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What Makes Fiction “Literary”?

One of my biggest literary pet peeves is the mindset that genre and literary fiction are completely separate entities. What bugs me about this division most is that there's an implied hierarchy, where literary fiction is a higher form of art and all genre fiction is inherently worse—which simply isn't true. There are tons of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and mystery stories that pay the same attention to craft and language as the works in the literary canon. On the other side, I'd also say that I've read my fair share of poorly written realistic stories.

The reality is that writing quality and plot-driven narratives are not mutually exclusive, and how literary something is has nothing to do with whether the story it tells is realistic or not. I think part of the problem here is that “literary” has become a kind of catch-all term, often used to refer to any realistic fiction that doesn't fit neatly into another category. A story isn't automatically literary just because it's a realistic story with low action, any more than a story is automatically not literary just because it has supernatural elements.

So just what does make something “literary”? The short definition you'll often see is that literary fiction is synonymous with high literature: writing that is artistic in its craft and focused on exploring serious topics or the human condition. Getting more granular, here are the key specific traits that literary fiction stories share.

The story is primarily character-driven.

When a story is character-driven, that means that the main through-line pushing the story forward is how the character(s) change or develop over the course of the story. Note that this doesn't mean the story can't have a plot. It can even have a very active or convoluted plot, but the primary arc that needs to conclude at the end of the story is the character's growth or emotional journey.

To achieve this, these stories also need to use three-dimensional characters with an authentic voice and realistic, clear motivations. They also typically show a lot of the characters' internal lives, and aim to get the reader emotionally invested in what happens to the characters.

It's artistic in its use of language and craft.

Literary writers pay as  much attention to how things are written as they do to what's being said. These stories make ample use of descriptive language, not just to set the scene but also to establish a mood or tone and convey how the character thinks and feels about their environment. You'll find lots of sensory details, lush descriptions, and use of figurative language like simile and metaphor, and they're intentional in how they use rhythm, punctuation, sentence structure, and white space to influence how the reader navigates the text.

Literary writing is often more poetic than other types of fiction, though this doesn't mean they need to be extremely lyrical or be stuffed with lengthy descriptions. Minimalist prose can still be literary if it pays the same attention to the points noted above—it has more to do with the care taken with the craft than it does with writing style.

It deals with heavy emotional or social themes and topics.

You can find moments of humor in a lot of literary fiction pieces, but generally speaking the humor isn't the main point. Instead, these stories aim to explore some aspect of humanity or society, even if they're also telling a story that seems more “fun” on the surface.

How these themes are dealt with is also something that makes a work literary. Usually, they're approached with nuance and subtlety, and the topics they choose involve moral gray areas or ethical quandaries. You'll rarely see a straightforward good-versus-evil narrative, for instance—if that's the set-up on the surface, then then literary story probably aims to challenge the reader's perception of which side is good and which is evil, or is more focused on a character's journey of self-discovery in the course of that dualistic conflict.

It features complex characters, worlds, themes, and structures.

This one is kind of a side effect of the above traits. Taken together, authentic characters, serious themes, and strong attention to craft often necessitate a certain level of complexity. Literary fiction is also the genre most likely to experiment with form and language, use non-linear storytelling, and involve sweeping long-view timelines or large casts of characters. Readers of literary fiction are okay with doing a bit of extra work to understand the story, provided the payoff proves itself worth that effort.

So what do you call realistic fiction that isn't literary?

There are an absurd number of sub-genres for the “genres” (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery, and romance), but realistic fiction has resisted this subdivision for the most part. You can see this reflected in a walk through a bookstore or library. Genres have their own separate shelves; everything else is sorted by author name in the general stacks.

Some subsets of realistic fiction do have their own labels, like:

...work in any of those categories can be literary (and most of them can also overlap with other genres, too), but they don't have to be.

There are also some other more general terms that can apply to realistic fiction that isn't necessarily literary. The term “General Fiction” is often used by booksellers for anything that doesn't fit into the other genres. There are also broader catch-alls. “Commercial Fiction” refers to any book with mass appeal, regardless of its other genre attributes. “Popular Fiction” is similar, though it tends to be more heavily slanted toward genre.

Just like with all the genre divisions, of course, none of this is cut and dry. Exactly what is considered to be a “literary” work is still often a highly subjective question. But hopefully this has helped to explain why literary and genre aren't mutually exclusive and exactly what people mean when they use this term.

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