I watched a film the other day which led to me thinking about enthusiasm envy. It was one of those sombre affairs that critics and intellectuals like, heavy on intimation of meaning (rather than actual) and somewhat light on fun. To like such stuff, you have to buy into the notion, probably first encountered at school, that worthy art is the kind you have to suffer.

It’s difficult to resist this brainwashing in our educational journey. Older, clever, teachers keep telling us which books, plays, films are the ones we should bend our minds to understanding. Our parents either echo this or at least agree the teachers must be right. So, if they find us reading genre fiction or, even worse, comics, we’re punished or censured or scorned. A dichotomy builds in our lives, between ‘approved’ and ‘worthless’ art – well, not actually called worthless so much these days, but rather things like ‘commercial’, ‘genre’, ‘light’.

Okay, so far so obvious. We all know about the war between Literary and Genre. But I want to talk about an aspect of it that might not be so apparent, to do with enthusiasm.

Take SF/Fantasy, for example. People who like speculative fiction not only have thousands of books and films to choose from, there are all sorts of online communities to join and conventions to attend. At these conventions, they tend to drink, talk and dress up a lot and, apart from the odd writer who feels he ought to perhaps be a little more ideologically restrained, they really, really enjoy themselves. Oh, and they’re incredibly, unashamedly, enthusiastic about their genre.

I don’t really often see the same enthusiasm in the worthy corner. At least not of the same open-ended nature. I’m not sure there are even any Literary conventions as such. I’ve heard of book events held in towns full of afternoon tea shops, where readers sit and humbly listen to authors talk about their books. I’ve listened to The Book Club on Radio 4 with its carefully articulated questions from the audience to The Author. And a while ago, I swapped favourite books with a colleague at work, someone who loved pubs and jokes and silliness of various kinds. But the book he gave me, as his favourite, was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. (I gave him The Once and Future King by T. H. White.) When I returned it, I said, “I’m sorry, Steve; I managed about 80 pages but it’s very heavy going.” He said, “Yes, it is heavy going, I agree.”

Now, I may be wrong but I doubt very much that if you asked anyone at a speculative fiction convention to tell you about their favourite book, they’d qualify their comments by admitting that in effect it’s pretty boring. Why would anyone want to read a boring book? Well . . . see above, perhaps.

My own moment of liberation was on a train between Swansea and Cardiff in the 1970s, struggling with The Magus by John Fowles. It suddenly occurred to me that I really didn’t have to read this book, or even like it, no matter how worthy it was. So I threw it out the train window and ever since have only read books I actually like.

I’m a member of various writers’ forums and groups and have noted that at times the Literary people can be rather disparaging about genre writers. Oh, they disguise it more these days, perhaps because some genre writers make a lot of money and even, whisper it, write very well at times. However, the old prejudice slips out from time to time. For example, recently I bumped into this, from the writers’ guidelines of the literary journal The Gettysburg Review:

“We do not publish genre fiction—mystery, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and the like—but are certainly not opposed to considering work that self-consciously employs the tropes of formulaic writing for more sophisticated literary ends.”

You can certainly have fun with that, assuming that is you understand what they’re going on about.

Anyway, the barely suppressed hostility that is sometimes shown by Literary fiction people towards genre folk is often rooted, I believe, in envy. Genre lovers don’t wade through difficult wordage because they feel they ought to. They just plainly like their stuff and aren’t shy in expressing the fact. They don’t like books just because they’re told to (although many do suffer from Robert Jordan syndrome – which is the chronic inability to stop buying books in a series that died long ago, because they can’t shake their initial loyalty to something they loved).

Does prejudice run the other way? Of course, and I’m no doubt expressing a fair bit of it in this post. However, I don’t think genre lovers actually envy ‘worthy’ lovers. They may feel inferior at times, since Literary still claims it owns the most ostentatious awards. It also tends to bag the teaching positions, at least in this country. If you haven’t had much published, or anything at all, it needn’t matter. As long as you have a creative writing degree and like the right books, then you can always tutor what you in turn were tutored.

I guess this post is a plea for enthusiasm from all writers. I’m tired, for example, of hearing writers go on about how difficult writing is. About the dozens of drafts they turn out before getting it right. About the ‘shitty first draft’. If it’s that kind of difficult, don’t do it. Look for enthusiastic difficult instead, which is taking leaps across the creativity void, for example, trusting there’s something inspiring and new on the other side. But you have to leave the tired, old but comfortable behind you. Or taking yourself and all your writerly struggles out of the way, to stand aside and just let your characters speak, your plot breathe and your prose tear down mountains, magical or otherwise.