Serious Fiction?

WHAT I MEAN BY “SERIOUS FICTION”

WHAT I MEAN BY “SERIOUS FICTION”

I promised I would post this material yesterday but found myself tied up. Then, too, I found that I wanted to think a bit about the matter at hand. I suppose an effective route to explaining what I mean by “serious fiction” is to talk about its opposite: pure action fiction, if indeed anything can be pure.  When a teenager, I used to read the sci-fi pulps and digests avidly.  Most of the plots had duplicate skeletons.  Aliens invade; the hero fights them, often with the aid of an elderly scientist, who has a beautiful daughter (Most sci-fi movies and mags of the 1950s included scientists who invariably had beautiful daughters.)  The hero, the heroine, and others join forces and defeat the aliens. Then, during the last few pages, although the hero and heroine have hardly pitched a word of woo, they suddenly find themselves in love and ready for the altar.  I don’t mean to trash this fare.  Much of it was written for teenage boys, young men, and even men in their seventies who still have a number of teenage brain cells in their craniums. Occasionally I still get out one of my old pulps and enjoy an action sci-fi tale by such writers as Edmund Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, or Don Wilcox. (Of course, even at that time more cerebral sci-fi was being written by Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon and others.)  But the bare skeletons of most stories closely resembled one another.  Action surmounted all other goals. But often the characters were interchangeable, lacked in-depth personalities, and had few, if any, if any personal problems. The same is true for much genre fiction. I have been told that many women’s romances follow basic formulas. Publishers require that the heroine meet the man of her dreams on the second page and thereafter feel unworthy of him. Again I do not intend of downgrade such fiction and mock it. Most of us occasionally enjoy escape reading.  True, too, genre fiction can take on attributes of more serious fiction. Owen Whister’s The Virginian is a western, but some readers would consider it literature.

The type of fiction I generally write focuses attention largely upon that most intriguing species of created beings: humanity.  Whether I write genre fiction or another type, I direct my interest on the personalities of the characters, their quirks, fears, vices, and manias. Even when I am writing my Kentucky Colonel novels, primarily humorous adventure stories, one eye us on spoofs, cockeyed kidding around, and at times satire of humanity,  My fantasy HELL IS WHERE THE HEART IS, in which a college administrator sells his soul to the devil to be a college president, hardly has a realistic character in it. Rather they all are type characters like Ben Jonson’s humors characters, who highlight or exaggerate foibles and foolish traits of (Continued)whom one may analyze, as one enjoys their adventures and even afterward. But I do not try to push any specific dogma. But here I am approaching a topic for another time.