If you walk into the nearest bookstore for a work of fiction, you’ll have to specify to find something that caters to your personal interests. If you’re into genre fiction, you’ll peruse aisles marked with headings that denote the overarching theme of the book; fantasy, sci-fi, romance, mystery, horror, and historical fiction all represent wildly popular and substantial areas of fiction. With genre fiction, you usually know what you’re getting into: horror fiction will haunt you with skin crawling tales; mystery fiction will keep you guessing the culprit of a crime until the last page, and so on. The tenets of genre fiction are easy to grasp, but what about that one area of fiction whose volumes far outnumber all the rest?
Of course, I’m talking about literature and literary fiction.
What makes fiction literary?
Some people might disregard literary fiction as something meant for pretentious readers. Literary fiction has a bad reputation for being hard to understand and inaccessible to people without a Masters degree in creative writing. People assume the vocabulary alone in a work of literary fiction renders it unreadable. Moreover, the stereotypical reader of literary fiction differs from a bibliophile as an elitist: they have a snobby attitude toward “lesser” forms of fiction, and they place more value in the density and difficulty of a story than in the story itself. While some works of literature and some readers certainly adhere to these stereotypes, they are in the minority. After all, authors write literature to be read and enjoyed by as many readers as possible.
As a rule, literary fiction has traditionally centered on fictitious stories with narrative elements firmly rooted in some realm of reality. Works of literary fiction are by and large written to uncover larger truths about all aspects of the human experience, from the highest powers in government to the lowliest urchin on the street. Literature has lofty ambitions in this regard, but the myriad ways authors convey their startling truths make for interesting reads.
For example, the renowned short story author Raymond Carver
fantastical geographic locales (settings in apocalyptic futures or in the distant past are normal for him) to write compelling narratives on the human condition. But they’re both considered literary for their attention to detail and their ear for relatable and poignant stories of humanity.
So what makes fiction literary? Perhaps the most effective way of explaining literary fiction to you is through advice most often given to aspiring authors in writing workshops: “Show, don’t tell.” If you’re a writer, you would do well to abide by those words. So with that maxim in mind, I’d like to share with you some advice borrowed from literary greats to help improve your writing:
- Refine your characterization, plot development, and overall sense of narrative by showing things to your readers and letting them piece together the rest. But don’t try to “hide the ball” with your readers. Tell them things when it’s appropriate.
- Try to cultivate your own niche on subjects about which you feel most comfortable writing. Carver wrote stories about the American household because that’s what he knew best. If you can’t figure out a fitting niche, cultivate one through research.
- Trust your readership to have the intelligence to put together the pieces as you spool out the nuances of your story.
- Present characters whose trials and flaws make for a meaningful and ultimately relatable reading experience. In other words, let (natural) conflict drive your stories.
- Regarding conflict, not every character has to be a bank robber or a drug addict in order to make a story compelling. The small anxieties and dramas of life can be just as interesting as anything else.
