Spontaneous Musings

Genre gets a bad rap from a lot of novelists. At least the teacher I had clarified - stating that genre can be well written, but many beginning writers tend to spend too much time on setting or theme. He's not wrong about that - I've certainly seen it a lot in writer's workshops. Heck, a lot of published genre stories have that problem - which is why genre gets a bad rap. It's called pulp for a reason. Literary - if you do that, you are unlikely to get published because let's face it - the whole story is the characters there really isn't much plot...the biggest problems in literary fiction (and I'm talking about pure no holds barred English Lit major literary such as James Joyce or Faulkner or Steinbeck or Edith Wharton, not genre literary such as Henry James' Turn of the Screw) are a tendency to fall too in love with your own words or too in love with whatever crazy narrative gimmick you've come up with (ie. stream of consciousness, reverse order, dialect, etc) or an over-reliance on dysfunctional families (*cough*Oprahbooks*cough*).