1) All good stories use some kind of formula
Everyone knows that pop genres like horror, mystery, musical comedy and adventure, use formulas, of course — that’s what ”genre” means. The highbrow ideal says that art should be original and (usually) true to life; those are supposedly the hallmarks of quality. But we now live in a society more steeped in stories than any that has gone before. In a given week, we may see a movie or two, rent a couple of videos, catch a half-dozen (or more) television programs, listen to the radio, play CD’s and read newspapers, magazines or a book. The more of this we absorb, the more clearly we see that every good story uses some kind of formula.
–Laura Miller, “This Is a Headline For an Essay About Meta,” New York Times Magazine, November 17, 2002
2) Unbelievable stories underscore real human dilemmas
When you read horror, you don’t really believe what you read. You don’t believe in vampires, werewolves, trucks that suddenly start up and drive themselves. The horrors that we all do believe in are of the sort that Dostoyevsky and Albee and MacDonald write about: hate, alienation, growing lovelessly old, tottering out into a hostile world on the unsteady legs of adolescence. We are, in our real everyday worlds, often like the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, grinning on the outside, grimacing on the inside. There’s a central switching point somewhere inside, a transformer, maybe, where the wires leading from those two masks connect. And that is the place where the horror story so often hits home.
–Stephen King, Night Shift (1978)
3) Genre entertainments reflect our core obsessions
Popular culture is a carrier of “old truths,” myth-like structures, and in this respect it’s always retrograde. But it’s also highly topical, engaged and relevant, because it works as a mirror. It reflects the obsessions, fears, dilemmas and frustrations of many people, transforming them into a pleasure zone, into our contemporary myths, into screens for our projections.
–Dubravka Ugresic, “These Infantile Times,” Kirkus, November 29, 2011
4) One needs distraction from time to time
How about Sherlock Holmes, Vice Versa, Dracula, Helen’s Babies, or King Solomon’s Mines? All of these are definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh at than with, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can say is that, while civilization remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power. There are music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters of the stuff that gets into the anthologies.
–George Orwell, “Good Bad Books,” Tribune, November 2, 1945
5) We all enjoy familiar stories we haven’t quite heard before
The reason that Wittgenstein eagerly awaited his monthly copy of Street & Smith’s Detective Story is the same that prompted Nadezhda Mandelstam to ask visitors to bring her Agatha Christie’s latest. Neither one was after startling revelations about nature or society; they simply wanted the comfort of a familiar voice recounting a story that they hadn’t quite heard before. Call it a vice (Edmund Wilson does), call it an addiction (Auden’s word), a guilty pleasure in book form simply means time off from heavy lifting or heavy reading. Auden, in truth, didn’t do [Raymond] Chandler any favors by admonishing prospective readers that Chandler’s books should be “judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”–because it’s only as models of escape literature that they work as art.
–Arthur Krystal, “Easy Writers,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2012
6) Your average genre tale is no worse than your average novel
The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does. …And the strange thing is that this average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is not terribly different from what are called the masterpieces of the art. It drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a little grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvious; but it is the same kind of book. Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.
–Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1944
7) Widespread popularity lends a literary gravitas of its own
If the formulaic qualities and perfervid fantasy of romance novels bring them closer to superhero comics than to Dostoevsky, what does this mean, exactly? …The key difference between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Violet Winspear is—the beard, obviously, but in terms of literary production, the difference is that the latter is thinking more about you, the reader, whereas the former is thinking more about himself, the author. Each approach has an enormous value, potentially. To put this another way, Dostoevsky writes from deep inside himself, about his whole life, every single thing he ever saw or learned; Winspear plies her craft according to what she imagines it would please you to read, imagine or dream about, though it’s nearly impossible for a novelist to avoid revealing some of his own ideas and beliefs about the world, however tangentially. It doesn’t matter whether you call this “serious” literature or not, really, though it seems to me that when millions and millions of people are involved in the same reading, it is very serious indeed.
–Maria Bustillos, “Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing,” The Awl, February 14, 2012
8) Genre fiction emphasizes strong voices and propulsive prose
So what do regular adults see in young adult fiction? It’s a different experience from reading, for example, literary fiction. Not better or worse, just different. The writing is different: young adult novels tend to emphasize strong voices and clear, clean descriptive prose, whereas a lot of literary fiction is very focused on style: dense, lyrical, descriptive prose, larded with tons of carefully observed detail, which calls attention to its own virtuosity rather than ushering the reader to the next paragraph with a minimum of fuss. That kind of writing can be marvelous, but sometimes you’re just not in the mood for it.
–Lev Grossman, “Nothing’s Wrong With Strong Plot and Characters,” New York Times, March 28, 2012
9) Good writing is good writing, genre notwithstanding
The academy is broken as it relates to many creative writing programs. They have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you’re not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you’ll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won’t accept students who are writing genre fiction – what an institutional ego! My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they’ll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they’re closed to that sort of thing. You’re offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories.
–Tod Goldberg, The Rumpus interview, September 7, 2014
10) Highly plotted novels plumb common fears in a game-like format
When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of game format.
–Don DeLillo, Paris Review interview (1993)
11) Commercial fiction has always been revered and popular
I don’t like this so called highbrow versus commercial dichotomy because I feel it isolates both camps in an area that I’m guessing no one particularly wants to be in. Who wants to be “high brow”, and I put that term in quotes, and unappreciated, and who wants to be “commercial” and “unserious”? And again, I can’t help looking back to the 19th century to someone like Dickens or George Elliot or Zola. These were writers who were revered, widely consumed, and yet they were writing great work by any standards. I don’t see any reason why there has to be an opposition there. I don’t like it and I don’t think it serves any of us very well, either as producers of creative work or as consumers of it.
–Jennifer Egan, PopMatters interview, February 20, 2012
12) Popular fiction offers respite from news headlines
The absence of sustained interest in Kansas in the substance of the evolution issue is featured in a story of August 6, 1925 in the Emporia Gazette. Miss Nora Daniel, the city librarian of Emporia, had reported that she thought the public interest was aroused by the trial at Dayton. However, the standard works in the public library such as Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and others had maintained only normal circulation. The Gazette reported that Miss Daniel was a conscientious librarian, and proud of the title of Emporia as the “Athens of Kansas,” but finally “she broke down and confessed” that the six Edgar Rice Burroughs books on Tarzan had been out continuously since the opening of the Dayton fuss, and had maintained the largest waiting list of any books in the library. The editor hated to think of Emporia as a “low-brow town after thirty years of loving thought and earnest prayer,” but facts were facts, and the rush for Tarzan was one of those blows that “almost killed father.” It seems evident from the above that journalists of the time and protagonists in the quarrel overplayed the implications of the monkey trial as a barometer of the religious climate of the 1920’s.
–Raymond L Flory, McPherson at Fifty: A Kansas Community in the 1920s (1970)
13) Genre fiction can evoke a uniquely visceral reaction
I have no quarrel with literary fiction, which usually concerns itself with extraordinary people in ordinary situations, but as both a reader and a writer I’m more interested by ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I want to provoke an emotional, even visceral reaction in my readers. Making them think as they read is not my deal. I put that in italics because if the tale is good enough and the characters vivid enough, thinking will supplant emotion when the take has been told and the book set aside (sometimes with relief).
–Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars (2010)
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