I gave a paper at a conference last weekend and my paper was about a Victorian writer named Ouida. She was hugely important and famous and influential in her day but she's pretty much fallen off the radar at this point. Someone asked me whether I think Ouida's work is interesting in terms of what it has to say about the culture and the time period or whether I think it has genuine literary merit. And the question made me stop and think and realize that I didn't know how to answer it. Because elegant metaphors, not so much. But yes with the fun and the funny and the tears and suspense.
I'm not sure that the satisfaction I get from high literature and other kinds of reading *is* different because I tend to not separate them in my mind. (Which, of course, begs the question of why I do so with fanfic if I don't with published works) Stephen King alongside Dickens.
I guess it really all boils down to what I think I'm trying to do when I write fanfic. Impress/intellectually engage or stimulate the emotions. And suddenly, I'm kinda not sure anymore. As you say, both would be super awesome.
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I gave a paper at a conference last weekend and my paper was about a Victorian writer named Ouida. She was hugely important and famous and influential in her day but she's pretty much fallen off the radar at this point. Someone asked me whether I think Ouida's work is interesting in terms of what it has to say about the culture and the time period or whether I think it has genuine literary merit. And the question made me stop and think and realize that I didn't know how to answer it. Because elegant metaphors, not so much. But yes with the fun and the funny and the tears and suspense.
I'm not sure that the satisfaction I get from high literature and other kinds of reading *is* different because I tend to not separate them in my mind. (Which, of course, begs the question of why I do so with fanfic if I don't with published works) Stephen King alongside Dickens.
I guess it really all boils down to what I think I'm trying to do when I write fanfic. Impress/intellectually engage or stimulate the emotions. And suddenly, I'm kinda not sure anymore. As you say, both would be super awesome.