for the writers among us

Since I know at least half a dozen of you are writers, I thought you might be interested in the discussion we had on the last day of one of my seminars last spring.  Yup, that's how long this post has been floating around in my head.  I was in the Literature program, but our English department also has a quite well-regarded MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program for creative writers. The MFA students have to take at least 3-4 literature courses during their program, so in almost every seminar I took, there were at least a few, and sometimes a bunch, of MFA students.

I loved having them in class because first of all, they're a talkative bunch, so they always generated lively discussion, and secondly, they often had different and interesting perspectives on what we were discussing because they focused less on literary theory and more on how the work was put together, how the author achieved certain effects.

So anyway, the very last day the professor opened up a free-for-all discussion about the state of fiction today.  In a graduate level classroom, this meant that we were going to discuss literary fiction.  No one had to say that.  Serious literary types do not read genre fiction.  MFA students are the ones that are learning to write literary fiction-- which means that they can be quite snobbish about genre fiction.  I see literary fiction as a genre, but not many do.

We had a discussion here about literary vs. genre fiction awhile back (try this one or this one if you're interested, and on that second one, read the comments).  So most of you know that I am a fan of genre fiction.  I love mysteries and science fiction and fantasy and romance novels.  In fact, literary fiction has become so dismally, drearily despairing (or so weird), that in the past couple of years, when I've wanted a break from my reading for school, I've read genre fiction.  So this is not intended to be a defense of literary fiction. I'm just reporting what they said.

Mostly the MFA students see literary fiction as "real" writing, while genre fiction is just about taking a set of genre conventions and coming up with a new version of them-- sort of like painting on blank canvas compared to paint-by-numbers.  (Genre conventions are the elements that always appear in a work of a particular genre.  In a mystery novel, there will always be a murder, and an investigator, and clues that include red herrings, and a denouement where all is revealed.  You can do some pretty creative things with that set of guidelines, but it's rare to read a mystery novel that doesn't use most of those conventions.)

So here are these kids, who have landed highly sought-after positions at a good MFA program (it was even in the Top 10 a few years ago), discussing the state of fiction today.  I was fascinated.  I was madly scribbling down notes.  The main thing I noted was the changing emphasis on why they write.  Twenty-five years ago, the last time I was in school, the argument for literary fiction would have included something along the lines of "art for art's sake," writing what was in your soul no matter what was popular, ignoring commercial success to stay true to Your Art.

But these kids want their work to be read.  It's not so much that they're after commercial success (although a few of them were unabashedly interested in making money), it was more that they wanted to write stuff that people would read.  "We're trained to write plotless stories," one of them said, "but that's not what people want to read."  (And also, that's not what gets published.)  "You can't ignore readability," another said-- which was a near astonishing assertion coming from someone in an MFA program.  MFA students write lean, spare, elegant prose that captures a particular moment in time.  "The moment after which nothing is the same," one of them described it during another discussion.  They do not worry about whether or not their work is readable.

But they also couldn't understand the attraction of genre fiction.  "In a typical thriller or suspense novel, the conflict is resolved by action," one of them noted.  "What's interesting about that?"  "Why would you want to write something where most of the decisions are made before you sit down to write?" said another (which almost made me laugh, knowing how some of you have struggled to write good, intelligent genre fiction).

It seemed to me that they were describing something of a crossroads in fiction writing-- a new willingness to consider fiction as something that a reader should enjoy reading.  (A willingness to consider the reader, period, I might cycnically add, something literary authors of the past have not really felt they needed to do.)  If they are typical of MFA students in other places, I suspect that literary fiction may be shaken up a bit in the next few years.  Probably few of them have ever read genre fiction, but I would love to hand them some of the books we've described as the good stuff and see what they would do with it.


So, not much else to say, just thought it might be food for thought for some of you.  There were surprisingly few authors they were willing to recommend-- Franzen was pretty universally admired, but all the other names that came up were disputed-- Froer, Eugenides, Paul Auster, A.S. Byatt, Lydia Davis, and Nick Flynn were mentioned.  And that was about it.