On the Differences Between Literary Fiction and Genre I

I've been trying to decide the difference between literary fiction and genre. I believe the best novels have always had story as well as psychological and social insight and graceful diction. The way we separate genre and literature in the twenty-first century is, to my way of thinking, mostly about what sells best.At the same time, in my latter years I've come to enjoy reading books with a lot of narrative momentum more and more. I think I always did--certainly as a child reader-- but I spent many years trying to convince myself that what I was really devoted to was high art, and the truth is that while I love some high art, some high art leaves me with a big "meh."In my own writing, I've always been able to tell a small story, but have not necessarily been able to maintain the narrative momentum that I love through a whole novel. The problem with highly polished writing is the danger of creating a static set piece-- a bijoux for contemplation and admiration rather than a river that sucks us into its rapids.The novel I'm working on now is science fiction, and I've been trying hard to create that river and rapids. I'm writing just as carefully as ever (and this will probably mean I'll never be a commercially successful genre writer because it will always take me too long to write a book). Occasionally I choose to simplify language for action--but I do that for action in anything I write. Mostly, I delight in creating a small world for myself as I did when I was five years old and my parents bought me a miniature ranch with horses and fences and people. I love world creating. I love this world too, but part of this world, for me, is the possibilities of imagination--of going into another world.Much genre writing is simply bad --written hastily, written to satisfy personal needs (but this may also explain the popularity of even badly written genre: it may be scratching a widely shared itch). Some genre also sticks slavishly to industry-standards (the Christian romance in which the lovers don't have sex before marriage). The genre I've been reading isn't romance anyhow. I like good detective and crime fiction and I like excellent science fiction and fantasy that abides by the rules it creates.All novels, of course--and this is why genre and literature are not so different after all--create worlds, whether alien planet far far away or south central Los Angeles just after the Watts riots of the late sixties. In my science fiction novel I have to spend more time describing my created world that I would if the novel were set in New York City, but frankly, it's a trivial difference because even though I can expect my readers to fill in a lot of blanks about New York City– that there is one sun in the sky on a bright fall day, for example (in my science fiction novel, there are two: a bluish one and a pinkish one)--there are still particular streets and waterfronts and restaurants that have to be built out of observation and imagination.A failing of much student writing I see is to assume everyone shares the same frame of reference that they do: that we all know what certain catch phrases mean, that we all feel the same about the present president of the United States. More conscious effort in my genre novel goes into creating the illusion of a world we can step into.This is also one of the main reasons I write genre. It allows me to continue the satisfaction of play from my childhood reading: to go have adventures in another place. I am, at least in the initial drafting stages, manipulating the riders and horses of my little plastic ranch, and imagining power I don't have in my real life.For me, science fiction in particular, also and maybe paradoxically, offers a more direct way to write about ideas and power relationships. In my my real-world novels, I've probably always been too self-effacing in the sense that I am meticulously honest about writing about classes and experiences and social action that I am familiar with: I have an abstract knowledge of how politics work, and some less abstract knowledge at a local level, but I don't know what it is like to have my community destroyed by an oppressor. That is, if I am honese, I can write about things like that in the real world, but only a a distance, with great care and bracketing explanations.In my science fiction novel, along with fun of imagining lavender shadows as the day wanes, I can explore directly the potential results of decisions based on ideology among the humans-- and the mistakes different sentient species might make about one another's motivations. I am also experimenting with political structures and the influence of history on human lives.That's not what I sat down to write when I started in on a genre novel. I think I sat down with the urge to play as I played as a child, but since I'm an adult, the topics I play with tend to be issues I see unresolved in this world.In genre, I can write more directly about the forces that mold and limit us by writing in an invented place.