Newbie to this genre - ponderings.

Ha I posted an excerpt from my WIP in the M/C/L section of the SYW forum and I'm not even sure "mainsteam" or "contemporary" really involve. If anyone could explain I'd really appreciate it.

A good idea is just to read your way through lists of best novels like this one or this one. In bookshops I look for books published by Vintage Classics, Penguin Classics and Penguin Modern Classics. Almost every one of those are worth reading.

Rose English said:

I suppose I wanted to show my face here and wonder out loud why it is a much quieter board than Novels; and what makes people come here rather than the 'catch all' Novels forum? I might be wrong, this is the impression I have.

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I have no where else to go. The next logical place for me is the Interstices board, and that's a ghost town. I still read the Novels board, but don't post much. Oh, well. If a place is too popular then I usually don't want to be there anyway.

You don't have to go back to the classics. Try these three contemporary literary writers
Ron Rash, Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert Morgan.

Or if you usually read a particular genre, try reading a book that has a "literary" style and a "genre" plot or plot elements. (How on earth do you know it has a "literary" style? Well, it's in the general fiction section of your local mega-book mart, not Mystery or Romance. That's the only guide I've ever found, and it is pretty arbitrary.)

So, for instance, if you like romance, try The Time Traveler's Wife. If you like SF, try The Sparrow. (Actually, a lot of stuff in the SF section is pretty "literary," like LeGuin and Delaney, say.) If you like realistic YA, try anything by Salinger or Roth or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man or anything by Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood. (They all have coming of age elements. Actually, 80 percent of "literary fiction" is just YA written for grownups, I've found. Which is not a bad thing.)

Take it from an ex-lit professor, "literary" is very much in the eye of the beholder. Maybe the only thing all lit novels have in common is that they were not conceived by the writer to fit a genre. (But some were, especially as you go back into the 19th century.) I love Pynchon, but 98 percent of "literary fiction" is nothing like his books. Compare him with Kafka (whom I also love)... they've got virtually nothing in common.

This is an issue for me because everything I write has elements of SF, fantasy, slipstream or whatever you want to call it, but everything is character-driven and nothing really fits a genre. When I query, I just call it a novel, but I make sure the agent considers SF or "offbeat" stuff so she won't reject it based on a futuristic setting or fantastical scenario.

Dan Simmons wrote a bunch of SF novels and a historical novel, The Terror, that's considered literary/mainstream because it's not about spaceships. As far as I'm concerned, his style was more polished and "literary" in the SF. Is The Handmaid's Tale SF or literary? Did Stephen King's style change when he became a "mainstream" writer? The quandaries keep on coming.

Hi Rose,
For months now I've wondered why this board gets such little attention. As this would normally be the only board I post, I always seem to find myself in Novels just because nobody else does. And damn, now, I'm a conformist...

Jay McIerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth....and somebody mentioned novels published by Vintage....usually always a good place to look for worthy reads. Good luck working on your first novel...and now I could stop procrastinating and finish writing the first draft of my WIP. (4 Chapters to go, yay me..)

Seems like many people define these differently, but the way I do is that M/C/L all can contain genres, but the difference is that they are all focused on the character and changes in the character, and also the "excellence" of the writing style, thoughts, and so on. They are usually deep and involved and hit upon "eternal truths" in some way. The more, the better. Genre novels are plot driven and as long as they are great entertainment, really don't have to be that "deep" or psychologically sophisticated.