How are genre fiction and literature different? And what are the similarities?

Some thoughts, and some development of things I've mentioned previously:

I'm thinking that in order to write literary you need to learn how to write genre fiction—in particular story structure and character arc. Otherwise, if you never learned what it is and you try to write freeform you'll end up with a mish-mash, something that's part literary, part genre, and part gibberish. How would you know? And the problem is (a big part of it) you won't fulfill the promise of the genre, you won't wrap it up neatly and tie off the loose ends, connect up the inciting incident with the climax, etc. In other words you'll half-deliver genre but fail to do it properly. You can't do it properly unless you've learned how. And you can't keep it out unless you know what it is.

The genre elements you let in will ruin it for anyone who wants pure literary fiction. And then there'll also be the gibberish—stuff that's neither good literary fiction nor good genre, just babble.

This is why I believe it's necessary to learn about genre writing conventions, even if you want to write literary fiction. Or, as in my case, if you want to write genre but give it some breathing room, stretch it out some ways into literary-space.

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I also believe that genre writing is the teachable/learnable part. It's built on structure. If you want to write literary fiction there isn't much in the way of instruction, you just need to understand it from a lot of reading. Knowing what genre is helps with that, because then you know what literary fiction isn't, or what elements need to be severely reduced anyway.

So, unless you're one of the people who intuitively understand how to write good literary fiction, learn the learnable part. Unless you're writing only for your own enjoyment of course, in which case do whatever you want.

Not only is the genre fiction teachable and learnable, it's also comfortable and familiar. People who know the genre, whether they've read about its elements or just have read a lot of stories in that genre, know what to expect from it. They can tell if a story is hitting the right points or not. This is why I say genre is written from and for the conscious mind, the part that deals with the known and the familiar. Genre is safe in certain ways, even if it's filled with murder and mystery. There's no real mystery in the structuring of it.

And as the corollary to that, literary writing is done largely from and for the unconscious. That part that deals with the unknown, the unfamiliar. In LitFic people expect to be challenged, to not be able to see what's coming. They expect to deal with existential dread of a kind you don't often see in genre fiction. Let me clarify that—characters in genre fiction will encounter existential threats and get thrown into the unfamiliar, but the reader won't. In literary writing the reader drops headlong into the unfamiliar, because the writer is willing to do that. In fact it's something readers expect from literary.

This is all pretty much theory on my part. It probably needs to be tested and modified. But this is how I learn, by writing my thoughts. Usually just to myself, but when I venture onto the board with it I often get feedback that shows me where I'm wrong or points out things I'm missing. Hoping that happens here so we can all learn from it (those of us who need to).

 

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
Paul Auster - City of Glass
Elias Canetti - Die Blendung
Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing
Franz Kafka - Description of a Struggle
Virginia Woolf - The Voyage Out
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Poor Folk

Fun exercise: pick a writer who wrote literature, and look up if their first novel was genre fiction, or if there was already something obviously different about them.
I think with Lewis Caroll his jottings from his childhood have been published, and (iirc) at the ages where you or I were writing what our pet cat did in the holiday or whatever, he's got like, early versions of Jabberwocky, and satirical deconstructions of Anglo-Saxon lyric.

The seven authors listed aren't famous for taking LSD or meditating. They had standard educations, and the relationships between the different parts of their brain anatomy aren't knowable to critics or readers - and can't be imitated by other writers. One of the reasons we put people's names on the front of the book is that great writers seem to be able to reliably crank out masterpieces by being them.

They don't seem to write piles of Westerns in between shaking the foundations of literature, or to think "God, the Fountainhead was a slog to write, I'm going to find out what this vampire romance stuff is all about." Maybe they think they are writing genre fiction, but something -inspiration perhaps- prevents them.

Dostoevsky be like "yeah, but should I have given my MC different powers?"

 

I've been setting this thread to play in TTS Reader. I have nothing to contribute, not at the moment anyway, but boy, is it impressive to listen to. Especially when you choose the default UK male voice.

Palms and plaudits to one and all.

 

Why would they be? It isn't necessary, it's just a way of switching your attention away from the noisy consious and letting the unconscious rise into prominence. Many people do that naturally. The unconscious is always active, except during the deepest stages of sleep—it's mostly the conscious mind that seems to need sleep. The unconscious is simply the part that operates beneath the level of conscious awareness. Meditation is just a blatant way of getting in touch with it, but many writers apparently allow it to guide their work, doubtless without doing any formal meditation. When you get into the flow state, that's the unconscious largely taking charge, it's why you lose the sense of time passing. But for many people the hard part is to get the overbearing conscious mind, the ego-driven part, to shut up and let its silent partner have some air time. I believe all the really good artists were deeply in touch with their unconscious and frequently achieved flow state while working. And I believe the really great ones had awakened their Greater Self, what Jung called the Archetype of Wholeness, which essentially means you've taught your conscious mind that there is an unconscious and they've become well acquainted, to the point that the Greater Self becomes the new center of identity.

But I was probably doing things right when I only wrote about this stuff on my blog where people were less likely to respond, because out here the majority of people don't know about this stuff and think I'm a raving lunatic. I'd have to spend far too much time trying to explain all these things, and most people wouldn't listen anyway.

I've always been deeply interested in dreams, for as long as I can remember, and that led to an interest in lucid dreaming when I discovered a full-page ad in the back pages of an Analog sci-fi magazine some time in the early 80's I believe, for Stephen LaBerge's Lucidity Institute. I was hooked, but wasn't able to learn more about it at the time. That wouldn't happen until 2009, when I had a computer and suddenly decided to see if there are message boards dedicated to lucidity. However, in that full-page ad I did learn the importance of keeping a dream journal, so I started doing that. Actually even before that I had always written down the really cool or powerful ones. Decades later, on finding a luicid dreaming message board, I learned how to do it and also learned all kinds of things about dreaming, sleep science, and all manner of weird things about near-sleep states that you discover when you learn to pay attention as you're falling asleep and even in your dreams. It's one way of bringing conscious attention into the unconscious. So not only did I read many books on related subjects and research deeply into sleep science, but I have personally experienced lucid dreaming many times.

Ultimately from there my questing led to Jung and I studied his techniques and theories deeply. I have somewhere around 100 books about him and his work and have read most of them all the way through and for several years I worked through the beginning stages of the Individuation process. As I mentioned before, I made it through the Shadow stage and into the Anima stage (not sure if I said that here, probably it was on my blog).

So it should be clear that I know more about this stuff than most people. I'm not saying that I'm an authority, but I am saying I've researched and had personal experiences in these matters, and I have knowledge about it, much of which can't be studied scientifically (because how can science really study subjective experiences that can only be self-reported?) but that many other people have also experienced. Most people don't really understand what the unconscious is, they know only that it creates dreams, but not that it's awake and functioning all the time. Or that many of the great figures of history have reported having ongoing dialogues with some mysterious inner personality, that Socrates for example referred to as his daemon, that would let him know when he was wrong about something. Einstein also was thought to have an unusual level of access to the unconscious and that it was what allowed him to think outside of the box so well.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm spewing all this in anger, I'm totally not. I just felt like I should explain that I'm not just talking out of my ashpot here.

I believe most of the really great literary authors as well had unusual access to the unconscious. Especially those who wrote outside of the standard narrative mode. The unconscious doesn't really submit itself to formulae or structure, though if it's working in tandem with the conscious you may well be able to do that and still get the deep insight and strange dreamlike quality the unconscious brings to the table.

I also believe that many LitFic authors are working mostly or entirely consciously, just imitating the techniques and styles of other authors, possibly combining a few so it isn't too noticeable. But even if doing this, it's possible that some unconscious guidance gets through. Every one of us frequently falls into a meditative state without sitting down and going through any formal process, while staring into a fire for instance or watching the surface of water sparkle in the sun or tree branches swaying in the breeze. Or just while sitting at a desk typing or thinking about what to type. I used to do walking meditations every night when I'd walk on the street near my house though I had no idea they were that at the time, I just looked up at the stars (or clouds as the case may be) and thought about story ideas and all kinds of weird things as I walked on auto-pilot. I would always get my best ideas at those times.

It isn't necessary to meditate or do acid to contact the unconscious, it's always there. It's working right now in everyone reading this (and everyone else too, except those presently in the deepest stages of sleep). It's just that normallly we pay no attention to it. The ego-driven conscious mind is much louder and more attention-grabbing. You have to sink into a quiet meditative state to begin to notice the subtle thoughts emerging from the unconscious. And it helps if you quiet the subvocal thoughts that like to constanly run through our minds. The unconscious tends to be far more metaphorical and symbolic, which perhaps is why those are qualities of literary fiction and great art of all kinds.

OK lol, I don't know how to end this, so signing off now.

 

These are the ones I called geniuses a little ways back. Some people seem to just naturally know how to do things like that. I believe they didn't have to study story structure because they just read books and intuitively absorbed it. Or they were just such good intuitive writers that they didn't need to know what it is, they just automatically wrote in a way that didn't collide with genre fiction, or that somehow worked well with it. Yes, maybe you need to be that kind of genius to be one of the great literary authors, but not to write litfic.

 

I'm of the belief that writers tend to write on both levels, most without realizing it. It's a simultaneous thing that occurs without our consciousness aware and new writers and sometimes even good writers are too busy plotting to pick up the clues the subconscious has left behind.
For me there's two levels going on fiction the level you read and understand - plot etc. but underneath that is a network of threads tying deeper meanings together. A lot of writers have actually groomed out or broken the threads because they don't understand how they got there or what to do with them. The first draft has laid it's bits and this is when writers, too busy with plot, sweep them aside or ignore them. A writer who understands and works with them giving them their due is better off but even that can go wrong if they shine such a spotlight on them that the deeper meaning becomes tricked out as gimmick.

One of my favorite last girl standing roles was in the slasher movie Just Before Dawn, Constance, and there is a broken thread trying to link the movie together via the use of make up.
Throughout the movie Constance is worried. She is worried about not heeding the old drunk's warning, she's worried about her boyfriend finding Megan sexier, she's worried about the noises in the woods and about being left alone. But she lets everyone else make the decisions. Her friend Megan is an extrovert and she's the opposite of worried in fact she giggles at the warnings and symbolically flaunts death by allowing herself to be photographed over a grave holding a batch of wildflowers. And when they are spooked – she is the one who grabs the knife. She also wears lots of make-up, skimpy clothes and goes skinny dipping. Her confidence though is a sham with no maturity to back it up as when it's her turn to cry danger she's scoffed, leaving her dispatched like anyone else.

The third girl is Merry Cat, a mountain girl who is even more skittish than Constance. She understands the danger in the woods and perhaps fears it because she's had a taste of what it can dish out. She is also envious of Megan and steals her makeup clumsily applying it before flirting with Megan's boyfriend. Merry Cat's final shot is her clutching the lipstick and caressing it over her lips. Lips that are trapped in a family held by a shamed silence.

Both Constance and Merry Cat wrongly seem to think becoming as assertive as Megan affords one authority and protection. And the assertiveness is symbolized by wearing the sexy clothes and make-up. Or so that would be the implication.

After several encounters with trouble Constance, disgusted by her own helplessness, lets her hair down and borrows Megan's sexy clothes and even paints her nails bright red same as Megan's, but it isn't until her narrow rescue from the evil mountain man terrorizing her that she puts on make-up. Her touch is more expert than Merry Cat's and her flirting unlike Merry Cat's is also as confident as Megan's. Maybe even more so. Her normally steadfast boyfriend is concerned by the transformation, wondering if she's in shock, and as he becomes a quivering mass of fear thinly covered by reassuring rambling – Constance turns tigerish. Her zenith of fear has plateaued into a calm energy. She is awaiting the arrival of the psycho, no longer a victim, but a warrior awaiting a primal battle.

She has learned that screaming for her boyfriend to come running didn't work, that expressing her concerns didn't work, that allowing others to investigate and get bumped off didn't work. She must grab the knife when there is no knife. And she is willing at last to confront the demons herself and kill or be killed.

It's an interesting flawed idea within a slasher as it doesn't quite gel. It seems both broken and utilized only to have a final sexy image.

 

I think this is absolutely right. I suppose you can't do an art project without both colllaborating extensively. You can't do anything without input from both really.

So there must be many points where the author decides which way to let it lean. Lit or genre?

Yeah, it sounds like on one hand they were going for the standard slasher thing where any of the kids who have sex or act provocative or do drugs are killed. But maybe they also wanted to mix it in with a female empowerment message? Sounds like a mess.

 

Interesting. I've heard of a technique like that, not for writing, but to try to figure out your own deepest motivations for why you do the things you do. And that makes sense—if it tells us about our own deepest motivations or emotions, then why not use it to figure out characters?

Indeed!

Also definitely true. I know much of what's considered classic literature today was orignially just genre fiction.

Which brings up a question, something I was thinking about last night.

Is actual literature still published, or is it a thing of the past? If anybody writes something literary today I suppose it goes under the rubric of literary fiction, and not actual literature? I kind of also suspect that if anybody were to write something as bold as say Moby Dick or Lolita now it wouldn't get published at all without extensive edits. Or am I wrong?

 

"literature" isn't canonized immediately, is it? If you mean it in the sense of a corpus, I think it takes a while for it be constituted.

 

That makes sense. I guess that's always been true.

 

We're approaching this discussion from a number of different vantage points: How should literary writing look? What happens in the brain when one goes about it? How one ought to undertake it? What defines it? All valid vantage points.

What has brought me to the topic of literary vs genre fiction generally, and to this conversation specifically, has been a combination of live critique-group experiences over recent years, both in-person and then online during these plague years, and secondarily a search for recorded guidance.

Those experiences have shown me such contrasting and often conflicting sets of values and expectations that I'm close to considering groups of one or the other orientation directly harmful to the other kind of writer.

The types of writing we've touched on so far really fall into two broad categories:

o Popular fiction, also describable as mass-market fiction. This includes most instances of genre fiction, as well as much fiction often called "general" or "non-genre" that does not neatly fit one of the well-established genres. Popular fiction's vocabulary, sentence structures, and narrative structure are conventional in both the general sense and certain genre-specific senses, and it's crafted to be easily readable — normally by readers at what's generally if inaccurately called "12-grade level," though occasionally by readers at a putative 8th-grade level. It's attentive to hitting certain plot points specific to its genre, much the way a Hallmark movie or a Law & Order episode hits certain points at certain minutes in. Its writers construct it to conform to model, devising a character to fill each of the roles (some optional) prescribed for the genre. The creativity is in the variations within each prescribed character or element, and to some extent in the ways of combining the standard elements. There's a huge body of received wisdom that's reflected in nearly all critique-group commentary and in the vast, vast preponderance of written guidance, all of which is specific to popular fiction.

(Arthur Hailey's 1965 Hotel might be cited as an example of popular fiction written outside the established genres of its time and thus "non-genre fiction." IIRC it was an early example of multistrand narrative in popular fiction, but otherwise adhered to Received Wisdom.)

o Literary fiction that is intentionally or incidentally written outside the (henceforth capitalized) Received Wisdom and usually outside genre conventions.

Where popular fiction is guided by the conventions of its genre and by the Received Wisdom, each work of literary fiction follows some other guiding principle(s) (which may be explicit or more often intuitive) governing tone, plot, focus, flow, subjective reading experience, etc. Its writers are trying to be faithful to some vision above all else.

Literary fiction is defined first by what it is not, namely conformant to the conventions, expectations, and guidance applying to popular fiction.

That's all. Literary fiction is defined in contrast to mass-market fiction. It does not cater to the expectations or conventions of mass-market fiction. Industry insiders may have their own little variations on this definition, but I believe it's the essence of all industry definitions.

(Much the same is true of popular music versus what might variously be called art music, high-art music, concert-hall music, or classical [though post-Mozart] or modern-classical music. The first conforms to a set of quite detailed structural formats, with basic and easily-understood harmonic progressions, standardized beats, etc. The second is at least an order of magnitude more complex, and if it conforms to standard structural formats [much does not], there are more of such models and they're more complex. Jazz, while not a hybrid of popular and classical, inhabits a class of its own that's more varied and sometimes venturesome or experimental than "popular" music.)

Literary writing may incidentally take a form similar to an established genre while ignoring certain conventions or expectations. In such a case it tends to be labeled literary romance, literary crime fiction, literary spy fiction, etc. In so doing it attracts some new readers to that genre, while putting off many readers of the unembellished genre. In some cases, literary writing establishes a new genre or subgenre, as was the case with early steampunk. Literary writing often follows some tenets of traditional narrative structure and even some tenets of the Received Wisdom (as distinct, say, from Aristotle's thoughts on Art and Structure) but its writer feels no pressure to do so.

Some sources further define upmarket fiction as essentially conventional, but with a higher reading level and other added elements that make it more interesting to some genre readers. It's still more popular/mass-market than literary, and it doesn't really break or transcend conventions — if it did, it would probably be called literary — but it caters to an audience looking for an certain amount of freshness or complexity.

Personally, I also define semi-literary fiction that is more literary than popular/mass-market, and transcends convention and Received Wisdom in some respects without necessarily breaking new ground. (This is where, for the most part, I place my own work.)

And some sources further define literature in distinction to literary writing, as of higher quality, social / cultural / artistic significance, or the like. By such a distinction, all literature is literary writing, but not all literary writing rises to the level of literature. Some (perhaps most) of today's genres began as codifications of what was originally literary writing breaking new ground.

So on the popular side we have popular/mass-market, including genre, non-genre general, and upmarket.

On the literary side we have literature, literary fiction, and semi-literary fiction. I would also place here hybrid fiction (perhaps a synonym of semi-literary) as essentially a literary work with some mass- or broader-market mindfulness.

An author cannot decide that his or her work is literature. That's a determination made in part by readers and in part by critics and academics over time. It's a verdict more than a genre.

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For me, the distinction between popular writing and literary writing is in no respect a matter of snobbery. Indeed I've witnessed much more hostility from proponents of Received Wisdom toward literary writing — the published and acclaimed as well as the tentative examples brought to critique groups by new writers — than ever from literary writers toward genre or popular writing.

It's simply a matter of acknowledging and accepting that the governing principles are different and often opposed.

Many readers of popular fiction simply have no patience for the complexity or non-conformity of literary fiction. Above all, they want to know What happens next? and How does it end? and they want the book to proceed expeditiously, indeed often at an exciting pace, to the end. They're bored or annoyed by digressions and poetic language. They may be confused by complex sentences. They're very annoyed at having to look up a word they don't know. They crave and take satisfaction from seeing their conventions observed. They're happiest after reading an ending with a satisfying revenge or comeuppance, or the thwarted lovers' finally coming together in a marriage chapel or a night of bliss, or resolutions of that sort.

Readers of literary fiction, in my observation, crave novelty, unconventionality and transcendence of convention. They tend to be bored by conventionality. They love a well-written digression. They often love complex sentences when well-written. They love discovering an evocative, subtle, or powerful word they haven't known. They're in no hurry to get to the end of a book — they have the patience and indeed a craving to read beyond a 99,999-word book and they're happy with chapters that exceed 3,001 words apiece. They're tolerant of non-resolutions, which they may find poignant or true-to-life, or value for other reasons. They're often sad or at least wistful to reach the end of a book — they may take satisfaction from the ending per se, but wish there were more of the book to continue reading.

As I say, this is my experience. I can't claim that it universally describes readers who prefer these respective types of fiction (and certainly there are readers who like both, or who prefer one but share a characteristic or two from the other group); it's simply what I've observed.

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My thoughts along these lines began to develop after a disturbing critique-group experience I witnessed a few years ago. A relatively new writer brought to a group a piece of a novel about—of all the improbable things for me to experience a sudden enthusiasm for—a prize fighter. The excerpt began It was a wondrous thing, this love. It continued for a couple of thousand words of the most artful telling I've ever seen in a critique group piece. It was fully the equal of rhapsodic passages in some published novels by acknowledged masters. It narrated what was probably a six-week period of time, dipping appropriately into glimpses of moments here and there, remaining mostly above-the-moment—like… do they call it a montage in cinema? I don't know the terminology for flipping through images and vignettes—distilling the impressions and essences of naïve first love for a decent sap who doesn't recognize how he's being misled and used by the woman… just such a sophisticated approach, an amazing piece to jump out of the blue, in a whole other league of writing from anything I'd seen in any group before, despite having seen quite a few appealing and well-written excerpts. This guy had instinct.

And then the group went to work on it, as if simply going down a checklist of Received Wisdom. "You're doing a lot of telling—you should be showing us most of those things." (Wrong.) "Some of this language is too vague." (Wrong.) "You should be using stronger verbs." (Wrong.) "This sentence is in passive voice." (No, actually, in grammatical terms it was not in passive voice, but so what if it had been?) The critique session was a travesty. No one was hostile, they were just so wrong, as though they'd never read really high-quality writing. God, I wish I had pieces like that one to my credit. He took it in stride. (I suppose if anyone knows how to take it on the nose, it's a boxer.) I emailed him immediately afterwards, saying I thought it was brilliant, and that he should ignore almost everything he'd been told about it.

They were genre writers trying to turn this beautiful piece of literary writing into conventional genre writing. Everything they said conformed to the Received Wisdom—it couldn't be faulted on that basis. But they were deaf to the artistry. You can't mistake something like that, see it where it isn't. You can fail to recognize it, as they did, but you can't imagine it into someone else's writing. It was that good.

Unfortunately, it's rare for literary writers to come to the critique groups I've seen. The ones who do tend not to stay long. They're subtly made to feel out of place, and the advice they receive often appears to me inappropriate. From my practical point of view, that's really the only reason I care about the difference between popular and literary writing. Although I crave and thrill to unconventionality and to Bacon's "…excellent beauty that hath…some strangeness in the proportion," I'm always one of the first to download every new book from Daniel Silva. He's no LeCarré, but he does go above and beyond for his genre, something I really enjoy about him. So call him upmarket, but he's still genre.

For me it's not about snobbery, it's about recognizing and respecting the difference, and not trying to turn one into the other.

So that's my more-than-a bit on this for the moment.

 

I wonder if I should turn that post into my first blog post.

 

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Updating this.

And I'll try to explain it better, I think I used my own shorthand before and failed to explain the steps that would allow more people to understand all this weird stuff I blather on about.

When those venerable Chinese of yore created the Yin/Yang graphic they were essentially describing 2 modes we all have of seeing the world, two filters we can see everything through. Of course they didn't understand it was because we're literally of two minds

But if you drop into philosophical thinking mode it's clear to see that the two clusters of characteristics describe many similar dichotomies.

Keeping in mind the caveat concerning the brain hemispheres (that it isn't a simple or complete division etc), and using the terms as tags for the two different minds that share our craniae, it's pretty clear they map quite well onto the Yin/Yang graphic.

And so do the characteristics of genre fic and lit fic.

When I say something is 'conscious mode' or 'unconscious mode' that's all I mean—that we're looking at a dichotomy where one side is clear, structured, logical etc and the other is mysterious, unstructured, symbolic/metaphorical etc. I believe everything we see in that way is a reflection of the two ways we have of seeing the world (conscious and unconscious). You're usually in one mode or the other, at least predominantly.

And that's another caveat that must always be added. I often talk about these things at their maximum levels, as if there's such a thing as purely conscious or purely unconscious. But it's never that simple. There's always a bit of one in the other, assisting, like the little dot of Yin inside Yang and vise verse. And sometimes the dots get pretty big, or both minds even seem to be balanced. When the conscious mind is in the driver's seat it has the unconscious riding shotgun and navigating. And then they switch. But whichever one is driving tends to shape the experience.

Sort of like, because I created and am to some extent driving this thread it's taking very Xoic-esque form, all about all this bizarre unconscious stuff. If @evild4ve or someone else had created it and was running it, it would doubtless take a very different form. Even though other people are contributing. The one in the driver's seat makes the key decisions.

OK, I guess that's as clear as I know how to make it.

 

you should

 

Wow, I completely missed your mega-post!! I think I was writing mine when it went up. Excellently done! Yes, by all means, you ought to be blogging. It seems you have a lot to say.

Thanks for bringing up the other categories, I had forgotten. I used to know about them, but more recently I narrowed it all down to genre and literary, probably for convenience's sake.

I think when you mention upmarket fiction, that refers to writers like Stephen King?

 

@Also About the experience where the boxer/author brought literary fiction to a genre group (like bringing a knife to a gun fight?)—there have been times here on the board when I've critiqued pieces according to the standard genre conventions and later wondered if maybe the story was closer to literary fiction. Oops! Sorry to anybody I might have done that to.

But as I said, I believe the genre (or popular) fiction conventions are much more learnable/teachable, and a lot easier to critique because they follow conventions and structures. Plus I think the vast majority of people on forums like this are here for genre. Though before I joined here I did run across a forum that seemed to be aimed at much more literary work, or so it seemed. And another that seemed oriented on what I would call social fiction, I didn't see any sci-fi or fantasy or horror listed. Just what might be called contemporary realism.

 

And having said that, I must say I like the places other people take this thread when I'm not paying attention!

 

I would think that's the case for most readers across all spectrums.

 

Could be. But I've heard more than one critique-group peer I trust come back from meeting agents at a writing conference and say they were told "Millennials don't want to read books longer than 90-100K words." One was told "Literary is just a word writers use to get around wordcount limits."

 

Something I wanted to say but forgot—all that stuff about me meditating while writing and doing freewrites etc isn't what I think is necessary, they're just some techniques I'm playing around with. Ways to try to activate the unconscious, to flip that switch and get myself into the right mode for writing literarily.

 

I can't say -- at most I may have read his Needful Things long ago -- though I doubt it for a simple reason. The non-reason: in this context, upmarket is an indication of style, not quality. The reason: King is phenomenally popular and commercial. Doesn't he therefore epitomize mass-market fiction? And can't basically anyone read and appreciate him?

The first link I found while Googling is this one: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-recognize-and-write-upmarket-fiction#3-examples-of-upmarket-fiction

One of its observations was that upmarket books are often called bookclub books.

The one example of its three that I've read is Alice Seybold's 2002 The Lovely Bones. That was also a good while ago, well beyond my horizon of sharp recollection, but I remember it as significantly "drier" than my impression of King, more reserved in its language and observations, and more reflective. More cerebral.

 

I would have thought so. But now I suspect that some readers would grow too bored with King's conventionality to truly appreciate his work.

 

I haven’t read a tremendous amount of recent books lately but I imagine Station Eleven is a good example of this.

 

I might be misremembering what upmarket means. But king was (at one time at least) considered a breakout. Technically he wrote horror, but he wasn't required to stick to horror conventions. They allowed him to do what he wanted, and he stretched his stories some way toward—I don't know. Maybe not literary, but something well above standard horror. He did much better characterization than horror usually has, and his stories tended to be very long. Maybe the term wasn't upmarket, maybe it was just called popular fiction? And the authors of it are allowed a lot of leeway to do what they want because they sell so well.

Word