Genrephobia

Tonight in the realm of social media I encountered this post:

I was fortunate at Elon to have some really great Creative Writing professors, but this was still a problem. Not only was genre fiction looked down upon, but it wasn't even addressed in writing courses. You had to take literature courses if you were interested in understanding the inner workings of these particular kinds of tales.

I always like to throw Ursula K. LeGuin, or Kelly Link, or the aforementioned Terry Pratchett, or Ray Bradbury, or goodness knows how many other authors in the faces of people who sneer at speculative fiction. Those same people usually sneer in general at all "popular fiction," which just makes them sound like hipster kids who can't like a band if more than five people have heard of it.

This kind of post used to make me fist-pump and shout "Hallelujah!" in acknowledgment. But now I think a touch of the devil's advocate has taken root in my soul. Because the reason my professors in college didn't talk a lot about writing genre fiction is that they were trying to equip us with a toolbox of basic storytelling fundamentals. The trappings of genre are important, but they don't work if you don't have a decent story framework to hang them on. And I begin to realize that many young writers lean too heavily on the features of genre - the unicorns and space ships, the serial killers and ghosts - which weren't designed to hold such weight on their own. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Ursula LeGuin and all the rest of them - they write good stories, that just so happen to feature flat planets and Other Mothers and wizards and dragons and all the rest of it.

There was a guy in one of my classes as an undergrad who decided to ignore the unwritten "no genre fiction" rule and wrote a short story about some teens who encounter the chupacabra in the woods. The parts where he wrote about the chupacabra were great because he was obviously excited about it, but the story fell apart and was ultimately a flop because those descriptions and the sequence of actions weren't grounded properly in a larger narrative that was crafted using the skills our professor was trying to emphasize in the class.

I think academia in general and creative writing departments in particular have a lot to learn when it comes to acknowledging and teaching genre fiction to students. However, I think memes like this sometimes get a little too gung-ho in condemning the snobbish behavior of such ignorant professors. I think progress lies somewhere in between.