Serious Fiction

Serious fiction is about self-awareness.  The central character either becomes more self-aware or pointedly, they fail to do so.

Serious fiction may be somber or sensational, stoic or silly; tone does not make it serious.  Stories that focus on characters’ failure to become more self-aware end as either tragedies or farces depending on whether or not the audience feels pity.

The central character doesn’t need to change beyond increasing their self-awareness.  Their situation may be no different at the end than at the beginning, but at least they know more about themselves.

If they fail to be more self-aware, the story needs to comment on this in order to be serious fiction, otherwise it’s just formula fiction.

There’s nothing wrong with formula fiction, it’s the mainstay of most genre fiction, but there’s nothing exceptional about it, either.   (Truth be told, many serious fiction stories fit comfortably in genre boundaries.)

Serious fiction always deals with a moral or ethical choice.  The scale doesn’t matter -- grandiose epic or kitchen drama -- but it needs to involve that choice.

It’s difficult for series fiction to be serious fiction; series fiction involves characters always charged with a specific task, the rightness or wrongness of that task never called into question.

On the rare occasion when serious fiction is written as part of a series, it’s inevitably undercut by later instalments.

(There’s also a form of bogus serious fiction best exemplified by the Very Special Episode in sit-coms, a faux moral dilemma that really doesn’t change the character/s or alter their self-awareness but pretends it does.)

Huckleberry Finn is serious fiction, Tom Sawyer is not.  

Huckleberry Finn the character, for all his rough, illiterate ways, remains thoughtful and introspective; his experiences change him and he is aware they change him.

Tom Sawyer the character is just a bundle of appetites and urges, monkey-clever, to be sure, but utterly devoid of introspection and self-awareness.  He is no different a person at the end of his adventures than at the start.

He’s a lot easier to write than Huckleberry Finn.

Not every writer pens serious fiction all the time.  There are bills to be paid, and if cranking out issue 207 of Killmonger puts food on the table, so be it.

But serious writers gravitate towards serious fiction, and even when they write for genre markets, they tend to write with serious intent.  It’s the rare genre-focused writer who can also produce the occasional serious fiction story.

Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison wrote serious fiction, Isaac Asimov did not.

Raymond Chandler wrote serious fiction, Erle Stanley Gardner did not.

Eric Ambler wrote serious fiction, Ian Fleming did not.

© Buzz Dixon

(thanx to Thaddeus Thomas
and David Gerrold
for sparking this post)