You would think that writers stick together.

Um, yeah. Let me disabuse you of that notion right now.

There are literary writers and there are genre writers. Kind of like there are Catholics and Southern Baptists. Both Christians, but totally different.

Literary writers are given reviews, and taken seriously, usually producing work that transcends society in some manner or other and is usually educational or morally edifying in some way. Case it in point – it is designed to be art/literature/educational. Think dinner at a restaurant with linen tablecloths and smallish size food that looks pretty.

Genre writing on the other hand, is more along the burger and fries of books. It’s a staple. More people read it, buy it, hell, consume it, because frankly they are hungry, they don’t have the time to sit down to eat. They just want to get filled up with something they know they’ll like. Genre writing is designed to be entertainment, in the same way a movie, a video game or a television show is entertainment.

This doesn’t mean it was harder to produce the book for the literary writer. It just means that the literary writer chose to take longer slashing their own path through the woods instead of taking an established trail.

News flash for my literary friends: genre writing is formulaic because that’s what readers want! They want to know a murder mystery contains a dead body and we’re going to find the killer. They want to know a thriller is going to be scary and give you goose bumps and they’ll throw the book at the wall if a romance doesn’t have a happen ending, well, let’s be honest, it won’t get published at all without a happy ending.

But within those very loosely constructed borders is a whole world to explore, so the stories are never the same, and they are not imitations of one another, just like America is different from England, even though we both speak English, share some of the same history and occupy the same planet earth.

What’s interesting to me is this: literary writers I’ve talked to yearn to be thought of as artists of the word, but they deep down wish they had fame to go along with it. They think that’s what genre writers have because of the hundreds of thousands, hell millions, of copies of genre books a single popular genre writer can sell.

Genre writers on the other hand, and more specifically romance writers, wish their work would get the respect of a literary writer, so when the go to a spouse’s company dinner party some smart aleck doesn’t say “Oh, your wife writes sex books. Bet she just cranks those out on the weekends in between quickies.” They wish that the serious reviewers would even try cracking one of their books and give a review. And they wish they could be nominated for awards given out for books (because after all, they’ve spent years tapping away at their keyboard and going through the harrowing world of publishing the same as the literary author has.)

So one wants fame, the other respect. Funny since they both write books. Didn’t you know that really, you should have taken up acting? More people likely know about Zac Efron from Disney’s High School Musical than will ever read a single book.

But I digress. (as per usual) Writing is hard work no matter what. If you want to be your own original and educate the world, then be literary and soar. If you want regular deadlines and want to make this your job, then write genre. It’s all a matter of market and numbers. You can’t go around wishing one were the other. It isn’t. It won’t be.

So literary authors, rather than disparage your genre brethren, think on this–as long as people are still picking up genre books, be grateful. As long as they are reading rather than watching re-runs of Scrubs or Grey’s Anatomy, you have a prayer they may some day desire to be educated by their reading selection.

Genre authors, keep plugging away and know one thing—people will always pay for entertainment, even in a depressed economy. And books are the cheapest source of entertainment on the planet (ok, unless you are born a guy). And in a hundred, possibly two-hundred years, your books may even be well-respected literature if William Shakespeare, Emily Bronte and Jane Austen are any indication.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 7:48 am and is filed under Blogroll, Genre Fiction, Publishing, Writer's Life, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.