There’s a lot of advice out in the wild for people who are trying to write. Unfortunately, making this advice usable often requires figuring out what writing niche you belong in. 

Fiction or non-fiction? Poetry? Literary or genre? What’s the difference between the last two? Women’s fiction? Cozy mysteries? Why does ‘cozy’ sound so insulting, when it is where Emma Lathen would have been categorized, if the category existed when she wrote? Where does D. E. Stevenson belong? Jan Karon? Should I go look them up on Amazon to see where they’ve been put? 

Why am I obsessing over this? For two reasons…

ONE 

In the book I am currently trying to write there’s tension between Writing Excitement, including dead lambs, and fraud, and stolen documents, and worry about life-and-death, and Writing Something Else, that involves solving the fraud quickly, saving the lambs, and spending time and writing effort on the heroine making better decisions about how to live a really good life. 

That is also known, on some level, as the difference between literary and genre. The internet says that genre is faster paced and plot-driven, while literary fiction is slower, and character driven, and possibly Art. Some people say genre is entertainment vs. literary meaning. Some say shallow and mindless vs pretentious and boring. There’s a lot more. The point is that if you are looking for beneficial advice it won’t be the same for those two kinds of writing. And that’s frustrating. 

TWO

I just read an amazing book. I can’t explain why it is literature. But it is. It also costs 99¢ on Amazon Kindle, and many people use the price of a book to determine whether it is literature or not. According to price it isn’t. However, it is. This is one time when I would like to have been an English major, so I could explain clearly how great this book is. It begins with a beaten up fifteen year old explaining exactly why iconoclasts were/are so wrong.

The Image: A Novel in Pieces by Steven Faulkner  

I found this book when I was searching for ‘Catholic fiction’ and thinking that I’m obviously not Flannery O’Connor or Walker Percy. (I’ve also tried to embed a link to Amazon several times and I can’t make it work.) Everyone should read this book.

~+~+~+~

In the end, I think there’s probably a continuum between genre and literature. I even think that individual writers probably slide back and forth on that continuum. Books that are mostly entertainment may achieve a certain literary quality, and, I honestly hope, being entertaining doesn’t disqualify a book from being Art. 

If I continue with the example of Emma Lathen, she (is actually two people who collaborated and) wrote two different murder mystery series with two different detectives. One series was set on Wall Street with a revolving cast of characters and the other was set in Congress. 

I found the Congressional series so boring that I literally did not care who got murdered, and couldn’t remember why it mattered, even while I was reading the first  book, and I didn’t read any more. My opinion was well-enough shared that that series died a quick death. I’ve heard that it was nearer and dearer to the hearts of the writers, yet the other series made more money (translation, more people bought it), so they went on with it. Interesting if true. 

The other series, set on Wall Street with John Thatcher as detective, had a cast of recurring individuals with sharply defined characteristics, whose actions were always interesting. The characters that showed up for the plot of the year, though, were also fascinating, and as it happens, the plots were clearly driven by the character of these secondary entities. Sometimes they wanted money, just taking it, or running a complex fraud. Sometimes, they wanted various kinds of social status, and sometimes, the victims were really, really horrid and it’s not surprising that they got killed. Although the denouement always involved a financial explanation/angle, the human element was never neglected. 

Short version: Lathen wrote a lot of fascinating characters. But she’s still genre.

Dorothy Emily Stevenson is another author who wrote a lot of books that I think would be called genre today. Some of what she wrote approaches literature. Her description in Listening Valley of someone going through the Blitz was amazing Art. Her last book about Sarah Morris might be literature. 

There was a lot of argument originally about Tolkien and whether The Lord of the Rings was literature or not. 

Actually, come to think of it, Dante was scorned at one point because he wrote in the vernacular rather than in Latin. 

I will say the most important piece of advice I am paying attention to right now is the one that says, no matter what you are writing, the more you write the better you will get. This piece of advice comes with an estimate of half a million words before you’ll be really good. I expect some people have more natural talent. 

I have written 56,000 words on this blog since December 2022. I have also written 58,000 words on my new story over seven years, I’ll count Dante for about 30,000 words, and Marguerite had about 65,000 words. Maybe 200,000 words. Got a ways to go.

Rabbit Hole: I spent some time slithering around in the mud at a fiber festival this weekend, and bought some pretty yarn, because the owner let me stand in her tent for a moment, when the rain poured down. Then I spent more time learning about the tags that sheep wear to identify them for various reasons, mostly having to do with diseases that the government is trying to track. Neither activity was very helpful for the book I am working on, but there was no way of telling, ahead of time. Excelsior.