Lit Fic and the Literary Nebula

lit fic--the nickname given to literary fiction; stories and novels with an emphasis on characters as they cope with moral questions rather than following plots dictated by genre fiction conventions.

The arena of literary fiction is a confusing but worthwhile one to enter, leaving the writer to make individual choices as the ideas arrive, or leaving the bookstore manager to decide where to shelve it and the writer to write it. Colm Toibin's 2009 novel Brooklyn could be classified as lit fic because of the respect with which he portrays a mother and her two daughters; it could also be classified as a bildungsroman because the youngest daughter, the protagonist, does "come of age" and in the process gets an aching sense of which life would be best for her, the small-town Irish town of her birth, or the Brooklyn her sister has arranged for her to move to.

Any number of literary writers have been attracted to genre fiction, adapting literary techniques to help them explore the potential of genre fiction. Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, has written romances and mysteries along with her literary work. John Banville has undertaken a mystery series after having finished a novel that won the Mann Booker Prize, and Denis Johnson, after having won the 2007 National Book Award, has published Nobody Move, a mischievous take on the noir, hardboiled crime novels of the 1940s and '50s. And remember Graham Greene, who called certain of his novels "thrillers," as though he were abdicating some literary kingship.

Add to the mixture the fact of the increased number of graduate-level writing programs, and the effects on readers, writers, and publishers of so-called YA or young adult fiction, factors that may seem unrelated but which contain similar degrees of investigation and honesty in their depictions of humanity at work.

Lit fic, accordingly, is the result of the writer carefully and deliberately choosing characters who best represent the issues the writer wishes to deal with, then peeling with care the onion of discovery.

Bildungsroman, Crucible, and Not to Forget Episode

bildungsroman--a novel about the growing-up process of a young person, seeking admission into the hallowed chambers of adulthood and supposed maturity; a youthful journey through painful experiences and idealism to a more pragmatic awareness of conventional behavior and ethics, often rendered in first person, autobiographical point of view, such as Great Expectations, Huckleberry Finn, and The Adventures of Augie March, but equally effective in third person, with he or she narrators, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Member of the Wedding.

Although some writers have deliberately set forth to write a bildungsroman, most have done so through the simple expedient of choosing an interesting, talented, or energetic young person as a protagonist (See Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis.), then following an arc if not the entirety of that person's life. Accordingly, some scholars, critics, and reviewers will call such a novel a bildungsroman. If said bildungsroman appears to be a cautionary tale or one with a strong dose of moral choice, then said scholars, critics and reviewers will be showing off their knowledge of the original intent of bildungsroman, which was to give young readers a means of measuring their own goals, behavior, and responses against some topical paradigm.

One American author, Horatio Alger, Jr., Americanized the Germanic construct to "rags to riches" in a series of inspirational and hortatory novels, a hobby horse he rode to fame well beyond his death in 1899, inspiring generations of young men to work their way to the top. All these many Horatio Alger stories could be thought of as bildungsromen.

Writers do themselves no good when they allow themselves to be reined in by a catch-all term or concept, regardless of how conventional the concept has become, nor how trendy and accepted it is. Stories of young men and women coming of age for a two-sided target, one for authors, the other for readers.


crucible--a scene or series of scenes in a narrative in which plot and character elements collide, intensify, and boil over to point of dramatic consequences; the narrative sense of increasing tension, building toward pressure; a bowl- or cup-shaped laboratory container, designed to heat chemical compounds to extreme temperatures. Hence the useful metaphor for the writer of a scene as a container of volatile elements to which the heat of dramatic pressure has been applied. To extend the metaphor from the physics of chemistry to the dynamics of drama, the notion of the crucible extends to the results of the heat hurrying along the inevitable change that is a part of story.


episode--a dramatic incident or event that is part of a larger work; scenes involving characters with whom the reader is familiar, being moved to activity if not action by accelerating circumstances of a plot design; a separate segment of a published work. The writer is most often likely to hear the word used about a particular work as an indication that the tail is wagging the dog--the incidents and moments are distracting the reader from the story. A work thought to be episodic is by not necessarily lacking suspense or other vital elements of drama, instead the work is seen as lacking the force of causality.

In a well-constructed story, characters behave as they do because the circumstances of their agenda and of the plot force them to do so or offer them unanticipated opportunities to do so, thus the sense of the presence of causality. Episodic narratives may be big on activity and movement but they emerge as not being relevant to the main force of the story. Think determinism, a concept that everything that happens is the antithesis of free will and is in fact the result of previous events. Stories are if not entirely deterministic, well guided by the principle of determinism. Think law in the sense of precedent-setting cases informing the rendering of new decisions; called stare decisis among legal scholars, their judicial reach for determinism is visible. No episodes for them.