[Serious] Who here is geared towards, or aspires to, a more literary style of writing?

I really try not to let my obvious bias shine through any time I hear the phrase "Literary Fiction." Tonight I'm feeling snarky. If you don't want to read someone ripping it to shreds, you should stop here.

I often find it very self indulgent, like an actor saying "Oh I'm going to give an Oscar Performance" or a playwright proclaiming "I'm going to write a Tony winning play."

"I don't write Sci-fi, I write literary fiction based on a post apocalyptic near future world. But it is about the struggle of the characters."

By definition literary fiction (if you can even find a definition upon which LF writers can agree) is supposed to be good. And if that is the case, why is so much self-proclaimed literary fiction utter crap filled with purple prose and in your face symbolism?

In my opinion, literary fiction is an award to receive after you've written something worth receiving it. And all writers yearn for that.

I am a writer, and I write for consumption. An award I give myself means nothing.

Often I feel that Literary Fiction is used more like a shield by new writers. "Oh they don't understand because it is LF!"

No you just don't have a plot and 100 pages of someone whining about their parents sucks in any setting.

"Oh it isn't purple prose, that is my style of description! Look at all of these commas, you know this shit is real!"

No, you just fluff your shit harder than the porn star understudy.

Write and if it has legs it will walk on its own.

And then you get to many of the LF authors themselves, who seem to have such condescension for the lowly genre writers. "Oh the time I put into a sentence."

Motherfucker, if you stopped spending so much time with a thesaurus you'd be done by now.

Yeah, if you are banging out Harry Potter Hentai Fanfic, you probably aren't putting a lot of time into your work. But the majority of people here are serious writers, we all think about what we write. That is why we are here.

And what gets branded as LF to show as an example? Past genre work that is just written well.

Now, I'm gonna get off my soapbox and go have another Gin & Tonic and play my State of the Union drinking game. And if you got this far and your feathers are ruffled, I warned you all the way at the top.

/r/writing Thread