There've been a couple of posts lately in various blogs I read about literature vs genre. Ursula le Guin's post Petty Expectations stood out for me, especially her examination of the Y.A publishing trends. Go read, I'll wait.

The argument of literature vs genre, in all its forms, is a bugbear of mine. Largely because it crippled my writing for years. I spent four years in a degree that worshipped literature, where my desire to play with otherworldly ideas was met with scorn and, on occasion, pity. I accepted and resented their assumption that literature was intrinsically "better" than genre, and despaired as I realised that it was not what I loved to write. But it was what I had to write, or fail. And I developed a terrible habit: I wrote to show I was clever. And I kept that habit for another three years after I left.

It didn't stop me writing. But my stories tended to hit people over the head with their concept, and shout There! Aren't I smart, Oooh, is it the old lady or the girl? Faces or vase? Isn't your mind blown? Hmm? Hmm? Praise me, praise me! They weren't bad, per se. Perhaps a little self-satisfied. But it was limiting what I could write - I would only write what I thought could be clever. And that's ridiculous.

My mother has an apt phrase for the distinction between genre and literature: one is written primarily to entertain, the other primarily to communicate a message or theme. Neither is better than the other, they're just different priorities.

The reason genre gets so bad a wrap is frankly that our various puritanical influences have devalued and even perverted the notion of entertainment for its own sake, and people forget that there is often a message or theme behind the genre-work, it's just not the primary purpose. But being 'entertained' just for its own sake is seen as wrong, somehow. A waste of time and resources, childish, pseudo-masturbation for those who couldn't put their brains to deeper thought, and that prejudice prevails over any closer examination of the merits of the work.

The reason literature is seen as so high and mighty is that so many of those books have forgotten the 'entertain' component entirely - and gotten away with it, too, for the same reason.

Books that have both rise above their category, whatever it is. But while we might scorn a message-less genre book, literature that doesn't entertain is alright - you're just not 'deep' enough to get it. Or smart enough. You haven't seen the cleverness of the work. How the author pulled in components from these classic (and also probably not very entertaining) texts, how the symbolism fliped the whole story on its head, and even though it has no protagonist, no plot, no entertainment value and is in fact a very boring diatribe about a chair in somebody's living room, it works, you see.

It's the same principle behind the incoherence of many academic texts - if you don't understand it, it must be good. Because if you admit you don't understand it, everyone else will look at you, shake their heads, and try patiently to explain it to you in as complex and convoluted manner as possible to disguse the fact that they don't get it either. It's an agreed code of conduct. They spent ten years of their lives geting to a place where they could garner respect for pretending to understand things; if people start writing things simply, then anyone could get in.

I should point out here that by 'they', I don't mean indivuals. I don't think any of my professors ever thought "No, I can understand too much of this, take it away and obfuscate it until I'm only 30% sure I even know what you're talking about". This is a mob-process, created by the gathering of specifically-similar individuals into its own entity, and propelled forward by the momentum of its own existence. Its purpose is purely to maintain the status quo - to keep itself in the undercurrent of the mob. And it does this by seducing the newcomers into unknowingly believing in it.

I'm not saying "don't write literature". I'm not even saying "don't write experimental literature that doesn't work", because you can't find what does work until you've found a bunch of things that don't. I am saying:

• don't feel that "just" entertaining people isn't enough
• don't feel that you have to make some new and groundbreaking point about humanity with every story
• don't feel you have to be clever - don't try to be clever. 

Just let the story be what it needs to be. There are no new ideas. Especially now, when everyone and their dog is publishing. Ever since we had fire, we had stories to entertain us while we huddled in from the cold. So tell us one that speaks to you. That's all you need to do.