Hey, everyone, it’s Writing Wednesday again! This week won’t be talking about writing advice. Instead, I want to focus on something I’ve heard a lot about lately. During my residency at SHU, the topic of literary vs. genre fiction came up pretty often. However, the focus wasn’t on what people enjoyed reading. The focus was on how genre writers have been treated in various academic settings. Other students brought up this issue everyday while I was there and I quickly realized that my own experience didn’t match the majority.
If you’re taking part in Seton Hill’s MFA program, you probably came from a school where you received (at least) an undergraduate degree. If you’re like me, your undergraduate experience was probably where you experienced some of your first writing workshops. Now, I know this isn’t true for all SHU students but that was my experience. I enrolled in seventeen writing workshops during my undergraduate career. My background covers fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and screenplay writing, pretty much in that order. When you go to graduate school, you bring your own set of experiences. This doesn’t just mean how many workshops you’ve taken or what your degree is in, but also how your work has been received in the past.
My undergraduate school, Stetson University, was a great place to write. Their creative writing program was relatively small but I never felt boxed in because the professors were incredibly open-minded about writing. I felt encouraged to write literary fiction as well as genre fiction. Their goal focused on writing well, not writing to a specific audience.
Various students shared their experiences with me and I was shocked by what I heard. Apparently, a lot of undergraduate professors won’t even accept genre work. They won’t teach it, they won’t accept it, and they try to stamp it out wherever it appears. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience. There’s a pretty big problem with this approach. I’m in a program full of genre writers. I’m in a program with people who have been published and people who will be published in the future. Well, genre writers who feel slighted by their former literary professors may carry those feeling over to literary writers in general. These feelings (on both sides) create an unnecessary rift in the writing community.
My own experience was very different. I wrote what I wanted to, when I wanted to, and everything was received equally. I’m still friends with literary writers and I have nothing bad to say about my undergraduate professors or their creative writing department. A woman in one of my undergraduate workshops went on to get a three book deal shortly after graduation. She wrote, and still writes, genre fiction. Other students in the class went on to publish literary short stories. They had the same peers, the same professors, and the same encouragement from people in the department.
Let’s take a quick look at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In short, this is a story about a man and his child trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic setting. Now, I love The Road and spent quite a bit of time studying it for a research paper. During my research I came across various critics arguing about whether or not The Road is genre fiction. Well, it’s post-apocalyptic and that sounds a lot like science fiction to me and other seemed to think so as well. However, many critics claimed that there was a lack of other science fiction elements. They also argued that the writing style belonged to literary fiction. Everyone is right. The Road is literary science fiction and I think it’s an absolutely great piece of writing. Obviously, I’m not the only one.
The simple truth is that genre fiction and literary fiction aren’t going anywhere. Creating animosity, holding onto animosity, and poking each other with sticks won’t actually accomplish anything. If someone keeps a talented writer out of their classroom, they’ve only succeeded in telling me that they like to put personal preference above creative productivity. Let’s not do that. Instead, let’s write, write well, and give each other a pat on the back when we accomplish that goal.