132: Is Literary Fiction Always "Better?"

 

The belief that literary fiction is better than genre fiction has been instilled in most of us, and it can be difficult to overcome. Learn why this is so harmful, whether literary fiction is truly better, and what you can do if you're a new writer who's wrestling with what kind of book you want to write. 

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is literary fiction always “better?”

Welcome to your big creative life, a podcast for writers and creatives that helps you live your best big creative life, whatever that means for you. I'm Katie Wolf, a writer, book editor and creator. Join me every week for tips and discussion on writing, mindset up leveling your life and anything and everything that will help you achieve your big creative dreams. Let's get started.

 

Hello, friend, welcome to your big creative life. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening to the podcast. We just wrapped our first two weeks of the novel jumpstart program, which is my program for new writers to help them write the first 50 pages of their books in eight weeks. And we have such an amazing group, it's a small group, everyone in the cohort is very supportive and encouraging. And I really hope they're getting so much out of the program. If you missed the registration, or you decided to pass on it this time, but are interested in the future, my tentative plan is to run a version of it again in the fall.

 

So I'll announce, maybe I'll start talking about it maybe like a month before, if I decide to launch it again in the fall. So that you can know when the enrollment period is going to open and save up if you are interested in it. My plan is to get some feedback from the people who are in it currently, just to see if there's anything that we want to tweak with the program, anything I can do to make it better, and then relaunch it again in some version and fall.

 

Alright, the title of this episode is a bit misleading, because the answer is know right off the bat like is literary fiction, quote unquote, better than genre fiction. But I want to dive into this issue because it is something that I think a lot of us come to the practice of writing with, it's a belief that a lot of us have what whether we know it or not, this can be something that we're aware of, that we have this bias in this judgment, or it can be something that that's subconscious that has been programmed into us. And I'll talk about where a lot of this comes from. But this is something that's important to examine because it's important for you as an author if you want to be writing genre fiction.

 

But it's also important for you as the literary citizen, it is important important thing for you to be aware of, as a reader, as a writer, as someone who was in this world, in this community, to make sure that your unconscious, perhaps bit of bias or judgment is not to make sure that that's something you're aware of and working on. Because we don't want this to bleed out into our actions or comments, our interactions with people, it's just, it's really something we have to be mindful of.

 

And this is something that I was not aware of, when I first started writing that I have this type of programming. And the catalyst for this episode. Why I decided to talk about this now is I was having a conversation with one of my coaching clients. So I have a six month coaching program where people sign up to work with me for six months. And I give them feedback on their pages along the way. We have coaching calls, they can check in with me Monday through Friday on this app that we use, I do editing at the end, etc. And this person came into the program with an idea for a book, but she wasn't totally sure what genre she wanted it to be she wanted. She wasn't sure if she wanted it to be more just general fiction, or romance.

 

 And a lot of our work together in terms of coaching was just me helping her sort through her thoughts and her feelings about this. And we discovered that she had internalized this belief at some point along the way, like a lot of us that literary fiction or more even just general fiction is somehow superior to a genre like romance. And we talked about this, and I shared with her what I wish I will share with y'all in this episode, that a lot of this for me came from English classes, both in high school and then in college. I was an English Lit major. That's what my undergraduate degree is in. So I had to take a lot of literature classes. And when you are reading classic works by mostly straight white men, and that are dense and literary and we're not reading we were not reading much genre fiction at all, like hardly any.

 

In fact, the bulk of the books that I read in my classes were written prior to 1950. We read almost nothing new. I think I can remember, I took one class that was American literature after 1945. That was great. I loved that class, I loved the professor, and we read Don DeLillo. And we read, what is it? Tim O'Brien, his book about the I think it's the Vietnam War. Anyways, we didn't read much, if any genre fiction, and so the roots of this are easy to see why it's easy to see why we might have internalized this belief that certain types of fiction are just better and more deserving of analysis and reading than others. Because if the bulk of your Literature degree is devoted to these classic works, and you're not reading romance, or you're not reading thrillers, or you're not reading, sci fi, or just any any genre fiction at all, like it makes sense.

 

So anyways, we were talking about this and teasing this out. And through all of this examination, and really getting honest with herself, this client realized that she wanted to write a romance, she wanted the story to be dual point of view. With these two characters, alternately alternating chapters back and forth, or sections back and forth. And that's really what the book that she wanted to write. And why the other reason I want to talk about this is yes, to be to bring this stuff out into the light to be aware of it. But this can prevent you from writing the book that you want to write, if you have this subconscious bias, like this client did, where romance is somehow inferior to other genres.

 

But you want to write a romance that's going to cause an internal dissonance, there's going to be a conflict in you because you want to write this thing. But you shouldn't, you should write something more literary, or dealing with a different subject matter. But you want to write romance, and it's just going to be hard. And I want you to write the book that you want to write. If you want to write a romance. I want you to write a romance. And the thing that I've discovered about working with coaching clients and with editing clients, I know I'm talking about romance, specifically here. But the reason for that is really because I think there's an added layer of just misogyny on top of why we think this this internalized misogyny, that books written by women, mainly for women that feature women's stories are somehow inferior to other types of books.

 

But what I was gonna say is working with romance authors, as an editor, working with romance authors, as a coach, and also reading romance now myself, it is difficult to write a well paced, complex, emotionally immersive and engaging romance. This is one of those genres that looks easy. It looks pretty surface level, like, oh, it's just two people falling in love. And in fact, will they won't they, and then we get together and live happily ever after like boom, done.

 

It's not that easy. It is not that is not that simple. authors who do this, well make it look easy. And that is the case with a lot of good fiction. But I found it particularly true for something like romance where you don't even notice the work that the author is doing. You don't even notice things like pacing, or sexual tension or other things that are happening. There's just, there's so much work that goes into this and making these characters work individually and together, that the reader doesn't even notice consciously. So it's difficult to do that well.

 

And this is something that I want to talk about a lot because I love romance. And I didn't use to I didn't use to read romance because again, just some internalized misogyny that I was dealing with, and a lot of the programming from this literature degree about how certain books were better than others. And I don't know if y'all remember this, like 20 years ago, there was this whole category of like women's fiction called chick lit, which just makes me cringe to say that out loud, like chick lit how demeaning to call a category of fiction, chick lit.

 

I'm so glad that that has fallen out of fashion. And we could say the same thing about like women's fiction. Women's fiction is just any fiction that centers a woman's story, which is absurd, because the majority of people who are reading books are women. So it's just it's asinine that we have these categories is like these things like women's fiction, there's not men's fiction like it's just so stupid. Anyways, yeah, a lot of this just comes back to that programming and internal misogyny, so I think it's important again, you just to examine all of this stuff, so that it doesn't impact the choices that you make.

 

And I remember my first book, this is something that, again, I was not totally aware of. But I had this bias. And I felt like I should write more literary. But my first book was women's fiction. And it dealt with three different generations of family. It alternated between 1980 and the present day. So the 1980s sections were a mother, the mother character, when she was a little girl, she was like eight years old, or 10 years old, I can't remember how old she was. And then it flashed forward to the present day with her adult daughter, Leah. And I agonized after I got the draft out, probably the second draft out after the story was solid, about how to make this more elevated how to make the prose more elevated because I wanted this to be closer to literary fiction. And it really wasn't.

 

There's a term in the traditional publishing world that is called up market fiction. And it's not a term that's used to market books. It's really just on the back end of things like agents and editors, and publishers and stuff. Up market is a category of books that is somewhere in between literary and commercial. And traditionally, generally speaking, books that are literary focus more on the pros, they focus more on the characters as opposed to the plot, and then books that are very commercial, focus more on the plot and don't maybe don't have as deep have a focus on characters. That's traditionally what those designations mean.

 

And so then upmarket, that term, is like in the middle. Another term for this is like book club fiction. So I was obsessed when I was finishing this book, when I was editing it and getting it ready to query. I was obsessed with that, because I didn't want this book to be commercial, because in my mind, that meant not as good. And I don't like to say that because it's embarrassing, but that's just the truth. That's how programmed I was. And it took a lot of time and unlearning for me to work backwards and wake up from that and realize, wait a second, that's not true at all.

 

In editing, I have come to realize, and I talked about this on a previous podcast episode, that writing a compelling story is a different skill from writing a beautiful book, where the prose is just incredible, and someone who is a beautiful, beautiful writer with flowery language, rich imagery, etc. That's one skill, but then telling a story that readers can connect to where they just can't put it down. That is another skill. And a lot of writers have both, which is amazing, they're lucky and blessed and wonderful. And there's definitely overlap between the two. I don't, I don't mean to say that they're completely separate things. It's like a Venn diagram. But good fiction does not just mean beautiful sentences and literary fiction. That's not what that is.

 

Lately, I've seen a bit of an essay lately, really, it's like the last year or two maybe on tick tock. I saw a number of videos that came across my FYP that were talking about Twilight and talking about Stephenie Meyer specifically, and how much hate Stephenie Meyer got for her writing ability. When Twilight came out, people tore that woman down, they tore her to shreds for her writing ability. And look, I'm not going to argue that Stephenie Meyer constructs beautiful sentences like she's not the best line level writer. We all know that. But there is a reason that Twilight was such a massive, successful series, because I could not put it down when I started reading, and I was not really into vampire stories. I was not really at but for some reason, Twilight, just, I mean, I devoured the series.

 

Not so much the last book, but the first few books, yes, devoured them, I could not put them down. So she's doing something. Well. If we have a book like that, where people just cannot put it down, it's massively successful. People are talking about it. Yes, some of the success might be the people just want to see what all the hype is about. Sure. But you cannot tell me that she's not a good storyteller, like something in those books worked.

 

So I just I want to encourage you, if you can recognize yourself in any of these things that I've shared in this episode, I think it's worth examining why you have these beliefs where these beliefs and this programming has come from, and then what you can do to unlock are nice things. Because writing genre fiction is hard. Writing genre fiction is just as worthy and wonderful and good as literary fiction. And in some cases, it's harder. So I never want there to be this hierarchy that some genres or some types of books are better than others, because that's just not the case.

 

Yeah, it's really not. And different readers are going to respond to different types of books anyways. So even if you do write an incredibly lush, rich, literary fiction, like a literary novel, some readers just aren't going to want to read it and don't care. And the same thing is true with a commercially a commercial book that is has incredibly a fast paced plot and not much character word, but you can't put it down.

 

There are readers who are going to look at that and say, no way, I don't want to read that. So you might as well just write the book that you want to write, go with your natural strengths, go with your natural writing style, and write the book that you want to write. I think a lot of my healing has come from just recognizing that I'm not a literary fiction writer, I'm not writing literary fiction, I probably will never write literary fiction. And that is okay.

 

It doesn't make me less of a writer, it doesn't mean I'm not, like, good, I'm putting that in quotes. That's just not what I write. That's just not my natural writing style. And it's not. Yeah, it's just not one of my strengths to write those like beautiful sentences every once in a while, I do surprise myself with a really beautiful sentence. But um, yeah, that's not one of my strengths as a writer, like I can analyze my own strengths and weaknesses well enough to see that that's not it, I just don't have that talent. And I'm so in awe of people who do and I love those type of writers. But that doesn't mean that they're better than other types of writers.

 

So listen to this, let it digest sit with if you are having some of these, this judgment in these feelings as well, again, I think is just worth examining, both for yourself as a writer, but also for yourself as a reader. And as a literary citizen. Again, if you're participating in this world, in this literary world, it's important to look at the judgments that we might be placing upon other writers. So alright, thanks for sticking with me on that one, and maybe challenging some of your own beliefs. And I'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. 

Katie Wolf