Long Tale Press

This comment was included in a review of CRAZY ALBERT. I'd love to hear what others think. You don't have to read the entire excerpt or review it. Maybe just read the first few paragraphs or not at all. You can still comment on the following:

Excerpt from Review

...Now, back in the day of Charles Dickens, this would have been commended as a sensational intro for a book. Back then, readers had patience for the well written and cared more for the words than the actions they led up to. Unfortunately, today's readers tend to be agitated in nature, waiting for something to happen, and attending short attention spans in doing so. As such, we (as authors) find ourselves cutting many beautiful words, as we pluck the beautiful sunflowers from the ground to present them the field that lies underneath...

Is literary/mainstream a viable genre in today's book market, or is it a hard sell because readers are impatient with description? Please respond.

IMHO, whether a book withstands lots of description depends mostly on the book's genre.

Action/adventure books, like DaVinci Code or whatever, need more action and less description because description does, like it or not, slow down the pacing. And those are "thrill ride" books where people want a cliffhanger on every page.

Literary/mainstream fiction, on the other hand, tends to be more focused on the full range and depth of life. Literary is where you go to read about how people feel, what motivates them, and how the details of their backgrounds shape who they are and the choices they make.

In many ways, action/adventure books are just brain candy, while literary books are where people go to live vicariously: to experiment with other choices they might have made in their lives, to consider how they would react in different yet entirely plausible circumstances, et cetera. There is a degree to which literary fiction involves the reader by presenting the reader with an opportunity to put themselves into the story, at least in their imaginations, as the main character. They can ask themselves, while reading Pride and Prejudice, "would I say 'yes' to Mr. Darby's proposal of marriage?" Or while reading To Kill a Mockingbird, "would I have made a big stink over injustice, instead of accepting my father's pronouncement that at least getting a bunch of jurors to deliberate for a few hours was as close to justice as a black man was going to get?"

The point is that literary books involve their readers, and IMHO you can't do that unless you can make the world and the situations very real to them. Which requires description.

As always, I say "just write the best story you can write, and you'll be fine."

Sign up for National Novel Writing Month at www.nanowrimo.org; novel writing starts November 1st!

Coming back to this thread after a really long time, I also want to say that Literary / Mainstream is certainly not a dead category. I won't call it a "genre" because that has its own connotations in the book industry, mostly along the lines of "anything that's a genre book is, by definition, not literary / mainstream."

Certainly you can walk into any bookstore in America and find plenty of new-releases in their literary / mainstream section. Even our own Edevine's "This Side of Normal" is classified that way, I believe.

Anyway, it's certainly not a dead category. Most of what you write, Jan, would seem to fall into that category so if nothing else you're doing your level-best to keep it alive!

Sign up for National Novel Writing Month at www.nanowrimo.org; novel writing starts November 1st!