{"id":762,"date":"2015-07-21T07:38:25","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T11:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/makingcomics.spiltink.org\/?p=762"},"modified":"2016-04-10T03:13:47","modified_gmt":"2016-04-10T07:13:47","slug":"an-aside-on-genre-vs-literary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salgoodsam.com\/mc\/an-aside-on-genre-vs-literary\/","title":{"rendered":"An aside on Genre vs Literary"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the First post<\/a>, I said I think Ty’s\u00a0talk is an excellent crash course in Genre Writing<\/a>, sometimes cast as lowbrow, but most popular forms of writing these days tend to conform to clear genre tropes<\/a>, or making a point of hybridizing those for dramatic novelty.<\/h2>\n

There’s nothing intrinsically<\/span> keeping genre stories from being Literary Fiction other than the degree to which they are willing to explore deeper themes in a mature way. That can even happen in a short story, so it’s not about being big thick graphic novels\u00a0either. You can tell a lot about a character in a great short story<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I could easily say, Dave McKean’s Cages<\/a> is a ‘literary’ or ‘art’ comic that I think in part conforms to Film Noir<\/a> and\u00a0Neorealismo<\/a>, those are genre as much as Superheros<\/a> or Fantasy<\/a> are.<\/p>\n

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How do we tell them\u00a0apart? Do we need to? As writers, we need to be aware of them at least. The first trait used to distinguish work as being one or the other\u00a0is if the story is plot or character driven.<\/p>\n

Genre writing primarily focuses on plot over character development<\/a>. What makes any story seem more Literary first and foremost, is its writers ability and willingness to spend more time with internal lives and motivations of it’s characters.<\/p>\n

This is hard to do well, so it’s not surprising writers with less will to put in the time, or working to meet short deadlines often opt for a\u00a0more expedient and fast moving plot driven story.\u00a0The more here, is often about time we put in as writers into developing, editing, and curating our characters and script.<\/p>\n

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In the course I recommend that we make a point at the stage of designing characters<\/a>, to do our XY formula, focus statement<\/a> and a\u00a0narrative character<\/a>\u00a0monologue of some kind.<\/p>\n

We do one in the form of a one page Tanka<\/a> constraint in Making Comics at Syn. One can come before the other, you draw them and then come up with a back story. Or come up with that first and then draw them. But both I feel help a great deal in developing a compelling story<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, there are many other traits that tend to distinguish Literary fiction from Genre writing. It’s kind of “know it when you see it” thing in some respect but we can definitely list them as the\u00a0traditional perceived differences in stories that set out to be Literary, vs those built on a Genre foundation and not aspiring to more.<\/p>\n

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This\u00a0lists originally created and posted by\u00a0Jennifer Ellis<\/a>\u00a0is I think a good place to start, I like her full post and you should open to\u00a0read it for sure<\/a>, as well as some of the articles she links too. These lists are comparisons\/contrasts, meant to illustrate at least how people tend to perceive what is called Literary work as different from Genre driven stories.<\/p>\n

Traditional differences between genre and literary fiction by\u00a0Jennifer Ellis:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

“These are broad-brush differences that in some cases focus on the extremes of the categories\u00a0 and that disagreements abound. Many genre books have elements of literary fiction and vice versa and there is increasingly a third\u00a0 category of crossover fiction that will be discussed below.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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Genre Fiction<\/span><\/p>\n