What Did I Write?

In her recent video on Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy, video essayist Laura Crone does an excellent sidebar into the "unhinged zone" where she discusses the issues with and inherent superiority of Literary Fiction. As I watched, I completely agreed with her criticisms; I also resent the idea that one amorphous category of literature is elevated to an assumed level of higher intelligence (read: smugness) while the rest is considered "easy" or "slop" (AI-generated work is slop, but I'll write about that someday). On a personal level, however, I couldn't help but feel disheartened.

For the past year, I've settled on the fact that my first novel—the one that is complete and in a few agents' inboxes and may never see the light of day let alone your bookshelf—is literary. That's not because I intended it to be some dive into pretty people's problems or gorgeously screwed up characters that use high diction whenever they get too emotional. My intention was (and absolutely still is) to depict stories that are brushed aside and neglected until it's too late: male mental illness, obsession, grief, caring for people at your own peril. Obviously people have written about these things before, but so have I, and the way I fumbled an extra 300-page plot around a psychadelic, cerebral short story for a college writing course has led to a novel in form but not in function. It doesn't seem to fit in anywhere.

Originally, I pitched the novel as crime fiction, because the epistolary framing device is a collection of letters or voice note transcripts collected by someone obsessed with a missing persons' case. She submits the "file"—the novel—to the police commissioner to prove that the protagonist is the culprit of two serious crimes. However, solving the crimes is not the point at all, and anyone who reads my pitch looking for that drive will be disappointed. Hence, slush pile. As I looked for comp titles in crime, I realized my story isn't as action-packed and doesn't delight in how morally corrupt the characters are. Likewise, I knew that submitting under "crime" just to get published would be disingenuous to myself, and if an agent actually believed in my work, would lead to make such drastic edits that the thing on the bookshelf would be unrecognizable to me.

(Yes, I know that the editing process is quite involved and the word document I'm currently staring at won't be what a reader sees, but I still want to call the final product mine.)

The same issue happened when I switched to "psychological thriller". While the "psychological" aspect is more accurate, I don't think I've written a thriller. It's a very slow burn. Things happen, of course, and from the outset I've tried to make it clear something is wrong, but thrillers feel like riptides and my novel just doesn't. By the end, the pace is much quicker and the protagonist's voice is erratic; I'd say maybe the final 150 pages could join the thriller category, but it takes the initial 150 pages to get there. So again, it winds up in the slush pile.

Daunted by the idea of "Literary Fiction", I looked up what it meant on several blogs to make sure I wasn't impersonating a more respected yet much-harder-to-publish genre. And my main impression was that literary is a catch-all term for books that merge genres, are more cerebral and character-driven, and address wider themes about human nature and society. They are conceptual. In the broadest sense, that's what I think I've written, but mostly because it doesn't belong anywhere else. And, based on the number of red columns on my personal submission tracker, it doesn't belong in the Literary category either.

What did I write? Did I just create an eternal playground for me to constantly improve my writing so I could apply it to other pieces? Is this my fucking metatextual immersive theater from Synecdoche, New York? Should I follow my family's advice and turn the novel into a radio drama "just to get it out there" despite having one pre-existing appearance on audio platforms and no time to cast/rehearse actors?

In Laura's video essay, she opts for a better distinction: psychological fiction vs. adventure fiction. My novel is psychological. Pretty much all of my writing is. But there's no category for that on an agent's QueryTracker drop-down menu. Agent bios list genres and literary as separate, even pair "literary" with the term "upmarket" and "genre" with "commercial". In other words, they like reading stories that might be harder to sell, but that doesn't mean they'll take a chance on you.

At this point, I've been told to give up on this first work and devote more energy to my second idea, which I've mentioned before: it's a low-fantasy, spec-fic work that in theory might make more sense to agents and publishers, depending on how I write it. It already has categories assigned to it; I just have to meet the criteria to get it out there. But I can't surrender just because what I've written doesn't fit into categories an artistic industry has deemed objective, despite every rejection email telling me that this industry is, rightfully, subjective.

I can't give up on what I've done. Lighting a Blurry Night isn't my magnum opus because I probably will never have one and I reject the notion that working on a project for a long time with a lot of love automatically makes it good. But according to beta readers and even some folks in the industry, what I've written deserves more than what it's gotten so far, and it's not for a lack of fight in me to bring it to light. Call it whatever you want once you've read it; I just wish that, one day, you could.