Genre Rant

I belong to the writing community WriYe, and while I don't participate in the yearly challenge or post very often, I do wander over to the forum once a week or so and check out the posts. Now, WriYe's membership is largely high school and college age writers, mostly female, mostly writers of Young Adult Fantasy. They are a lovely, bright, dedicated bunch. Many have little or no support for their writing from either family or school.

One posted that she recently got an idea for a story stuck in her head, started writing it, and realized to her surprise that she was writing ChickLit. After several sources gave her grief about ChickLit being trivial and "unworthy", she posted a question: do you think ChickLit is worth writing?

Here is an expanded version of my reply:


Anyone who would declare an entire genre Unworthy of being read or written is an elitist jerkwad. Are there crappy chick lit novels? Of course. Are there well-written chick lit novels that are in their own way the equal of the best of other genres? I would be astounded if that weren't the case.

Literary snobbism irks me like few other things. High school teachers refusing to allow Fantasy for independent reading because it's "garbage"? College creative writing classes with a "no genre fiction" rule? Literary critics using terms like "bodice ripper" and "space opera" to dismiss all of Romance and SF? Bullshit, all of it. In the first place, all fiction is "genre fiction", dumbass. Second, aren't we supposed to, like, encourage young people who actually choose to put down their iPhones and read or write something, instead of shaming them for their preferences? I'm pretty sure I read that in an education manual somewhere. And third, the whole concept of genre as a measure of literary merit belongs back in the day when the term "The Great American Novel" could still be uttered without irony, when we actually believed one white guy's experience could sum up everything for all of us.

Even more depressing is when writers themselves buy into the idea that genres can be ranked. The SF crew look down on the Fantasy folk, and both of them scoff at the Romance gals, who sneer at the Erotica crowd... and everyone picks on the poor Fanfiction bastards. And looming above them all, sitting smugly in their castles made from old copies of The New York Times Review of Books, are the LitFic elite, the genre so cool they won't even admit they are a genre-- never mind admit that they can write some seriously crappy books themselves. They also have no problem pillaging from the hacks when it suits them. Most forms of Literature-with-a-capital-L include some elements of "genre". The brilliant SF and Fantasy writer Lois McMaster Bujold once referred to Romance and Mystery as literary "universal donors"-- everyone takes from them. But one of the big tricks of LitFic is that when you steal borrow from a genre, everyone acts like you invented it. As a Science Fiction reader and writer, it bugs the shit out of me that when Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy write about the future it's not genre, it's "a daring exploration of form". It's also a fucking Science Fiction novel, and not a particularly original one, so get the fuck over yourselves.

Most infuriating of all, the ones that go around unilaterally bashing another genre have usually read virtually nothing--or sometimes just plain old nothing-- from that genre. Hey, who needs to read it, right? Everyone knows that Science Fiction/Fantasy/Romance/Mystery/Erotica/Inspirationals/Young Adult/Fanfiction is crap. And get a load of that cheesy cover! If it doesn't have a black-and-white photo of an abandoned doll and the words "A Novel" on the cover, it ain't Lit'rature. I learned that in grad school.

I think I hate this crap so much because I used to be a believer in it. In college I was a poet, and then a writer of contemporary short stories. Then I attended an M.F.A. program that was All LitFic, All the Time. I rolled my eyes at entire sections of the bookstore. And then, as a lark, I started writing Science Fiction... and then quickly figured out I had to start reading Science Fiction, too. To my shock, a lot of the novels were actually good. Some of them were actually better than the LitFic stuff I'd been reading. My little mind was blown, and I have never been the same since. So when I see smart people who should know better clinging to these ridiculous outmoded ideas of genre, I want to slap them, hand them a copy of Four Ways to Forgiveness, and challenge them to explain to me why that book is not Literature.

Look, I'm not saying that everyone has to like everything. Subject matter can turn you off; nearly every woman I've mentioned to that I'm writing a SF novel has told me that they don't like SF. Every genre-- including LitFic-- has its conventions, and sometimes they're just not a good fit with your reading preferences. I don't care for Horror, most Mysteries, Fanfiction, Mainstream, contemporary Romance, or Chick Lit. But I have faith that when readers tell me there are sublimely written and deeply satisfying examples of these genres, they know what they're talking about.

I have a dream. I dream of a day when the best books of every genre will share the right to be called Literature; when writers let go of using junior high school lunchroom politics to rank their fellow artists; when Science Fiction and Romance are reviewed alongside LitFic and Memoir; when no young person will be told by a teacher, a reviewer, or another writer that the books they love to read and to write are Unworthy.

In conclusion: yes, I think ChickLit is worth writing, if that's the story you have to tell, and you tell it well.