Genre Fiction and Literary Fiction

When I was growing up in Skokie, IL, my parents and I had an agreement about books. I could read anything I wanted to read so long as I stayed away from books they found too smutty for me. Though, throughout most of my childhood, they rarely looked at what I read. And I did read. Every week I went to the Skokie Public Library, and or to the Bookmobile which parked at the corner,  and took out as many books as I could. I read them all. I also took home lots of records too. So, my time alone in my bedroom had me either conducting the synphonies of Mozart and Beethoven or reading and copying out by hand passages I loved in the books I read.

My life in a book was more real to me than the life I lived at home. Or, more accurately said, my life while reading was more compelling than the one I lived with my family. I learned things from books that I never learned from my parents or in school. For example, I learned empathy and ethics. I learned that these values weren’t easily acquired or kept. That a good story could be built around a character struggling to understand what was the right thing or the best thing to do and then the rest of the story would be about how that played out.

Those values, justice, mercy, love, kindness, weren’t taught to me as well as they were in the books I read. The more difficult the task for the protagonist to find the best way to deal with a situation, the more inclined I was as a child to love the story. As I grew up, that changed. My friends used to tease me by saying that so long as a story or a movie were depressing, I was sure to love it. I think we all need those dark phases too. Those periods where we struggle with our own demons and want to participate in the fictional lives of others involved in the dark times too.

No matter how many books I read a year and that varies with how much I write in a year, I’m always on the lookout for books that books that will plunge me into the labyrinth of life with all its complexities. Thus, my books of choice are those that start out to do that. I am enamored of those writers who want to take the time to explore the deepest and most consequential ways in which we are human beings.

I often say to myself that reading a Chekov short story is like putting a band aid onto my skin for life. I think of reading Nadine Gordimer is to find out how doing the right thing leads to a life of misery. Or that reading Alice Munro is a journey into structures that are so involved that the story is, to me, more about architecture than meaning. I read Stephen Millhauser because he makes me laugh and cringe in fear just like Kafka does. I also read Kafka because that is an exercise in brilliant absurdity.

When I was in high school, I read all of Faulkner’s novels as well as many of John Steinbeck’s. Then I read much of Virginia Woolf. I then dove into Dostoevsky. Every one of these authors I chose because they had written lots of books and because they were so good at what they wrote.

When I became a writing teacher, I tried to shove onto my students the writers I thought they should know. Often as a gift they gave me a book they liked. I couldn’t always feel that the exchange was equal but it gave me insight into what was going on in this new world of writing that I was hoping they would like to dive into with me.

At first, students had this delusional belief that writers made lots of money because Stephen King did. Then as time went on and the world of self-publishing began to open up, they were convinced that if they quit their day job they too could write a best seller for the world wide web and make a ton of money and spend their days doing what they loved to do best, which wasn’t writing or reading. Too often this belief that writing was going to be the magic bullet that would solve all their personal problems in life turned out to be just as problematic as going out into the world to slay managers and customers.

I fantasize about teaching a course on genre fiction. That course would fulfill two sets of wishes. I wish that people didn’t need genre fiction. I wish people appreciated literary fiction.

Now though the entire literary landscape has changed radically from when I first began reading. Now we have too few bookstores and libraries. Instead we have Amazon. Amazon had been doing lots of things that are radical in nature and work and don’t work when it comes to book buying, selling and writing. (Here is a good article on some of that:http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/has-amazon-turned-ebooks-into-commodities/

But what is truly of importance to me, and I hope to you too, is this. Sitting down to write isn’t about sitting down with a ledger to see how much money you can make if you pursue this particular story idea. Not if you are originating this idea, want to spend as many years as it takes to follow the entire story to its conclusion, and then work to help others learn of its existence.

And yet, I have one last huge wish. It has to do with literacy itself, the role it should play in all our lives and the role we should play if we want to maintain a literate world. Wherever you live, there are literacy programs that you can help with. These local programs are always in need of your help. So, please go to them with offers of time, talent or money. That too will help us to confront the lack of a serious literate culture that is full of wonderful story tellers who just don’t know yet that they have that talent.

What happens is this: People get lazy and crazy with their lives. They begin to think that there are solutions to things that can be found in food, in alcohol, drugs, and sometimes in genre fiction. I don’t understand the craving for the constant story of love thwarted and then consumed. Or for vampires or dragons. In fact, a monodiet of anything is so uninteresting that it makes me suspicious of the motives. I remember going to white parties when I moved to NYC in the late 1970s. People had to dress all in white and the food we ate was all white and by the time we left the apartment where the party had been held I felt as unstimulated and constipated as a person confined to gruel must feel.

I understand binges of a particular writer’s work so that you get to know it intimately. I don’t understand a constant feeding at the trough of simple stories told for the pure pleasure of plot. Plot is a great tool for writers and since there are so few of them, it is always good to learn all the other techniques involved in writing fiction. I can’t imagine being tied to the demands of a certain plot line and to make the “what happens” in a story be the most important element in it. For that truly is what genre fiction is about. Writers are satisfying a certain need in their readers for a consistent sort of story that is likely to be long on the what happens and short on the other elements, such as dialog and description, the use of description being to me one of the mightiest ways of telling almost any aspect of a story.

Many years ago I was introduced to the short fiction of Bruno Schulz. What happened in his stories was almost so minor as to be forgotten but what stood out were his descriptions. Being inside one of his stories was like lying on my back on a very dark night and watching the stars. Knowing that I can’t see everything that I am looking at but having someone inside me telling me what is important to notice. To have this guide showing me what it is in that dark sky that I must pay attention to.