Post 1

Post 1

Introduction: I’m a junior and this is my second Creative Writing class. I usually write fiction, I am not really certain what genre. I admire stories with elements of science fiction, fantasy, or some type of magic. I also like regular stories as well. My experience in the Creative Writing Program so far has been positive. I didn’t really like poetry, but I learned how to understand it last semester in an intro class. Learning about the significance of form in poetry made it easier to understand it, for instance line breaks and concrete poems.

Genre: Before reading “Literary vs Genre Fiction” I’d never heard of Literary Fiction. If I had I was not aware, because the word did not really hold a definition for me. After reading the PDF, the impression that Literary Fiction brings to mind is fiction that is more useful for academic reading. I would call Literary Fiction academic reading because of the way it was described as depressing and oppressive in the PDF. Books that I’ve read that are unstructured or depressing I’ve usually had to read for a class. For example I would call “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, “Free Enterprise” by Michelle Cliff and “Bailey’s Café” by Gloria Naylor Literary Fiction. All of these books had heavy themes and were depressing at points, and I most likely never would have read them for ‘fun’. Books that are read to learn academically seem to fit into the Literary Fiction genre.

On the opposite side, Genre Fiction brought connotations of light reading. When I read the ideas about Genre Fiction in the PDF I thought it could be defined as fiction that follows certain guidelines and could easily be classified on a shelf. The PDF says that Genre Fiction usually has a predictable or reliable structure I think that’s a part of the guidelines it follows. Genres themselves are kind of obscure because they are not that solid from person to person. Sometimes they help the reader find something but other times they make things more confusing, particularly when I am writing something I don’t know what the genre is, is anything with Zombies sci-fi? My experience so far in reading and writing outside of genre or with hybrid genre has been subconscious I guess. I like to think I’d give a book a chance regardless of genre because it could be very interesting but I know there have been books I’ve read because of genre and I didn’t like them at all.