(Approximately: writing is the activity as you may well think of it: plots, characters, narrative; writin' is contemporary literary fiction, with its emphasis on style)
All of this is fine by me. I think it's great that options exist and that people have them to choose from; I'm always eager to hear about what people enjoy and to learn about what they know. No, it's something else that bugs me, namely: Why should the package of values that the lit-fict crowd prefers be considered to be superior to the popular-fiction package?
What case can possibly be made that fussin'-with-the-writin' is automatically more important than attending to matters of character, suspense, story, situation, and entertainment? It's a pointless argument to make, no? As pointless as arguing that vegetables are automatically better than fruit, or that candy is automatically better than beef. So far as pleasure -- and even imaginative nourishment -- goes: Doesn't what matters to you at the moment always depend to a large extent on what you're looking for, what you're in the mood for, and what your preferences are?
In fact, if one of these two packages -- either the lit-fict package or the popular-fict package -- is going to be said to be more important than the other, it seems to me likely that the character-suspense-story package is of far more innate importance. The popular-fiction package reflects, after all, a direct engagement with the basics of why most people are interested in fiction in the first place. Popular fiction is the meat-and-potatoes of fiction. Lit-fict is the garnish. You tell me which is more important.
The real question is more important to whom. The prospect of dissertation writing has led to an obsession with questions of style. To the extent anyone has a good, clean prose style (that I can appropriate), they're useful and interesting to me. It'd be more surprising if it were otherwise. An argument, a conversation, a paper--all have a natural flow to them that can be picked up, if not easily, than within the life and experience of the average person. Once you cross 100 pages, you begin to do something unnatural. To manage it at all takes skill--to do it well deserves notice. I don't believe there's any correspondence between Writin' and good prose style, but I'll also never be convinced that the focus on style is a bad thing.
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