Genre fiction is more important than literary fiction in our society.

Genre fiction is more important than literary fiction in our society.

I’m biased, it’s true.  I write genre fiction. I (when I have my act together) publish it. I read it more often than not… by a large margin.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Let’s face it: the idea that genre fiction is somehow lesser than so-called “literary fiction”  is bullshit. 

Here’s why.

There’s plenty of bad genre fiction to point at… but there’s also lots of bad literary fiction to point at. The difference to me is simple Dash at least bad genre fiction might be entertaining due to the spectacle of the thing.

But bad literary fiction? It doesn’t hit the public eye in the same way.  It’s simply boring, and nobody cares, reads it, or adapts it into films. That’s why it isn’t on the radar, and why people don’t complain about bad literary fiction… Except for the many parodies of bad literary fiction out there, especially the formulaic types where the protagonist simply muses about the meaning of life while smoking a cigarette, or while writing a novel, or just walking while thinking about the painful humdrum of being a middle-class person in America.

This points to something important that gets missed.

Crappy literary fiction never reaches the mainstream. It never reaches the public consciousness. It simply disappears.

Crappy genre fiction, on the other hand, like every Transformers movie ever, has an audience. It is worth something to people.

So again I say: genre fiction is worth more than literary fiction.

And those who deny their genre fiction roots are simply engaging in classic elitism, nothing more.