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Literature,
or literally, "an acquaintance with letters," can mean a variety of different
things. It can mean a body of work. The general works from a specific
culture. Fiction. Nonfiction. Poetry.
The term literature encompasses all of that but for our purposes here,
your editor is using the term to describe a specific type of writing:
hoity-toity writing. It's the stuff that you were required to read in
school, and it's the stuff you may not actually choose to read again.
But it's the kind of writing your dear editor prefers because, my friends,
I am a snob.
I remember when I ran my own book
club. My intention was to get smart folks together after reading something
with a lot of pages and smallish print. No pictures. I wanted to create the
same sort of discussions I had in college, complete with the self-important
attempts to say witty things. But for some reason, the actual book conversation
would fizzle out after about a half-hour, followed by several hours of girl
talk inspired by chips and dip and wine. Which is to say, I don't know why
that didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.
Perhaps it's because, once you're
an adult, literature is something that's best kept to yourself. Literature
is full of heady concepts and authors who think very highly of their particular
way of writing. It's not something that's fun for parties unless you are in
an academic setting and in retrospect, if you truly enjoy whiling away an
entire evening saying bloated things about a Samuel Johnson essay, then you
have a problem understanding the real purpose of wine.
But back to the actual nature
of literature. It is hoity-toity, yes, but it has good reason to be. The writing
is of a standard that requires thought and, maybe a little practice. You'll
find in literary works experimentation with form, with ideas, and with the
language itself and to be honest, it takes a smart person to do that. I make
fun literary authors but they do excellent work and I thoroughly enjoy slogging
my way through the mess that's in their minds. I feel smarter when I do it.
Likewise I am very annoying.
The nuts and bolts: The idea of
fine literature typically excludes genre fictions, such as romance, science
fiction and mystery. What distinguishes it from other forms of writing is
a particular sophistication of language and ideas: You find the most important
things are those left unsaid. The writing may be very complex (Faulkner) or
very simple (Hemingway) but the author is writing to achieve that high level
of literary merit without much thought for the audience. It's up to you to
get it.
Character development is paramount,
the description of which can be also be complex and heady. This doesn't mean
that plot is unimportant, but the end the story is not so much the conclusion
of plot so much as it is the conclusion of a character's internal conflicts,
resolved or not.
You can of course find examples
of fine writing within the genres but you will most often find writing
preceded by a concept on the other side of the literature aisles. Paul
Auster, for example, is great, great writer… of mysteries. He is a
good enough writer to have made it out of the mystery aisle, but I'm not
sure that's fair because what he writes, however lovely the language,
is definitely mystery stories. A devoted mystery reader might miss out
on this gem simply because he occupies a spot in the literature stacks.
That's why Fictionarium exists. -ed. |
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