The Author" debate that I'm sure everyone is either sick of or uninterested in (or both).

At the same time though, I'm hard pressed to believe that literary fiction is not written as a communication between author and reader. There is no writing just to tell a story. Because there are an infinite amount of stories you could tell, and you're writing one, very specific, relatively unique story. And you're writing that story for a reason. And if that's the case, nothing interesting or even coherent is getting said when the author is trying to make himself and his work likable to as many people as possible.

This is the same reason we know so many pop songs are bad even though they're mostly technically fine. They're catchy and inoffensive, yes, but they're also banal and puerile and somehow ingratiating under any amount of scrutiny. I think the same fate awaits the work of writers who are looking for a market before they've even finished what they're writing.

Because there are an infinite amount of stories you could tell, and you're writing one, very specific, relatively unique story. And you're writing that story for a reason. And if that's the case, nothing interesting or even coherent is getting said when the author is trying to make himself and his work likable to as many people as possible.

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I just don't think that's true. I think a great story is universal, and if it's well-written, universally accessible. The point of a great story ought to be that anyone can read it and get something out of it, and ought to be glad they did so.

cmi0616 said:

Once you view literature as a product (which it is once you submit it for publication, but the writer mustn't think this way prior to finishing the final draft) as opposed to a craft, your message is bound to get diluted in the pursuit of finding a larger audience.

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I disagree. I started writing in the first place because I needed money to pay the rent. And that's exactly what I did. People are different. They have different goals and different processes. And that's okay.

And that includes prose version of "pop songs" thank you very much. Saying popular equals puerile is as banal as saying literary equals pretentious.

veinglory said:

And that includes prose version of "pop songs" thank you very much. Saying popular equals puerile is as banal as saying literary equals pretentious.

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I didn't say that, though. I said the work of writers who are looking for a market before they've finished what they're writing are inevitably puerile. Shakespeare, for instance, is very popular, although I wouldn't equate his work to "pop lit". There's a difference.

whiporee said:

The point of a great story ought to be that anyone can read it and get something out of it, and ought to be glad they did so.

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And now we're getting somewhere. What are they "getting out of it" if the author has purposely made his work as agreeable as possible? A good story has to be sincere and genuine, and when an author starts self-censoring anything that might be controversial out of his work, he has foreclosed the possibility of sincerity.

Okay, let's say this: after years of hard work, you write the GAN. It's full of great characters, a great storyline and love and hope and sex and dreams, as great lines and thought-provoking ideas. In the climax, as an honest part of his/her character -- the MC goes off on a 2000-word diatribe about American Imperialism, and that the Sept. 11 hijackers had the right idea. It's a point in the book that you wanted to make when you started, but not the only one.

You get an agent, who, in your first conversation, suggests that you remove the speech, that the book doesn't need it. You decline. The agent says okay and submits to publishers who love it, but ask you to remove that scene saying, "We can't sell it, we'll be blackballed and so will you." You refuse, and the agent releases you from your agreement.

Had you dropped the scene, your book would be published and all your other, great points and your great characters and your great story would be out there. But since you didn't want to adjust to your audience, it's not. How is that beneficial to anyone?

I think you're trying to make accessibility a bad thing. You've mentioned Wallace -- he's an example. To most people, Infinite Jest is unreadable, and his other works even moreso. He may have been the greatest writer of our generation (I'm not saying that because I'm one of those people who, even on a sailboat with nothing else to read, couldn't finish it. Same thing with the post-office one), but because he was so enamored of writing literarily (and in my opinion, indulgently, which is what a lot of literary writing turns out to be), only a relatively few other people know. He didn't want to adjust to what people wanted to/were willing to read, and in the end it cost him an audience he could have had.

Well perhaps it's just the particular example you gave, but the whole point of fiction, to me anyway, is that if you're doing it right, you don't need a 2000-word diatribe. If the point you wanted to make was a point about American Imperialism and the "911 hijackers having the right idea," the point I'm making is exactly that the 2000-word diatribe that you could easily just write as an essay is preachy, condescending, and probably not very engaging. That's why literary novelists write novels instead. Because fiction may be the only way to talk about these things.

I'm not at all saying accessibility is a bad thing. Saying something worth saying and writing accessible fiction aren't mutually exclusive (and also, I think the overwhelming majority of the stuff Wallace has written is actually pretty accessible, it's just long, but that's neither here nor there). I think the combination of accessibility (27th City notwithstanding) and meaning in Jonathan Franzen's work might be the reason he's selling so many books. I think the best writers successfully combine the two. Proust, Kafka, Twain, Dostoyevsky etc. were all doing this.

If all you meant was that good fiction should be relatively easy to read, I might be inclined to agree with you. But what it sounded like you were saying, initially, was that fiction should simply "tell a story" whose purpose is solely to entertain, and that content in the story that people might initially have an aversion to should be edited out. That's what I was disagreeing with, but if it's not what you meant, my apologies. But while the diatribe is a bad idea as a fiction writer, the content in the diatribe isn't. Some people might rightly be offended by such a message, but the author shouldn't shy away from writing something because people might not like what he has to say.

cmi0616 said:

I didn't say that, though. I said the work of writers who are looking for a market before they've finished what they're writing are inevitably puerile. Shakespeare, for instance, is very popular, although I wouldn't equate his work to "pop lit". There's a difference.

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Then you did say that. And I find it offensive. Mainly because... it is offensive. I have already stated I look for a market before beginning writing, thus you are calling my work puerile. I personally think writing fiction for an identified market to make the money I need to live is anything but immature or foolish. But if you need to judge other people's decisions as unworthy, knock yourself out.

cmi0616 said:

I didn't say that, though. I said the work of writers who are looking for a market before they've finished what they're writing are inevitably puerile. Shakespeare, for instance, is very popular, although I wouldn't equate his work to "pop lit". There's a difference.

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And I am trying to work out how saying "writers who look for a market before they've finished what they're writing are inevitably puerile" is respectful of all the writers who do, in fact, write specifically for a market.

Perhaps I am missing something here. I don't believe it is possible to draw any such firm lines, though, between commercially viable art, and art that has genuine artistic value, literary or otherwise. There has always been great overlap there, IMO.

mccardey said:

But I can't think of any literary-type comedy except, you know, Shakespeare and the dramatists - which isn't quite what I meant..

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Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy comes to mind.

cmi0616 said:

Once you view literature as a product (which it is once you submit it for publication, but the writer mustn't think this way prior to finishing the final draft) as opposed to a craft, your message is bound to get diluted in the pursuit of finding a larger audience.

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Perhaps you should explain this to:
Chaucer
Shakespeare
Milton
Richardson
Defoe
Sterne
Fielding
Austen
Eliot, George
Dickens

. . . oh, heck, most of the English and American canon.

Fitzgerald
Hemingway
Joyce
Woolf

And the winners of the Booker, etc.

They wrote for money; they lived on what they wrote, and in some cases, go to great lengths to promote, protect and market their works.

cmi0616 said:

I think a lot of those claims (especially where Shakespeare and Fitzgerald are concerned) are debatable, but that's neither here or there, because ultimately, you can't apply cultural standards from centuries ago to today.

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For the love of all that's holy, no, they are not "debatable." In the case of Shakespeare, we have the "bad quartos," which in the case of Hamlet show that he revised the play to appeal to rural audiences in touring "inn yard" companies.

He formed his own Company in order to make more money off his plays. He was entirely about making money.

Dickens not only serialized most of his novels, he actively pursued seasonal markets—which is why we have A Christmas Carol and his other Christmas texts. He was all about writing for money—his letters make that abundantly clear. He moved to limited releases of his works wherein he acted as his own publisher explicitly to make more money, and printed the first run on his own dime. He went on lengthy lecture tours in the U.S. explicitly as a marketing exercise.

Fitzgerald took a job in advertising to make money and sold short stories for money—to the point where he agonizes in his letters to Zelda about word count and payment, because she broke off their engagement over financial concerns. Fitzgerald revised This Side of Paradise multiple times explicitly in order to make it publishable in the opinion of editors—and was able to marry Zelda on the strength of the advance, which was his goal.

There are letters between Hemingway and Fitzgerald in which Fitzgerald discusses revising short stories specifically in order to make them sell, and his interests in courting Hollywood just because of the money he might make.

I think you need to refresh you understanding of literary history.

cmi0616 said:

As far as I'm concerned genre is first and foremost a marketing tool and in some cases a scholarly tool. Writers ought not to concern themselves with it.

That said, my impression of "chick-lit" is that it's a type of commercial, "pop" lit, which pretty much disqualifies it from being literary.

Is Austen "literary chick lit?" Bronte? I mean the term "chick-lit" is kind of gibberish as far as I'm concerned.

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You've clearly not read much of Austen or Bronte—and equally clearly, aren't deeply versed in the contexts in which they wrote.

They were in fact dismissed because they were perceived as writing "women's fiction." That's why Charlotte wrote as Currer Bell and Emily wrote as Ellis Bell. Austen used pseudonyms for similar reasons, and absolutely wrote for commercial reasons. She wanted to be paid, and she made no bones about it. You'll likely have noticed that she ruthlessly mocks the literary critics of her day—especially in Northanger Abbey.

veinglory said:

Then you did say that. And I find it offensive. Mainly because... it is offensive. I have already stated I look for a market before beginning writing, thus you are calling my work puerile. I personally think writing fiction for an identified market to make the money I need to live is anything but immature or foolish. But if you need to judge other people's decisions as unworthy, knock yourself out.

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I'm sorry that I offended you, that was not my intention. Keep in mind that since this is the "literary" forum, I am speaking in terms of literary fiction. Based on the links below your posts, you're not writing literary fiction. Which is fine, but I think literary fiction has different aims than, for instance, erotica, and that you can't apply the standards of one genre to another. So I apologize if that wasn't clear.