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Jess's avatar

I really like the notion of genres as being long-running conversations between all the participants in them - that's such a good way to look at it, and the advice to read within those genres in order to become fluent in the conversation is so correct. It's both useful for writing within the conventions of the genre and learning how to break them, on purpose, in order to subvert the anticipated path of the story. I read a lot of genre fiction, aside from Horror, and am real comfortable with the generally accepted ways these stories are going to play out, be it a fantasy epic or a sci-fi short, or a historical romance. I absolutely love when a writer masterfully pulls the rug out from under me through subversion, and you can tell it's because they fully understand the conversations of the genre or genres and are saying, 'fuck it, let's try something else'. Big fan.

I also love the repositioning of plot vs character driven towards prose-forward vs not prose-forward as a way to think about the differences between what is and isn't considered 'literary'. I think you are right on the money there - personally, I prefer prose with some character, and I tend to write that way myself - and I think that there's something in here about readership numbers and perceived accessibility, given the mainstream audience's attention spans these days.

Likely, more digging would need to be done to see whether there's a correlation between attention span and the push that I feel is going on towards less prose-forward writing within many genres, but I do think there's some kind of relationship there.

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Kerri Smith Maher's avatar

This is absolutely fantastic - thank you! I would very much like to assign it in a class on Popular Fiction that I teach - might that be possible?

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