by
Kathryn Page Camp
It’s a good thing writing
isn’t a science, because nobody agrees on terminology.
I recently
attended the Let’s Just Write conference run by the Chicago Writers
Association. I enjoyed listening to other writers’ experiences and came away
with some good craft tips.
But I was also
very confused. Why? Because writers don’t have a common vocabulary. We may
think we do, but then someone uses a different definition.
I’ve been at a
number of conferences where literary fiction was defined as fiction that doesn’t
fall within a particular commercial genre. Sometimes they add that it must have
literary merit or be of social value, although that condition is meaningless because literary merit and social value, like art, are in the eye of the
beholder. But at the conference in Chicago, I heard a different definition. One
of the presenters said that fiction can’t be classified as literary unless it
is written by someone with an MFA (Master in Fine Arts), especially if the
author is a woman. That’s the first time I’ve heard it described that way.
The other definitional
controversy isn’t as new but was given a new twist at the Let’s Just Write
conference. Nobody seems to know what an independent (or indie) publisher is.
Some people say it is anyone who publishes their own books, others say it is small
or midsize presses that aren’t affiliated with one of the major publishing
houses, and some say that the definition includes both. The new twist I heard
in Chicago is that independent publishers use a traditional print run rather
than a POD (print-on-demand) process.
Granted, both
unexpected definitions came from the same person, and nobody else spoke up to
either agree with or dispute them. So maybe that presenter is out-of-touch with
the industry. But when I returned from the conference, I searched the Internet
for definitions of literary fiction and independent publishing, and the results
were just as confusing.
Yes, fiction is
more art than science. But if we want to be taken seriously as a profession and
an industry, we need to speak a common language.
And that means
getting our definitions straight.
__________
Kathryn Page Camp
is a licensed attorney and full-time writer who writes adult non-fiction as
Kathryn Page Camp and middle-grade fiction as Kaye Page. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month
Selection for April 2014, and her first middle-grade historical novel, Desert Jewels, was released in August
2017. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.
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