“Don’t write genre fiction” is the first rule you learn in a creative writing program. I heard this from a friend with an MFA, who told his own students that beginners should learn fundamentals like character development rather than lean on the codified tropes of their favorite junk books to churn out plots. But in workshopping his own work he found that though he wasn’t writing anything like genre fiction, his plotless and ruminative stories didn’t sit well with a majority of his peers. In the face of feedback such as “this isn’t teaching me how to read it,” he wound up grousing after every class with a couple of like-minded mates, talking one another out of stomping away from school altogether. “There was an orthodoxy in place that did not respect what we did and didn’t even recognize itself as an orthodoxy,” he says. “I didn’t think my writing was all that weird.”
Sound familiar? Kind of?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Any genre has its predecessors and progenitors, its great books, its great failures, its hackwork good and bad. Cooper’s the good hack. She’s not as skilled as, say, Douglas Coupland, who writes catchy prose, but in her way she’s so likable I want to think her determination to see the extraordinary in the ordinary is some sort of elaborate Alice Munro-inspired spoof.
(A note to writers: If you think you’ve stumbled on a brilliant new technique, chances are that people don’t write things that way because it doesn’t make sense. If it’s not worth writing something that won’t make you immortal, you’re not going to be able to force it; for God’s sake either live with your humanity or go do something else. The book market’s cluttered anyway.)
Worse yet, in the 1980s and ’90s many English departments replaced the dread old “dead white European male” canon with reading lists stacked toward multicultural and women’s lit. Fairness GOOD, but the frustrating truth is that some civilizations developed written literature earlier than others, and men have been better educated than women in most societies until recently; thus the DWEM got a greater pool of years in which to accumulate published works for his filthy oppressive canon than the rest of us. No, it ain’t fair–but since when does the distribution of raw talent get put to a plebiscite, either? The wrongness of so heavily weighting the most recent couple of centuries–thus sticking to novels and short stories at the expense of their sources–when reforming reading lists should be obvious, and it’s an insult to a student’s intelligence to tell her that Joyce Carol Oates is as good or as much fun as Milton.
Readers tend to wallow in their favorites–litfic’s consumers just seem the least likely to explore. “Books are expensive and time-consuming,” says Mamatas. “Most of them are awful. Who wouldn’t play conservatively in such a marketplace? Also, books tend to console and reinforce–they make us feel better about bad things and offer some validation to what we already believe, as long as we pick the books that are marketed to us.”
