Originally published at Thus Sayeth the Lord…. You can comment here or there.

An excellent essay on the development of the mainstream literary genre.

Money shots:

As a fantasist, I reject realism as a literary movement. I’m offended by the postmodern proscriptions that some of my writing professors crammed down my throat in college. Their whole approach to writing was based on blind acceptance of values that served as “defaults” for creating good literature in the absence of any other, more rational, approach.

I insist that my literary tools come from honest observation of what works in storytelling, rather than being derived from someone else’s political agenda.

The hodge-podge of literary “rules” that you learn in college will destroy your writing if you make them your master and not your servant. As writers, I believe we should study the mainstream. Learn the works of the best practitioners of our arts, study their craft. Seek to improve.

I agree with Gunn that there aren’t any editors in speculative fiction who hold with all the tenets of the postmodern realists. At the same time, there are those who hold with certain attitudes. More and more, I see authors and editors trying to establish themselves as members of some cadre of literary elite. Their work is increasingly enamored of postmodern techniques and values, and therefore becomes correspondingly mundane.

Everyone deserves good literature–the old, the young, the fantasists, the realists, the Republicans, the Communists, the Christians, the Wiccan–men, women, and people of every nationality and color.

To define any one literature as the only possible “good” to the exclusion of all others seems about as preposterous as trying to establish one flavor of ice cream as “good” to the exclusion of all others.

I’m offended by anyone who says that art “Must be done my way.”