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To get serious for a minute - reader contract is a big distinction but there's also a cultural element to consider. Alice, who picks up The Spaceship's Adventure from the space opera section of the bookshop because the raygun on the cover catches her eye, will likely expect certain elements from the book (a plot-driven story, speculation of what spacefaring technology might be in the future, action, etc). Bob, over in the literary fiction section looking at The Profession-haver's Daughter-Wife, will expect carefully-crafted prose, much internal dialogue and character change, no glorified violence, and so on. He'll be very disappointed if the Daughter-Wife builds a raygun and shoots off in a rocket to fight in spacewars. So lots of folk say, "it's all marketing, literary fiction is just another genre of fiction, like horror or romance" but I think that's a bit misleading because there's such a huge cultural difference of perception between genre and lit. The thing is - in Australia where I'm from - writing "literary fiction" can get you awards and government grants which are never given to genre authors. There's a a bunch grants, awards, competitions, conventions etc set up by both government grants and non-profit organisations. They can give young aspiring writers a massive leg up. "Genre" fiction does not receive this cultural "recognition" and is not taken seriously (occasionally it's tolerated if it's YA). Lit books will get reviews in the Sunday newspapers but sci-fi books almost never will. I don't know what it's like in the US (different I imagine), but in a small middlebrow country with a very spread-out population like Australia, this stuff is super important to author careers - our population is tiny and conservative, it's borderline impossible to chalk even a meagre living from being a fiction writer, and this sort of stuff is all we got. If Bob writes great debut novel that's considered literary, he can send it to competitions and win awards, get invited to festivals, apply for writing residencies in lovely old houses, and so on. If Alice writes a fantastic debut that's considered genre, all of that is closed to her, because it won't not considered serious fiction. And - having an element of non-realism/speculative/fantastic stuff will almost always get you flagged as genre (with rare strange exceptions that seemed to be tied to foreign authors, but Magical Realism is a whole another beast). This is understandable if you're talking about a genre book that relies on tropes and conventions - your book might be considered less original because it relies on frameworks built by others. But that's not all genre books by far - for every Weiss and Hickman, there's a Gibson and Banks. You can write a fantastic novel, examine serious issues, be existential and all, but the presence of a speculative/fantastic/mythic element will get the book flagged as genre and it'll be shut out from a lot of opportunities as a result. I suspect genre might be looked down upon more because a book with horrid writing and awful plots can still sell if it hits the "sweet spot" for readers who are into certain niche things, love to read about them, and will love books about them even if the book is of objectively poor quality (e.g. Ready Player One). To get a Lit piece on the bookstore shelves, you have to be able to string a few sentences together at least. Or perhaps it's because genre stuff is considered more financially profitable in the US, and is so considered less serious because it's less challenging to write (due to less financial obstacles) and less challenging to read (due reliance on familiar tropes)? I dunno.
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Jul 24, 2017 07:28
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:48 |
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