Literary? Genre? Somewhere in between?

What’s the difference between fiction, literary fiction, and genre fiction? I’m working on querying agents and many of the ones I’m looking at say they accept both fiction and literary fiction. They don’t mention genre fiction but when I look at the authors they represent, some of that work sure seems like genre fiction to me.

As usual, I’m probably overthinking things; it’s my default position when I’m making a high-stakes decision (at least high-stakes in my mind). My trusty Webster’s Dictionary defines fiction as something imaginary. Check. Genre means a kind or type of something. Check. Literary means simply having to do with books and using the more formal language of writing rather than the informal language of speech. Hmm, not so sure the distinction between written and spoken language holds true but even so – check.

A cursory online search tells me that literary fiction is character driven, genre fiction is plot driven. Genre fiction is faster paced. Literary fiction explores the human condition with layered, complex writing. I’ll add that genre fiction has certain requirements, for example, a romance novel must have hero and heroine experiencing a happy ending, and a mystery novel must reveal the solution to the mystery with no clues unresolved.

Allegedly, John Updike lamented the tendency to categorize writing as either literary or genre because he felt it limited a writer’s expectations of their own work. Categorizing puts writers in a box. After all, doesn’t all fiction have something to say about the human condition? Even though genre fiction is faster paced and plot driven, can’t it also use layered and complex writing?

One of my favorite mystery writers is P.D. James and I’d say her work explores the human condition and is layered with complex levels of meaning. By contrast, I also love John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series and those stories say something about the human condition while being straight up plot driven with good guy triumphs over evil storylines. If we think of literary versus genre as a spectrum, MacDonald is firmly on the genre end of the spectrum while James falls closer to the middle.   

So, to my mind, the difference between literary and genre fiction has more to do with marketing than the writing itself. The work I’m pitching to these agents is somewhere between character and plot-driven, and it’s faced paced. Because it’s set in a slightly dystopian future, it’s been called science fiction. I think the story falls somewhere toward the middle of that literary-genre continuum but, since a query letter doesn’t give me much room to expound on my philosophy about the continuum between literary and genre, I’ll call this work literary.