Boy, it was only four o’clock in the morning and already a couple of things got me going. This one’s about the term "literary fiction" and its various misconceptions.
I’ve posted here before about this subject, as have more intellectual and expert litbloggers. The term is vague, and yet there is an area where we can pretty much agree what definitely belongs in this category and what doesn’t. I would expect a publisher, an agent, an editor, and sometimes an author, to have an idea of what the term means. That’s why I was aghast (and I don’t often get aghast) to find this as part of a reply by Evil Editor (an editor) to a query about placing a novel in a genre in a query letter:
Apparently you’re unhappy with calling your book literary fiction. Don’t be. Literary doesn’t mean it’s literature; it just means it’s boring. My advice: add some sharks and a wolfman, and call it commecial fiction.
Now this is certainly not the first time I’ve heard literary fiction called boring (Faulkner, boring?), but usually it’s been done so by hard core genre writers who seem to feel that lit fic is a snobbish term, even though 1984, Farenheit 451, etc., etc. have all been considered sci fi as well as literary. But that’s okay; they have a right to an opinion.
So does Evil Editor. (I’m assuming he’s serious and this is not tongue-in-cheek since there are no quotes or italics used–but it is April Fool’s Day…) But while I wouldn’t take a movie star’s political views as necessarily sound, I sorta kinda hoped that someone in the publishing business would watch what was put out there for those who consider him an expert. Opinion notwithstanding; it likely shouldn’t have been stated. While I’m not one of the devout "Evil Minions" — a regular reader–I did stop by often to check out his usually good advice to new writers. I’m less likely to bother any more.
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Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with “literary fiction” being such a big deal. I actually consider it a bump up in the ranks, since “commercial fiction” is usually synonomous with “unoriginal fiction” in my mind.
But I can see how people could consider literature synonomous with “boring” when Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, Fitzgerald, and Tolstoy get constantly paraded around ;-D (gah!-lol). Throw Dumas, Stevenson, Poe, Dexter, Doyle, Scott, Dickens, Milton, the Greeks, Catcher in the Rye, and To Kill a Mockingbird in the mix and then you will have a good representation of the potential of a work of “literary fiction”.
Hey, just to clarify.
Are you saying that toylstoy or austen are borning? War and Peace is the greatest novel written, not because of the writing it uses, but because how complex and real it’s charecters are and how complex their lives are. It’s why the book is interesting when it’s in the ‘peace’ sections of the book.
Sian
It’s all a matter of opinion 😀 BUT at least Tolstoy and Austen can be debated; ideas and debate are the essence of the “literary fiction”.
And just to clarify: I was praising the second batch of authours I listed; they help to balance the (in my opinion) boring works that are usually in the spotlight these days.
I don’t consider literary fiction boring, but I also don’t consider it a genre. It’s fiction with a quality that defies genre. Quality is, in fact, its primary definition, IMO.
As for “boring” as a descriptor of any fiction, I think it’s a relative thing and usually a matter of reader taste. I personally don’t want an adrenaline jolt all the way through a story. I get enough of that from real life, and if I need more I’ll crank up the espresso machine. What I want from a story is plot, characters, setting — all arranged in such a way that I lose myself in the story and forget those constructs are there. It becomes literary, IMO, when long after reading the story some aspect of it stays in my mind, has in effect changed me.