Literature vs. Fiction

I'm going to write, for reals this time, so I figured I should come back to this blog and get it going again.

I've been reading a lot of 'How to Write' books. I usually read a lot of these. There are a lot of crap books on how to write out there, but there are a few gems. They usually fall into two types of categories. One is the easy talking, don't worry about it, just write, conversational tone of book and the other is the scare the shit out of you, you will never format your query or manuscript correctly, get used to piles of rejection letters, and never misspell anything type of book.

Currently on my list of reading materials is the Portable MFA in Creative Writing, The Writer's Journey, and Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster. Now I love, love, love these types of books and not just because they all provide additional reading lists, but because I love to talk about writing and books. What I have noticed this past month in all my writing research is that the second type of these 'How to Write' books (the fancy, scary ones) use the same few books as examples of the best is literature. I'm tired of hearing about Tolstoy, Cheever, Henry Miller, and Homer. I'm not saying they aren't great (although I really don't like Cheever), but what about the really good books? Where are they in the study of how to write? Why don't they use examples of popular fiction? And isn't that the point? To write something that people want to read and not something that they are told to read?

I would love to see a book that talks about what Stephenie Meyer did in the Eclipse books, or how great Anne Rice is at telling a story, or lets talk about Ian McEwan's prose, or how Steven King creates suspense. That would be a really great how to book. Lets get in a little bit of study on Candace Bushnell, Ayn Rand, Colleen McCullough, or even Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

When I first started reading the 'How to Write' books I had to actually go to the library/bookstore and look up all the references and read them so that I would know what they were talking about. I am fairly well read, but I was starting at ground zero according the authors of those high-falluting books. Those who write the how to books are usually MFA grads and professors of writing and it seems like it's be beneath them to admit to reading popular fiction. Do they really read it and not admit it? Or are they scared to even open a novel that is on the best-seller list?

I'm trying to keep all of my reading middle of the road, somewhere between only NYT Best Sellers, classical timeless books, and today's artsy short stories and fiction. That is what educates me the most: reading a little bit of everything.

Here is my current to be read pile:

A Tale of Two Cities- Charles Dickens   (I've never read it and feel so guilty about that )
The Carrie Diaries - Candace Bushnell
The Chicago of Europe - Mark Twain
The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet - Reif Larsen  (The illustrations look gorgeous)
The Enchanted Castle - Edith Nesbit
The Body in the Library - Agatha Christie (Again I've never read any of her mysteries)
The Preservation of Historic Architecture - US Department of the Interior
Fanny - Erica Jong
Booklife - Jeff vandermeer

and that doesn't even include all the big fat novels that have been in the pile for a while. So far this year I've knocked out Atlas Shrugged and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but eventually I'd like to get to:

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Drood - Dan Simmons
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

Soooo many books, soooo little time.