I recently received this question from one of our readers:
I have read several issues of Tin House, including the most recent. Two vegetarians go on a hunting trip . . . enough said. I feel that I have several pieces that would fit the magazine, however, I am struggling with just one thing. This question is geared not only toward the magazine but the writing workshop as well. Do you accept genre fiction? I was also wondering how I might go about determining whether or not my piece fits into a specific genre and what general fiction is. Thank you in advance.
—Confused in LA

Dear Confused,

You ask a question of the ages. Technically, we accept any and all unsolicited manuscripts between September and June. I would normally say “genre” fiction does not stand a particularly great chance of getting published in Tin House, but then again what exactly is considered “genre” fiction and what is considered “literature”? Many fine writers have straddled that line, Kurt Vonnegut being an obvious example, and Denis Johnson, one of the greatest literary voices of our time, in my humble opinion, just came out with a detective novel. Are Cormac McCarthy’s books Westerns?

I think you know genre fiction when you read it. My personal definition goes something like this: fiction that almost purposefully avoids the literary, in hopes of keeping the reader (or the writer, for that matter) from having to “work” too hard. It also tends to employ some stock tricks, like ending very short chapters with cliffhangers, often hopping predictably from one POV to another. Characters tend to be one-dimensional, with the kind of awkward and false-sounding dialog you’d expect.
Genre writers know their audience, and it’s a large one: John Grisham sold 60,742,288 books during the 1990s. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, and I won’t do that here. But that audience, for reasons that sometimes seem obvious and sometimes are madly mysterious, is almost universally not interested in the same things we are.
We’re interested in good stories. Contrary to what many people think, it’s not work to read them. A good story is a thing to savor, something you want to make copies of and pass around, something you might find yourself inexplicably wanting to read out loud. (Or not so inexplicably—good writers all have musicians living somewhere inside them, whether they know it or not, and have perfect pitch when it comes to the sounds of the words they use). If you read a lot of good stories, then you know what they are. If you don’t, then you should start, beginning with the summer reading titles on this blog. Sometimes it takes me days to parse out what made a good story so damned good, sometimes I never can.
The best description I have come across of a story that we at Tin House would consider “unsuccessful” comes from James Wood, in his book How Fiction Works: “I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.” How a writer manages to create a novel that teaches the reader how to read it, how to fall in love with it, is a lifelong quest for most.
A writer can succeed with a novel about ranchers, astronauts, or lawyers, running from or fighting the bad guys, just as well as in a story about a silly party, at the end of which a man and his wife wrestle quietly over memories of her dead first love. But I must warn you: it is really, really hard to write a good story. I admire everyone who tries.
If you’re a reader of Tin House, you’ve already exhibited good taste. So I’d encourage you to submit (once our reading period opens). As I mentioned, we do accept submissions online (www.tinhousesubmissions.com), so you can save your postage, and we also accept simultaneous submissions, which means you really have nothing to lose.

Do you have something to say about genre fiction? Please post your comments!