Latest: Literary vs Commercial Fiction

When discussing literary fiction and “commercial” fiction, I’ve often read that they are two different schools of thought. Maybe that’s because in today’s world, we are trained to divide any concept into two and then pick a side. I don’t think you have to choose one or the other. Stephen King once wrote an article of writing tips where he said, “Write to entertain. Does this mean you can’t write ‘serious fiction’? It does not. Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds [...]