Literary v. commercial fiction

Best-selling author Jodi Picoult discounts the distinction. Of course. Writers who make money also want respect. But, in fact, there is a meaningful distinction between the two forms, perhaps best evoked by the great Graham Greene in his practice as a writer: he wrote what he called "novels," his serious work; and he wrote "entertainments," for wider appeal and to make money.

I like to make the distinction this way: commercial writing is writing outside-in: you write to satisfy the expectations and needs of an outside audience. You pay attention to the audience. The audience comes first and determines what and how you write.

Literary writing is writing inside-out. You write to satisfy some need or needs in yourself, to reach for a kind of perfection that is defined by the writer and the writer alone. The audience, such as it exists, is a group cloned from your own literary tastes and values. The audience is an after-thought.

In this sense, it is perfectly natural that commercial fiction is more popular than literary fiction. There is nothing wrong with this. What is wrong is that the corporate publishing industry no longer is interested in publishing books that won't sell a lot of copies BY DEFINITION. The old family-owned publishers considered it a cultural duty to publish literary novels, KNOWING full well they would not sell. From the bottom line point of view, from the business point of view, this is ridiculous, obviously bad business, and this is the mantra of the recent corporate publishing industry.

In general, too, I think commercial fiction is plot driven and literary fiction is character driven, but there's some wiggle room there. I know I have a hard time reading commercial fiction because I get into the beginning of the book and ask myself, Do I care what happens to these people? -- and since I usually don't, I quit reading. In fact, I cannot remember the last "best seller" I actually finished. It may have been decades ago, THE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING. Hmm. There must be a more recent one but offhand I can't think of it. Interesting.

clipped from seattlepi.nwsource.com "The problem that I have is that there is an assumption that commercial fiction cannot be worthy (of awards) and, when you think about it, the people we read as the classics today were commercial fiction writers. ... Dickens wrote commercial fiction, Twain ... they've only become literary through the passage of time. So that makes me wonder what will stick around. ... "I think that you look at a book like 'Nineteen Minutes,' which is really about social and moral issues, and about parenting, about bullying and discrimination. You can't say that any of those conversations aren't important. They're incredibly important. And if you can get a wider number of people to start that dialogue because you have more people buying the book, because of where it's placed because it is commercial fiction, I don't really think that is a bad thing.