I'm a What?

     The first “book” I ever attempted to write was, I’d bet, the same as the first book a lot of young writers try to write.  This fantastic little tale about a guy with no face who came from parts unknown to exact revenge on anyone who had ever done the main character wrong.  In, of course, the most brutal and painful fashion possible.

     And not a single one of the brutalized victims even remotely resembled anyone who had ever screwed me over in real life.  Nope.  Not one.

     My second attempt at a novel was more ambitious.  I set to work on a multi-part, sprawling fantasy epic.  I called it something like Fabled Earth (at least that’s what’s written on the disk I saved stuff on).  I don’t remember a lot of the details but there was something about an apocalypse, a magical gate, and these seven heroes – there may have been time travel and reincarnation, too.  And a lot of romantic entanglements and betrayals and whatnot.  Basically, Lord of the Rings meets Days of Our Lives (Days of Our Rings?  Lord of Our Days?).

     I always did like to mix genres.

     The point here is that both of those efforts were crap (which is, in large part, why they were never finished).  But they both remained, so I thought, examples of the kind of writing I do.  Mainstream fiction.  Genre fiction.  The sorts of things that sell millions of copies and get you devoted cults of fans and are far, far removed from the hallowed air of “literary fiction”.  And then, Harwell said something to me.

     “Dude, you’re ‘literary’”.

     He may have put it slightly more eloquently than that (or possibly less eloquently, involving four letter words and references to various anatomical areas), but the point was essentially that.  I’m a literary writer.  One of those pretentious, over intellectual, uses too many words, forgets plot and character and focuses in only on style and meaning and “art” writers.

     Can I go back to Days of Our Rings, please?

     Harwell pointed out, rightly so, that I don’t write about that stuff anymore.  At least not in what I’ve been producing lately.  (Which, if you’ve hopped over to http://neverfinish2.blogspot.com and checked out my novel in progress, Swim, you’d already know)..  And that blew my mind.  After all, while I’m forced to admit that Swim isn’t exactly the sort of thing I would qualify as “genre”, I certainly didn’t consider it “literary”.  Literary is tossing around highfalutin words that don’t belong, sacrificing story in favor of art, being pretentious and overblown, and generally attempting to create “literature” (said in snotty British accent) for the “highbrow”, rather than just writing a story anyone might want to read.

     That’s me?

     I always fancied myself the exact opposite.  I’ve grown up a simple man.  I like movies, not film.  I like TV.  I’ve read (and still read) comic books.  I’ve owned Britney Spears and Spice Girls CDs and I can’t stand Bob Dylan.  I’ve protested long and loud to anyone who would listen that I would much prefer to be Grisham, Clancy, or King than Hemmingway, Faulkner, or any of the other “dead old white guys”.  Yet, here I am, faced with being “literary”.

     We’ve been having the debate about literary fiction over on Wordtrip (http://www.wordtrip.com).  About why it’s touted so much when so much of it is really little more than over intellectualized pretentious tripe masquerading as meaningful artistic expression (see, that’s the sort of sentence literary writers use rather than saying “most of it is overdone crap”.)  And we came to a consensus, sort of, that not all of it was bad.  That some of it was just lumped in there because people like to label and that was the only label that fit.  For the first time, I started to consider that maybe “literary” didn’t have to mean bad.

     It’s much like one of my college roommates said to me: “Assholes are assholes, period.”  We lived in a townhouse our senior year and one of the guys who lived with us was gay.  No biggie.  He never hit on any of us.  But one day, one of us his friends did.  Again, no biggie.  The guy took my buddy’s rejection with no problem and still hung out with us.  I asked my friend, let’s call him Eric, if he had any problem with being hit on a by a gay guy.

     “Not this guy,” he said.  “But there was this one guy back home.  He was a total jerk,” Eric told me.  “Wouldn’t take no for an answer.  Accused me of being homophobic cause I wouldn’t go out with him.”  Eric paused for a minute.  “Funny thing was, his brother was straight, but he acted the same way when my sister shot him down.  I guess assholes are assholes, period.  Doesn’t matter if you’re straight or gay.  If you’re an ass, you’re an ass.”

     The point?  Not all gays are wonderful.  Nor are all straight men. And not all literary fiction sucks.  It’s not “literary fiction” that sucks – it’s the sucky literary fiction that sucks.  

     With that thought in mind, it’s easier for me to admit to being one of those literary writers, if that’s what someone wants to call me.  I write what I write.  If somebody slaps a label on it to get it on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf, so be it.

     As long as that label isn’t “over intellectualized pretentious tripe masquerading as meaningful artistic expression”.

     You know.  Crap.