UF vs. Literature: Death Match!

[alanajoli]

lyster wrote in response to my last entry:

My sense, based on the books I've seen self-identified as UF, is that few UF readers would recognize any of these three as Urban Fantasy, or at least as "their" urban fantasy. Am I correct? If so, where's the line? If not, whence this perception?There's a lot of marketing that going into defining genres. I was

Comments

[sartorias]

Interesting thoughts! It really can vary, can't it? One writer is using literary or beautiful language to this reader, and overwrought and self-conscious tangles of words to that reader over there. Chick lit to one editor, fantasy to the second editor, mainstream to a third. Crazy-making.

[alanajoli]

Oooh, I hadn't been thinking of it that way, but you're quite right: to me, beautiful language might actually be someone else's purple prose! Not only is there the whole marketing issue, but there's also just the plain and simple matter of taste to throw into the equation. :)

[asakiyume]

And sometimes it's even just a matter of mood on the part of the reader. My feelings about whether language is gorgeous and rich or annoying and overdone changes depending on my mood, for sure.

[jeff_duntemann]

'"Literary fiction" seems to be synonymous with "depressingly hopeless" in some circles.'

And hopelessly depressing. The problem with literary fiction--and the reason that genres evolved and are doing as well as they are--is that literature (as we now define it) drew its boundaries ever more tightly around itself, excluding more and more of the territory that writers of fiction were once free to explore, until every story now seems pretty much like every other story. What's there isn't bad, but it's so constrained that I simply don't read much of it anymore.

Genres can be constraining, too--if you let them. But what I love about genres today is that both readers are writers are willing to bend the walls of literature and remix the concepts and settings into entirely new things. The cross-pollination has been particularly energetic in the last twenty years, as the Internet allows followers of a genre to find others who read what they like, and authors to interact with their readers

[alanajoli]

I have a friend who didn't take any creative writing classes during college because she'd heard too many horror stories of friends who'd been dissuaded from writing anything with fantastic elements. I thought, what a missed opportunity! But then, perhaps she was right about what she might have experienced. I was discouraged from writing anything "in genre" during college, but only because the prof thought students should learn basic elements of writing before playing inside of a more narrow rules set. Now I wonder, with genre boundaries busting open so wide, if you're right, and that they're *less* constraining than supposedly non-genre fiction.

I also tend to agree on the topic of fun, but some dour folks would claim that if you're having fun then you aren't really getting it. Pooh pooh on them!

[jeff_duntemann]

"Pooh pooh" is being gentle. I'd use only four carefully chosen letters in front of "them."

If I had had to write literary fiction to learn things like plot, setting, internal dialog, and so on, I doubt I would ever have sold even a single story. The reason? I wanted a more interesting challenge. I needed to write action/adventure to keep me going, else I would have stopped right there and gone back to fooling with electronics. I learned how to plot first, and then (with effort) learned the rest, by writing SF and (very occasionally) fantasy. Good advice from established writers helped me more than I appreciated at the time, but above all else I had the freedom to practice in areas that excited me. Genre is more tolerant of mistakes, and engages inexperienced writers more thoroughly than tightly constrained literary fiction. I look back at my college-years fiction and groan a little, but it was practice, and it was fun. If not for that, I would not be writing what I'm writing today.

[lyster]

It's unsettling that good genre fiction ends up shelved as literature -- Emperor of Ocean Park isn't in the mystery section, nor is Cat's Cradle in SF/F. Not only does this keep "normal" folks from reading other genre books they would like, it also keeps genre readers away from awesome books like Master and Margarita and Satanic Verses, traditionally thought of as literature, which are amazing stories, and far less formulaic than mainstream fantasy. Not all literature is as depressing as Thomas Hardy, any more than all fantasy, urban or whatever, is about vampires mourning the fact that alas, they, damned childer of Caine, are cursed forever more to wander the earth without feeling the touch of the sun, tragically alone etc

[alanajoli]

I think the good genre fiction getting shelved outside of the genre is one of the things that contributes to the continuing anti-genre slur from the literati (as I don't want to assume that all of the "establishment" thinks thusly, and will only attribute the thoughts to those elitist anti-genre folks). Obviously, they must say, if it were good enough, it wouldn't be ostracized in a section where people who enjoy it will actually find it! ;)

Of course, Jane Austen, who I've heard claimed is the grandmother of all modern romance, is in literature (or at least general fiction) rather than romance. In her day, I believe she was just intending to write novels (where Hawthorne was, in his market, publishing romances); it's only been a reclamation from the current romance market that feels Austen is appropriately genred. So I guess it can go both ways.

The Chesterton quote is utterly lovely. :)

UF vs Literature: Death Match

[anonymous]

First on the trivial side: I blink at the inclusion of Twilight in Urban Fantasy, except in the most literal sense that it happens to have some urban fantasy creatures. To me, Twilight is paranormal romance (or as one commenter put it, "abstinence with vampires"), and much more romance than paranormal. Their fandom is proof enough of this. It's almost exclusively female, and the Twilight fans I saw at NEFX last year looked and acted like Muggles who had wandered into Diagon Alley and wondered who all these weird people were. The same, I've heard firsthand, was true of the Twilight fans at SDCC. The clincher: my genre-indifferent, chick lit and teen soap loving teenage daughter loves Twilight

Re: UF vs Literature: Death Match

[alanajoli]

To be fair, Twilight is probably most properly categorized in YA, which is a different beast (though writers I know who think YA is a genre in and of itself would blink at that inclusion also). Paranormal Romance in the marketing sense seems to refer to a very specific, category romance styled formula of fiction that Twilight doesn't fit. (Then again, neither does Richelle Mead's "Succubus" series, and that's where marketing categorizes that. They obviously didn't ask me!)

I'm amused that the Twilight fandom comes off like Muggles, since the tales I've heard of that group have been some of the scariest, most rabid fandom stories. (Girls cutting themselves at movie premieres and asking Pattinson to drink them? Not cool, kids!) But that's a whole different set of issues. :)

One of the posters on sartorias's blog also noted the literary-fiction-as-genre issue, and I think I'd like to hear more about that as an idea, since "literary" seems so very ephemeral to me as a term. Many people to use it in dissimilar ways -- or, frequently, as a short-

[asakiyume]

Sad to think of books languishing because they've been poorly "branded." You mentioned fantasy mislabeled (trying to "pass") as mainstream, but I wonder if the reverse ever happens, if something is labeled "fantasy" that doesn't appeal so much to the broad swath of fantasy readers, but would appeal to a "mainstream" readership.

Boy the labels are killing, aren't they? People do, thank goodness, tend to read more broadly than a label implies.