Everyday Canvas

The Deal with the Literary Genre // Christmas Pastime

Prompt: What Christmas TV Shows and specials do you watch every year to make your Christmas complete?

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I am not into watching the same thing twice, not even after sixty-plus years. So, most of the oldie stuff is out for me…except A Charlie Brown Christmas. It is my favorite Christmas based anything, even before It’s a Wonderful Life. Still, I am not watching those two again. I just cherish the memory of Peanuts and its brilliant creator.

Instead, I think I am going to read, just as soon as I put my real-life concerns in order, a Christmas novella by a writer friend: A Vacancy at the Inn: Riverton Road Romantic Suspense. It is something new and I trust this author's finesse in writing most anything.

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What's the Deal with the Literary Genre


Although WdC doesn’t recognize the literary genre as a genre, there really is such a thing. Surely, WdC’s point is understandable, as many a work in other genres can be literary, too, in the meaning sense of the word.

The Literary Genre problem is an ongoing battle among writers and literature teachers. Some say there is the literary fiction as a separate entity, and then, there are genres. Others insist that the literary is a genre with its separate merits like all other genres. Still others totally reject the idea that the literary fiction or the literary genre exists.

Yet, in what it offers, the literary genre is distinct. It is the one, which in the Amazon reviews, some people write that such a story drags or they couldn’t quite get into it or they think it is too depressing or so very, very dull, despite the fact that the use of the language and the writing is so beautiful. All this is because of the emotional complexity inside the stories of the literary genre.

Still, like other genres, the literary genre has a dramatic plot, tension, and some mystery, even if surprise endings are rare. Some people can’t get into this genre because of the emotional reversals and tangles in the stories and the emotional upheavals they create in the readers. In addition, to show the emotional intricacy, the scenes can be gloomier and the internal dialogues can spin around the despair or the indecision of the characters, making the action in the story strain and stretch.

Of the writers in the literary genre, Faulkner, Joyce, and Hemingway come to mind, as well as Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Zadie Smith, and Don de Lillo of our day.

As for me, I love the literary genre and try to write in it most of the time, even if it will never make me popular or rich. There is something highly original and satisfying in the reading and writing of the literary-genre experience since it sticks to the reader emotionally as it stays inside the humanity’s reality through the trials and tribulations of everyday life.