On Literary Fiction

Well, it's sure been long enough since I last posted, hasn't it?

I thought I'd kick off this year's first post by addressing the old, oft-argued question on the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. What makes literary fiction "literary"?

Everyone has their own opinions on this matter, and it's spawned many a writers' forum debate and flame war. Even agents and editors seem to disagree, and many fall back on the ol' "I know it when I see it" non-definition. One former agent's definition that I like is Nathan Bransford's blog post on it, which is very similar to my own definition, but I use a couple terms differently.

Before getting into what makes literary fiction "literary," I'll start with a few definitions with which I disagree. Some say genre-fiction is plot-driven and literary fiction is character-driven. I think that's a bit too simplistic. Where does that leave, say, a character-driven genre romance? What about literary fiction that has a great, exciting plot (and yes, they do exist(!!))? Some say literary fiction is just "good" genre fiction that manages to "transcend" its genre. I think that's not only inaccurate, but terribly demeaning to writers of genre fiction, as if genre was a shackle holding them back.

What else is literary fiction not? It's not a genre. It's a category. I often hear "literary fiction is just another genre," which is inaccurate in the same way that other categories like "YA" or "commercial" are not genres. Genres describe the content of a story. It allows the readers to form expectations about what's going to be involved in the plot or setting or characters. If it's a science fiction, you know to expect science or technology to play some sort of major role in the plot. If it's a romance, you know to expect a couple getting together with an HEA or HFN. If it's a mystery, you expect a mystery to be solved. What does "literary fiction" tell you about the content of the story? Absolutely nothing. Rather, it tells you something about the nature of the story and how it's written. Moreover, any novel which is literary fiction can also have (and probably does have) a genre. You can have a literary sci-fi story or a literary mystery. Many novels of literary fiction fall into genres that don't really have sections in bookstores, such as bildungsroman or magical realism. (By the way, when talking about "genre fiction" vs "literary genre fiction," I often used the term "straight-up genre fiction" to describe fiction which belongs to a popular genre but is not literary.) Literary is a category, and just as knowing a novel is YA tells you something about the pacing and voice, but very little about the content, knowing a novel is literary fiction tells you something about the style of the writing and on what level the story is going to take place.

What do I mean by what level the story takes place? The way I like to think about the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction is to draw a distinction between plot and story. In an interview with Jon Favreau, Martin Scorsese talks about the difference between plot and story. When I speak of "story," I don't mean the definition you often see that regards "The king died and then the queen died" as story and "The kind died and then the queen died of grief" a plot. When I speak of story, I'm addressing more directly what is the meat of your story? What is it about? What do you want to tell?

And now, finally, here's the way I think about the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction (hint: it's not that exciting, but maybe it's illustrative): in (straight-up) genre fiction, the plot and the story are convergent, are more or less the same, and basically coincide with one another; in literary fiction, the plot and the story are divergent, are different from one another, and the story happens under the surface of the plot.

Yes, a lot of this is a rehashing of Mr. Bransford's definition in different terms. Like I said, this is just the way I like to think about it.

In genre fiction, the focus is more or less on the material, interconnected and interrelated events that happen in the world of the character's (plot). In most genre fiction that is not literary, this is also the story. In literary fiction, the plot serves as a vehicle for the story rather than coinciding with it: the plot exists to allow the story to happen. This is why some literary fiction can seem to aimless and plotless. In some literary fiction, the story requires only a very minimal plot, because material events in the real world have minimal impact on the story. (This is also easy to do very badly.) However in more commercial literary fiction, you can have an abundance of plot (see Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan, David Foster Wallace, etc.). In literary fiction, the focus and purpose of the novel is what happens beneath the surface of events, while in genre fiction, the focus is on the events themselves, even in a very character-driven piece.

Now don't mistake me! This is not to say that genre fiction can't have a lot of things happening under the surface as well. Genre fiction can and very often does have a lot going on beneath the surface of its plot. But that is not its focus. It's not where the meat of the story is, though it may be where many important and valuable morsels may be hidden.

Since I see the question on forums so often, I hope my thoughts make sense to one or two confused people out there. Or maybe I just confused you more. What is literary fiction to you?

Next week (oh who am I kidding: whenever I get to it) I define magical realism! Stay tuned.

Real Schrödinger's Cat

This is also what I say when people call me a pervert.

Nazi Zombies

Lots of people say guns are worthless, because you need to take the head off.  I say get a bigger caliber.  (And sometimes you just need to slow them down.)

Pointer Poetry

there once was a pointer named x
who value was changed via hex
he was dereferenced one day
in an unsafe way
segfault

Dating Statisticians

I hear R. A. Fisher was popular as a dinner companion and John Tukey had strong objections to the sampling procedures in the Kinsey Reports.

Robot Girlfriend

The problem with AI love: even good programming throws exceptions.

Awesome.

I guess I can't get those mad guitar skills from Satan now.

Graduation 2.0

Well, it's been about a year since my last post. Don't worry, I haven't been slacking off too much in the year I've been absent from this blog. My laziness has a Master's Degree to show for it.

In related news, I've decided to stay here for a while longer and get a PhD. I've developed some research interests in my last semester here that I'd like to pursue further. Besides, all the jobs I could find were doing uninteresting things in uninteresting places, so I figured I've prefer doing something interesting in an uninteresting place, at least. Four to six more years in a nothing-amazing town. With the people in my department, though, it doesn't seem so bad. We'll see.

On unrelated news, I'm considering re-purposing this blog as a more general writing-nerd-otaku space. I may even upload some geeky web comics from yours truly. Expect updates about writing, computers, science, anime, and everything nerdy and bookish. Hopefully. If I feel like it.

Speaking of which, I really need to start writing again...

Graduation

Well, for those of you who have wondering why I haven't posted much lately, the answers are graduation.

The last semester before graduation can be rather difficult and time-consuming, particularly when you're getting that 4-year degree in three years instead. And a double major, at that.

Anyway, I was expecting a BS degree in Statistics and minor in English. Turned out the full extent of what I earned was a BS degree in Statistics and Mathematics, with a minor in English, and another minor in Physics. (I didn't even know about the physics one until, about, the night before or so. I didn't have all the classes for the physics minor as dictated online, but I'd taken so many higher-lever physics courses, it seems they decided to award me one anyway.)

So there's that news. Purdue graduate with BS in Statistics and Mathematics at 20 years old.

Now on to that MS in Applied Stats and I'll be going through all this again one year from now. Already into summer courses for my MS: STAT 529K - Applied Bayesian Decision Theory, not that any of you care what it is.

On another good, more writing-oriented news, I got into ENGL 408, which is one of Purdue's invitation-only Creative Writing class, where you have to submit former work to get in. For anyone who knows my writing, I submitted in "Fireflies" and "King Solomon Is a Blues Musician." I have no idea if any of you have read them, but AW member Kevin (you know who one I mean) seemed to enjoy it quite well when I posted it for critique way back when. In any case, I'll be taking that creative writing class and some statistics classes no readers here will give a fuck about (I assume) and hopefully get my MS and get the hell out of here in 365 days!

And for those waiting for graduation photos, here you go. There are more to come later whenever the school photographs send us theirs but these are just our own two. I really effin' wish the caps were sized.... impossible to put on. I'm a 7 1/2 in hats (generally an XL) and I have lots of hair.... it was a real challenge to put their caps on. Anyway. My mom should be obvious. My brother is the brown one who looks like an older version of me if I chopped my hair off. And my father is the white-haired old guy (to whom I birthday-gifted that Burberry houndstooth wool-silk blend sports coat, which I think looks quite well on him, and fits rather well.) Hehe.

Furthermore, note my badass bow tie. Ralph Lauren crimson spades with skulls centered in them. Oh yeah! I don't think anyone else there wore a bow tie....

So there you go, Maryn. Happy?

The Data of the World

Let's mix some work with play.

The statistician sits at his computer, staring into the dizzying array of scatterplots that tell him everything — almost everything. The interactions, the tests, the higher factorial orders of effects — these will reveal themselves later, all in due time. But these plots! The information they give, in wild matrices of dots seemingly thrown haphazardly across the screen like snowflakes in night — some aligning into curves, some refusing to conform to any kind of humanly-discernible shape — is beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. But not for him.

The statistician sees the patterns that inform the code he’s typing now. Line by line, the instructions that will make everything clear appear dashed in black and white across an incredibly 90s-looking interface, a boring GUI that hasn’t been updated in years, but he doesn’t need it to be. He doesn’t need anything flashy or drag-and-drop. He only needs the numbers that will come up, the P-values and the tables of errors and sums of squares that will decide the fate of the data.

On one side of the monitor are the dots. On the other side is the code. The tension, the fiery conversation between these two things are clear right now only in the statistician’s mind. Like a fight between the powers of Good and Evil: one is trying to hide the Truth, throw order into more confusion and disorder, while the other tries to fight back the darkness with a dimly-bulbed flashlight.

Each dot represents something — a person with or without syphilis, an automobile that breaks down or not, a cell that may have divided, a protein, a lab rat, an irate chimpanzee wearing lipstick, something — but that’s not what anyone else would see. What anyone else would see is just chaos. And the data? In its raw form? The data! Imagine a spread sheet from hell. Imagine hundreds, maybe thousands of lines of numbers out to crazy decimals, with esoteric columns that not even the experimenter knows what to do with. It’s randomness, chaos, meaningless junk from which nothing important can be grasped.

But the statistician is here to change that. It’s an Olympian task. The data fights you. It’s a Sysyphean burden. It’s like trying to pull a sensical story from the Library of Babel. Like drawing symphony out of piano notes played by a monkey with one hand as he composes Shakespeare with another. But you don’t have an infinite number of monkeys. You have N monkeys. N monkeys at N typewriters and what are your chances of Romeo & Juliet? Crunch the numbers. Do the math. It isn’t looking good.

And what if the experimenter screwed up somewhere? What if one monkey threw feces at another? The mega-outliers, the influential points that sit at the edge of the graphs, like angry, delicate snowflakes that threaten to end the world in ice, and you have to make the choice: stamp them out, or does Romeo really marry Juliet in a frostbitten outhouse? What if he does? This is a documentary and you can’t get it wrong.

Then: the code is done. The enter key is waiting. The statistician’s eyes gloss over as he looks at the data points one last time, hoping, praying. His index finger is poised, lingers in the air for N factorial seconds, an infinity in monkey time, comes down.

And the CLACK you hear is the sound of order from chaos.