I couldn't say. Until tonight I'd never heard of "theater fiction," which is what Wikipedia describes it as.
I'd prefer "all writing is at least slightly literary, and some writing rises to the level of literature" - because of all the cases where it seems:- - Genre writing becomes literature without the author intending it to - Emily Dickinson - Writers become literature by perfecting a genre - Shakespeare - Writers produce a new genre whilst observing an existing one - Lovecraft - Literary writing becomes generic after the fact - Tolkien In the last example, Tolkien sets out to prospectively create a new genre, using a developed academic understanding of how to do that artificially. It's difficult to conceive of a more literary project. But once he's done Lord of the Rings, and thousands of other writers have built a genre out of it, Lord of the Rings surely also has to be analyzed retrospectively by the conventions of the genre it founded. Which leads to a philosophical question:- Is 'The Lord of the Rings' a bad example of an epic fantasy book, or a beautiful example of a Tolkien? If we bring ourselves to admit Tolkien's editing wouldn't pass muster nowadays, I think he makes a useful counterexample to anyone who is being snobbish about literary being better than genre. It's possible to write a dreadful genre book that is excellent literature. Tolkien and Stephen King have in common that they become exempt from editing and this lets them make themselves a genre. Both I think want their work to form a united whole - iirc Stephen King's Dark Tower can be seen as a literary project to bring his own genre fiction together into something more... literary(?). I wish my suggested amend to "all writing is at least slightly literary, and some writing rises to the level of literature" was more useful though. It may reduce to a trite observation that "some writing rises to the level of literature," which is to say "shit happens." Isn't part of the beauty of the unconscious never knowing what it's up to? If the conscious mind came in and woke it up with a bright light, then we'd just have two conscious-es. The new one would be better-slept at first, and our tax returns would seem to take half as long. But soon some tiny difference of opinion about whether to round something (perhaps caused by a neuroscientific trauma in infancy) would cause them to squabble. And one of them would sulk and storm off back to bed. But that isn't the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario (I would suggest) is that the conscious comes back from a long day writing an epic fantasy novel, and finds its other half in flagrante with the therapist.
I think that's probably just because part of the plot revolves around a theater troupe. Not sure why that merits its own genre.
Come to think of it, there was a guy in one of my groups a few years back who was bringing chapters from such a book. He was quite good, and I enjoyed reading about the special energy of the milieu. He had an ironic take on much of it, which made it more interesting.
So I got those ideas from the earlier mega-post(s) refined into four blog posts. I think I'll keep any possible discussion of them outside the blog, as I feel (marginally?) less guilty neglecting someone else's forum thread than I would neglecting comments directly on my own blog, during those times when my oomph is too low to engage. And I saw and hereby thank for the likes already accrued.
I was poking around just now to see if there really are separate UK and US translations of Smilla's Sense of Snow (orig. Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne) and came across this interesting PDF about why there are different titles in the UK and US: https://translationreview.utdallas.edu/review-pdfs/Satterlee_CaseForSmilla.pdf The short version is a falling-out between the translator and the Danish author, who believed he had a better sense of English than his translator. The UK publisher published his adulterated translation, under the title he preferred, and put a fake name on the translator (since she didn't want her name on the adulterations); while the US publisher published the original translation with the translator's name. Such are the dramas of the writer's world.
@Xoic I'm currently reading King's IT and there's an early part in the book that (serendipitously) touches on some of these topics. I'm referring to the chapter that introduces adult Bill Denbrough and covers his struggles with creative writing courses while attending college. One interesting takeaway from those pages was that the closer Bill "progressed” to writing from his flow state, the less literary his peers and professors judged his work. And to that crowd, if it wasn’t literary it's without merit.
That's not one I've read. I'm just experimenting with this stuff, and I never said it will make your writing more literary. What I'm personally interested in from all this isn't to write literary fiction, but just to expand my own work out toward what I refer to as the poetic. I don't give a flying fark what a bunch of academics consider literary by the current standards, or what Stephen King decided that means in a story he wrote.
Sorry @Bone2pick , it sounded like you were just telling me I was wrong. I've come to realize that the things I was talking about on this thread really aren't literary, they're my own personal inclinations, leaning toward what I've been referring to as the poetic, exemplified by those movies I posted clips from. Maybe it's a subset of literary writing? Or maybe it at least leans more toward the literary than to genre or popular fiction. So yeah, I hereby resign as thread host, since I was really just taking it off track. If somebody else wants to take it up, by all means, feel free. Maybe the thread can become about literary writing. Or maybe I should change the thread title to Xoic's weird ideas that he thinks have something to do with literary writing. (No, I'm not going to do that.)
I think the line between "literature" and "genre fiction" is something that inevitably gets blurred over time and is pretty irrelevant in the long run. A lot of stuff considered masterpieces today was just popular, not especially highbrow, entertainment in its time. I think the protagonist needing to be "active" or have "agency" is a contemporary fad, something that often makes sense but which, like "show don't tell", is elevated into a dogma. A lot of my favorite stories and books have protagonists that get bumped around from one place to another or are otherwise reactive most of the time. I think there is an expectation out there that readers want to live through the protagonists but that's not always true.
I certainly agree that much of what we call literary fiction today is simply a continuation and evolution of what published hardback fiction has always been. It's not contemporary literary fiction that's a comparatively new phenomenon needing explanation, it's contemporary popular fiction, with its special rules the gatekeepers to publication enforce. Books for the middle class, then gradually including the lower middle class and working Joes, took a lot of social, economic, and technological change over more than 150 years to become possible on such a large scale. Much of what was considered general fiction in the mid-1900's would today be classified as literary, simply because it would be impossible to publish under any other rubric. And I'm talking about books that were good but not remarkable, at least no more remarkable than any completed and coherent work of fiction is remarkable. There's a lot of good popular fiction today, numerically I expect more than ever, even if what you find on the grocery store shelf is some of the least interesting and nourishing. But the received wisdom about how to write it has hardened into something atherosclerotic that isn't necessarily good for readers, writers, or publishers. I suspect publishers think they've weathered the wave of change that has killed so many newspapers. But it's not the delivery technology that's on the verge of cataclysmic change, it's the marketing and dissemination. The role of publishers is going to be hugely changed and reduced even ten years from now, not to mention twenty. They're going to be more like contract marketing organizations. There may still be some prestigious imprints, but they'll have much less control over the overall process.
This is very true, and something I hadn't really considered. Of course the written language in the Victorian age was pretty convoluted and highfalutin'. But then the education was much better in many ways. Maybe not as wide a swath of the general public were educated, but those who were were used to reading at a much higher level of literacy than we are today (in general I mean, unless of course you read a lot of literary work). Probably because, as you and @Also have said, the publishing industry has progressively dumbed down their product for mass general consumption. I do see the wisdom of that if you want to appeal to the largest possible audience. But of course that's never what literary authors wanted to do. I'm not being thread host, just commenting.
And following up on that (and this is sort of implied in @Also 's previous post) the reason the publishing industry probably lowered the standard (for popular fiction) is doubtless because the government schools reached a much wider segment of the population, including the lower middle and working classes, so they then became part of the target demographic. So now we have in a sense 2 publishing industries—one aimed at the less literary among us or those who want general entertainment and escapism, and one aimed at those seeking a more engaging and 'difficult' level. Milk for the children and meat for the adults. My guess is that in pre-pulp days most publishing was at that higher Victorian standard? Or wait, what were the so-called penny dreadfuls? Were those not cheap entertainment for the masses before the pulps came along, like in Victorian days? I believe they were. Maybe there have long been basically 2 levels of publishing. But then I'd also say todays mass market includes some work done to a higher standard than penny dreadfuls or pulps. It's expanded since those days. And I forgot about the magazines. In the golden age of magazine publishing a lot of them included short stories and serialized novels, and many of those would have been at a higher standard than pulps. I think paperback publishing expanded the horizons of the market considerably. That came toward the end of the pulp era and replaced them really, but allowed for a higher level of general reading I think. Maybe the introduction of the paperback coincided with that expansion of the 'lower' kind of publishing to include things beyond the lurid levels of pulp entertainment. And maybe people had a little more spending money and could afford the paperbacks, whereas previously the lower classes could only afford pulps? Did pulp publishing have something to do with the world wars and the depression and the need to use extremely cheap paper? I seem to remember reading that. I'm largely just guessing here, but I think all this plays in to some extent.
Here's a page covering some of the info on penny dreadfuls and pulps, and I had forgotten about the dime novel: Comics, dime novels, pulps and Penny Dreadfuls. It looks like the pulps were born in 1896 with Argosy, some time before WWI. And here's the Wiki entry on the history of paperbacks. What I said about paperbacks above was really aimed at the pocket paperback (of course penny dreads and pulps were a form of paperback). And the original pulps evolved into the digest-sized publications we know them as today, printed on better paper, like Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Also, let's not forget Shakespeare was not writing plays for the high-minded intelligentsia. His were for the rabble and the street ruffians, the potato-nosed peasants of the day. But they weren't reading it, they were watching it onstage. It was the television of the renaissance. I've read my way down to Paperback Originals in that wiki article, and apparently genre conventions were established or codified only after the emergence of original pocket paperbacks, somewhere around 1950. I had no idea that happened so recently! My bad—not sure why it said that. I've now read more in the first article and it says genres were begun in the pulps around the 1890's. I knew that. And I'll revise what I said earlier—it isn't really 2 different publishing worlds, it's more like a continuum, with a lot of overlap around the middle areas.
So that's the nub of the question: did today's mainstream popular fiction come from the penny dreadfuls and pulp magazines, or did it hijack mainstream fiction as mass markets more and more had money, leisure, and interest to read books? I think it hijacked mainstream publishing, relegating more selective writing to smaller and smaller niches of its original home. I recall that in the 60s and 70s, when paperback publishing was already thriving, there still existed "True Detective" style magazines and other types that were remnants of the pulp market. And publishing for the popular market was not yet then nearly so demanding as it appears to be today that content and reading level and other attributes be so carefully adapted to a 12-grade level of reader.
I'd suggest it's useful to take this division back to the 1400s and draw it in terms of literate vs. illiterate. Just because people couldn't read (much) didn't mean they weren't consuming vast amounts of printed media. More contentiously, what if it was genetic: what if illiterate people were illiterate because their people were subjugated and forced to speak an alien language? Rising literacy might be due to improved access to education, or it might be no thanks to the rulers at all - our cerebral cortices might be evolving. In response, they invent Bureaucratese - to try and move the goalposts, but the invented words soon enter common parlance and have to be churned constantly. I don't think genre-fiction traces back to the woodcuts of the illiterate majority. What a heinous misrepresentation! Doesn't genre-fiction - with its highly formalized structures, its ubiquity, its gatekeeping, its preponderance of socially-elite authors, and its reinforcement of their values - more resemble the decadent and artistically bankrupt output of a dying empire? These are readers who condone murdering trees just to crowd out our native folklore on the bookshelves, or anything that might let us reverse-engineer the psychic equipment they control us with. They pose with their books on the train, they take selfies with them, they carry them to book clubs - but probably they don't read them. And if they do, there's nothing in there. Probably they don't even speak English - the received pronunciation is what it sounds like when human vocal chords try to impersonate a six-foot tall tentacle-bug scraping its wings with its back legs. If one of us buys a genre-fiction book though, they rejoice. We have transferred our wealth to their purebred sons and daughters - who can afford to spend years doing creative writing courses, and thereafter sit around self-publishing tripe that nobody buys. We must read literary fiction: tirelessly training our cerebral cortices against the day when we rise up against the alien overlords!
I heard Lit. Fic summed up like this, and this is why I love writing it. It's a literature's version of a food blender. You can have elements of numerous genres without the restraints (or responsibilities?) of writing in one particular genre.
Consider a character who is hyper focused on a goal, such as a new technology. Outside of that goal the character is very passive in daily life.
To quote from a non-commercial page where I discuss this at length on another site: In a Nutshell: Popular fiction gets itself published and read by combining creativity and freshness with mastery of convention. It colors creatively inside the lines drawn by genre, convention, and craft lore. Literary fiction gets itself published and read by being intelligently unconventional. It colors freely over and outside the lines of genre, convention, and craft lore that shape popular fiction. For the most part, it actively avoids conventionality, unless -- as in the Coen Brothers' cinematic equivalent of literary writing, The Man Who Wasn't There -- it is conventional with deliberate irony. Core readers of popular fiction prefer certain kinds of conventionality, creatively and skillfully executed. Core readers of non-commercial a k a literary fiction prefer unconventionality in most things.
A couple of nights ago, something led me back to Altman's 3 Women, early work for Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek. He said he created it from some dreams, and originally there wasn't going to be a screenplay for it. For 30 years it was unavailable for home viewing, but nowadays it's available on several streaming channels including Amazon. Elsewhere we've talked about how much innovation there was in the 1970s that just sort of went away, or went somewhere else. And 3 Women wouldn't be a great film, let alone revolutionary, if made today, but it was an amazing thing for a major studio to release then. And an inquiry about a critique group I run led me back yesterday not only to Fear of Flying, but to The Women's Room and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. They stand up well.
To ignore the lines like that the author needs to know where those lines are, and how to cross them while maintaining the readers interest. I got turned off to the whole literary fiction market after reading a few years ago, that struck me as an eho trip for the author in the, see how smart I am, manner.
Man, if only when I started this thread I had known about the Mice thing—Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event. That would have put so much into perspective right off the bat! And saved me from all that meandering and foundering I did for many pages in the early part of the thread. Now I know, for instance, that The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland are both Milieu stories—they're about a very ordinary (and often quite passive) character journeying through a strange and magical land filled with strange and powerful characters, and they're often quite dreamlike. They're about the milieu, which means the place and the customs of the people, or their weirdness. It works perfectly with a passive character, one who only reacts to what others do to them, rather than being proactive (which is what's meant by an active character). Idea and Event stories also don't require an active protag, though there's no reason you can't have one. But they're about an idea or an event and how those things affect people, they're not about a change in the main character. It's only Character stories that require an active MC and a character arc. An active MC is a necessity of course in a Hero's Journey story, at least by the end. Usually in the beginning the character is passive or just going through life reacting to things other people do to him or her. They usually grow toward being more active via a training montage (lol). And now I've also learned about Juxtapositional and Lyrical story structures, and I know vaguely about Vignette and Verse story structures. These (if I understand correctly, which is not a sure thing—I'm trying to learn about them now) are more poetic forms of story structure, and I don't believe they require an active protagonist. I probably shouldn't say that, because I don't remember reading about that aspect anywhere yet, but they're not your standard narrative form—they're poetic, and that generally means an active character isn't required.
