If literary fiction isn’t formulaic, then why can so much of it be summarized as “Broken people descend through helplessness into hopelessness?”
Discuss.
Originally shared by Standout Books
In broad strokes, genre fiction foregrounds story, literary fiction foregrounds character.
Find out more with ‘What You Need To Know About Literary Fiction’.
A man turns to drink, causing him to lose a promising career and spend his days as a janitor. Over the course of the novel, he discovers that his dreams of bad things aren’t dreams but suppressed traumas from childhood.
Am I giving a generic description of a common male literature arc or a common Stephen King arc?
A man turns to drink, causing him to lose a promising career and spend his days as a janitor. Over the course of the novel, he discovers that his dreams of bad things aren’t dreams but suppressed traumas from childhood.
Am I giving a generic description of a common male literature arc or a common Stephen King arc?
A man turns to drink, causing him to lose a promising career and spend his days as a janitor. Over the course of the novel, he discovers that his dreams of bad things aren’t dreams but suppressed traumas from childhood.
Am I giving a generic description of a common male literature arc or a common Stephen King arc?
A man turns to drink, causing him to lose a promising career and spend his days as a janitor. Over the course of the novel, he discovers that his dreams of bad things aren’t dreams but suppressed traumas from childhood.
Am I giving a generic description of a common male literature arc or a common Stephen King arc?
A man turns to drink, causing him to lose a promising career and spend his days as a janitor. Over the course of the novel, he discovers that his dreams of bad things aren’t dreams but suppressed traumas from childhood.
Am I giving a generic description of a common male literature arc or a common Stephen King arc?
Humour aside, I prefer the division between genres that tend to foreground character (paranormal romance, literary realism, gritty fantasy) and genres that tend to foreground story (epic fantasy, hard science-fiction, military fiction). However, I prefer not to have the boundaries of categories any firmer than a three-minute egg.
If we were to focus on which genre has the strongest need to show world rather than personal action, I suspect we would find it was the literary genre, defined as it is by Proust’s achingly long description of a cake or Self’s paean to each brick of a street.
But, one sentence is never going to capture any genre. Epic fantasy is about massive world events, but we care because of specific characters; we must or GoT fans would all be massive fans of dense historical tomes too. Romance is about two very specific people, but the massive range of romance subgenres shows readers care about the world against which they play out the same tale of mutual misunderstanding.
So of course the literary genre can be described as mostly broken people failing; after all, happy people are all happy in the same way and (more importantly for fiction) face no real challenge to drive a book, so sad people make better characters; and of all the ways we might distinguish wish from reality, it is that reality is not fair, so it is more “real” for those sad people to fail than succeed.
Humour aside, I prefer the division between genres that tend to foreground character (paranormal romance, literary realism, gritty fantasy) and genres that tend to foreground story (epic fantasy, hard science-fiction, military fiction). However, I prefer not to have the boundaries of categories any firmer than a three-minute egg.
If we were to focus on which genre has the strongest need to show world rather than personal action, I suspect we would find it was the literary genre, defined as it is by Proust’s achingly long description of a cake or Self’s paean to each brick of a street.
But, one sentence is never going to capture any genre. Epic fantasy is about massive world events, but we care because of specific characters; we must or GoT fans would all be massive fans of dense historical tomes too. Romance is about two very specific people, but the massive range of romance subgenres shows readers care about the world against which they play out the same tale of mutual misunderstanding.
So of course the literary genre can be described as mostly broken people failing; after all, happy people are all happy in the same way and (more importantly for fiction) face no real challenge to drive a book, so sad people make better characters; and of all the ways we might distinguish wish from reality, it is that reality is not fair, so it is more “real” for those sad people to fail than succeed.
Humour aside, I prefer the division between genres that tend to foreground character (paranormal romance, literary realism, gritty fantasy) and genres that tend to foreground story (epic fantasy, hard science-fiction, military fiction). However, I prefer not to have the boundaries of categories any firmer than a three-minute egg.
If we were to focus on which genre has the strongest need to show world rather than personal action, I suspect we would find it was the literary genre, defined as it is by Proust’s achingly long description of a cake or Self’s paean to each brick of a street.
But, one sentence is never going to capture any genre. Epic fantasy is about massive world events, but we care because of specific characters; we must or GoT fans would all be massive fans of dense historical tomes too. Romance is about two very specific people, but the massive range of romance subgenres shows readers care about the world against which they play out the same tale of mutual misunderstanding.
So of course the literary genre can be described as mostly broken people failing; after all, happy people are all happy in the same way and (more importantly for fiction) face no real challenge to drive a book, so sad people make better characters; and of all the ways we might distinguish wish from reality, it is that reality is not fair, so it is more “real” for those sad people to fail than succeed.
Humour aside, I prefer the division between genres that tend to foreground character (paranormal romance, literary realism, gritty fantasy) and genres that tend to foreground story (epic fantasy, hard science-fiction, military fiction). However, I prefer not to have the boundaries of categories any firmer than a three-minute egg.
If we were to focus on which genre has the strongest need to show world rather than personal action, I suspect we would find it was the literary genre, defined as it is by Proust’s achingly long description of a cake or Self’s paean to each brick of a street.
But, one sentence is never going to capture any genre. Epic fantasy is about massive world events, but we care because of specific characters; we must or GoT fans would all be massive fans of dense historical tomes too. Romance is about two very specific people, but the massive range of romance subgenres shows readers care about the world against which they play out the same tale of mutual misunderstanding.
So of course the literary genre can be described as mostly broken people failing; after all, happy people are all happy in the same way and (more importantly for fiction) face no real challenge to drive a book, so sad people make better characters; and of all the ways we might distinguish wish from reality, it is that reality is not fair, so it is more “real” for those sad people to fail than succeed.
Humour aside, I prefer the division between genres that tend to foreground character (paranormal romance, literary realism, gritty fantasy) and genres that tend to foreground story (epic fantasy, hard science-fiction, military fiction). However, I prefer not to have the boundaries of categories any firmer than a three-minute egg.
If we were to focus on which genre has the strongest need to show world rather than personal action, I suspect we would find it was the literary genre, defined as it is by Proust’s achingly long description of a cake or Self’s paean to each brick of a street.
But, one sentence is never going to capture any genre. Epic fantasy is about massive world events, but we care because of specific characters; we must or GoT fans would all be massive fans of dense historical tomes too. Romance is about two very specific people, but the massive range of romance subgenres shows readers care about the world against which they play out the same tale of mutual misunderstanding.
So of course the literary genre can be described as mostly broken people failing; after all, happy people are all happy in the same way and (more importantly for fiction) face no real challenge to drive a book, so sad people make better characters; and of all the ways we might distinguish wish from reality, it is that reality is not fair, so it is more “real” for those sad people to fail than succeed.
It’s not just the failure to succeed that annoys me about a lot of litfic, though. It’s the failure to try. For me, “genre” fiction tends to feature people who confront a problem with some hope and expectation of solving it; “literary” fiction tends to feature people who wallow in angst about it rather than attempting to do anything. (Disclaimer re generalizations goes here.)
As someone who could have become a literary academic and instead ended up in a career which involves solving real-world problems on a daily basis, I’m naturally a fan of the former over the latter.
Both have an audience, both involve significant craft, yada yada trying not to be evaluative here, but that’s my personal preference.
It’s not just the failure to succeed that annoys me about a lot of litfic, though. It’s the failure to try. For me, “genre” fiction tends to feature people who confront a problem with some hope and expectation of solving it; “literary” fiction tends to feature people who wallow in angst about it rather than attempting to do anything. (Disclaimer re generalizations goes here.)
As someone who could have become a literary academic and instead ended up in a career which involves solving real-world problems on a daily basis, I’m naturally a fan of the former over the latter.
Both have an audience, both involve significant craft, yada yada trying not to be evaluative here, but that’s my personal preference.
It’s not just the failure to succeed that annoys me about a lot of litfic, though. It’s the failure to try. For me, “genre” fiction tends to feature people who confront a problem with some hope and expectation of solving it; “literary” fiction tends to feature people who wallow in angst about it rather than attempting to do anything. (Disclaimer re generalizations goes here.)
As someone who could have become a literary academic and instead ended up in a career which involves solving real-world problems on a daily basis, I’m naturally a fan of the former over the latter.
Both have an audience, both involve significant craft, yada yada trying not to be evaluative here, but that’s my personal preference.
It’s not just the failure to succeed that annoys me about a lot of litfic, though. It’s the failure to try. For me, “genre” fiction tends to feature people who confront a problem with some hope and expectation of solving it; “literary” fiction tends to feature people who wallow in angst about it rather than attempting to do anything. (Disclaimer re generalizations goes here.)
As someone who could have become a literary academic and instead ended up in a career which involves solving real-world problems on a daily basis, I’m naturally a fan of the former over the latter.
Both have an audience, both involve significant craft, yada yada trying not to be evaluative here, but that’s my personal preference.
It’s not just the failure to succeed that annoys me about a lot of litfic, though. It’s the failure to try. For me, “genre” fiction tends to feature people who confront a problem with some hope and expectation of solving it; “literary” fiction tends to feature people who wallow in angst about it rather than attempting to do anything. (Disclaimer re generalizations goes here.)
As someone who could have become a literary academic and instead ended up in a career which involves solving real-world problems on a daily basis, I’m naturally a fan of the former over the latter.
Both have an audience, both involve significant craft, yada yada trying not to be evaluative here, but that’s my personal preference.
Formulaic can be okay but a twist or two can make it seem not so boring or overused.
Formulaic can be okay but a twist or two can make it seem not so boring or overused.
Formulaic can be okay but a twist or two can make it seem not so boring or overused.
Formulaic can be okay but a twist or two can make it seem not so boring or overused.
Formulaic can be okay but a twist or two can make it seem not so boring or overused.