Animal Farm is a talking-animal fable. 1984 is science fiction. Nobody calls either of them badly written.
I loved both in high school, and most of what they made me read there I thought was crap. The two books that stuck were the ones with a story that grabbed me by the collar and a world I’d never seen. They were genre books dressed up in a literature class, and nobody told us.
The argument about genre fiction against literary fiction never dies. It goes like this. Literary fiction is art. Genre fiction is entertainment for people who don’t know better. The genre books sell more, the literary people say, because most readers have low standards. It’s a comfortable story if you write literary fiction, and it’s wrong.
A writer in an aspiring writers’ group laid out the case this week. He said he couldn’t get past a few pages of Stephen King, Dan Brown, Nora Roberts or Sidney Sheldon because the language was “mostly poorly written.” He’d read King’s On Writing to understand him and came away unimpressed. His favorites were Murakami, Atwood and Ishiguro, writers who blend genre and literary fiction. One commenter answered in six words: “Don’t confuse taste with skill.”
He’s right.
What is the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction?
Genre fiction is sorted by what happens and what the reader feels. Mystery, thriller, romance, science fiction, fantasy, horror and westerns each promise a particular experience. A mystery promises a puzzle and a solution. A romance promises a relationship and an ending that satisfies. Horror promises fear. The reader knows the deal before opening the book.
Literary fiction is sorted by emphasis. It puts language, character and theme ahead of plot, and it’s less interested in delivering a familiar experience. It often ends without the resolution genre readers expect.
Neither is a quality rating. There are brilliant thrillers and terrible literary novels, and the reverse. The label tells you what the book is trying to do. It tells you nothing about whether it does it well.
Why is genre fiction more popular than literary fiction?
Because it gives readers something they want, and it doesn’t make them work to get it.
Romance and romantasy lead adult fiction sales in the United States, according to Circana’s BookScan data, with thrillers and fantasy close behind. Readers pick those books up when they’re tired, stressed or looking for a few hours away from their own lives. One reader in the thread said she reads genre fiction to forget whatever stress is going on, and literary fiction when she’s bored and wants to be stimulated. Both are legitimate reasons to read.
Deliver the experience readers came for and they come back for the next book. Series dominate genre fiction for that reason. The writer kept a promise, and readers reward that.
The old snobbery treats that as a weakness. I think it’s the hardest thing in fiction. Making a stranger lose sleep to find out what happens next takes real skill, and plenty of acclaimed novelists couldn’t do it on a bet.
Don’t confuse taste with skill. A genre book that keeps a reader up until 3 a.m. did something most literary novels never manage. – Richard LoweShare on X
Is genre fiction poorly written?
Some of it is. So is some literary fiction. Sturgeon’s law says ninety percent of everything is crud, and it applies to every shelf in the bookstore.
The question is what “well written” means. If it means ornate sentences, rich metaphor and slow interiority, a lot of genre fiction doesn’t aim for that. If it means the prose does exactly the job the book needs, a great deal of genre fiction is beautifully written. A thriller’s short, clean sentences are a choice. They keep you moving. Lush description in the middle of a chase scene would be bad writing, however pretty it looked.
Stephen King is the easy example. He received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, and the literary establishment complained loudly about it at the time. Decades later, his books are still read, studied and filmed, and several of his short stories are taught in schools. Writers recommend On Writing constantly, and the book has its own page on this site for that reason. You can dislike King, and that’s taste. Calling him unskilled is wrong.
Taste is personal. Skill is whether the writer achieved what they set out to do. Mixing the two up is how readers end up sneering at books that are working exactly as intended.
Is literary fiction a genre?
In the bookstore, yes. Literary fiction has its own shelf, its own conventions and its own audience, like every other category. It has expectations a reader can count on, including lyrical prose, ambiguous endings and a focus on interior life. That’s a genre in everything but name.
And the walls between the shelves keep falling. The writers that thread poster admires are proof. Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and Never Let Me Go is a science fiction novel about cloning, while The Buried Giant is a fantasy with ogres and a dragon. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian science fiction, though she prefers to call it speculative fiction. Murakami writes surreal novels full of the uncanny. Cormac McCarthy won a Pulitzer for The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel.
Literary readers love those books, and they’re genre books.
The labels are mostly marketing.
The same reader in the thread who couldn’t finish King listed 1984 and Animal Farm among his favorites. That’s science fiction and a fable with talking pigs. He likes genre fiction.
He just likes it in a particular style.
What makes genre fiction feel shallow to some readers?
The trouble is specific craft problems that turn up in any book written in a hurry.
Another writer in the thread named the real culprit. She loves fantasy and science fiction but can’t stand books that open with three chapters of worldbuilding and exposition, or pages of a side character’s backstory before the reader cares about anyone. She blamed writers who don’t trust their readers and explain everything, leaving paragraphs you can skip without missing a thing.
She’s right, and it’s fixable. The problem is craft, and it shows up in every category. I’ve written about why readers put books down at chapter three, and info dumps are near the top of the list. Feed backstory and world details to the reader as they need them, through action and subtext. Plenty of genre writers do that brilliantly.
Readers who find genre fiction shallow have often read the weakest of it, the same way someone who’d only read the dullest literary novels might decide the whole category is pretentious and boring.
Which kind of fiction should a new novelist write?
Write the book you want to read, and do it well on its own terms.
I write science fiction, horror and a lot of nonfiction. One of my favorite series of all time is Roger Zelazny’s Amber books. I’ve read them from beginning to end several times. Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama still fills me with wonder every time I read it. Neither one apologizes for being science fiction or fantasy, and neither needs to.
If you write genre fiction, learn the promises your genre makes and keep them. If you write literary fiction, make sure there’s still a reason to turn the page. The best books do both. So many of the novels people call literary classics turn out to be genre books in disguise.
And if someone tells you your genre isn’t real writing, look at what they read. You’ll often find a dystopia, a ghost story or a fable on their shelf, wearing a nicer cover.
Read what you love
The genre-against-literary fight mostly protects people’s sense of their own good taste. Readers don’t care. They want a book that makes them feel something, keeps them reading and stays with them after they close it.
Any shelf in the bookstore can deliver that. The Writing Hub covers the craft of fiction in every genre, and if you’re working on a novel and want someone to help you get it right, my book coaching is built for that.
