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Aye, but that's where the "literary" meaning comes in. The "fun sexy stories" you're talking about... I consider them literary. No matter how simple or complex, no matter if they carry as much weight as the divine comedy.
I like all of the elements I listed earlier, but that doesn't necessarily mean I consider a story not literary if it doesn't contain one or more of the elements. They don't even have to use them to extreme degrees.
A fun little romp with a night on the town ending in crazy sex could be literary for me.
I don't think it's what is written as much as how it's written. How it's presented. Big words small words themes whatever....
If I read a story that I really didn't like because the characters behaved unrealistically and the sex wasn't hot, I'd still consider it literary. In my book. Because they made the attempt to put it together, they aimed for those things but didn't quite hit.
But now, say I came across a story that used a lot of "text" speech. Lotta LOLS and random slang. No real attempt to tell a good story. The equivalent of
"We was all out on the lake and let me tell you how I fucked this one girl. She was reel reel hot and I told her we should go somewhere be all alone an stuff. She was blonde and jus starts suck in me off next to this tree.
I tell her bend over and she pulled down pants and we was fucking and my buddy saw us and he took a picture and put it on facebooks and I got this chicks number. But her sister walked out first and took out her bikini. Her tits was huge...."
Okay so maybe that's the worst story ever and a bit of an extreme example.
But I have seen this very type of story before on Lit. It's a mess. Is it a story? Well yes of course. Are they free to submit it here? Why yeah, there's no quality requirements other than making it past Laurel's skim job. Will people read it and like it? Yes, there's an audience for anything, and some people like to read little quick snippets about someone's encounters, whether or not its "literary" and to whom it is "literary." That's the freedom of Lit.
But do I consider that literary? No. It makes my head hurt just to read. It looks like a long chatroom post. And for me it isn't entertaining. For many it's not entertaining. I think these are the stories OP was talking about. (Extreme example I know, but of that ilk.) To me that's understandable, from both sides of the fence.
In the end, I look at the stories on Lit as like browsing CDs or something. (Or iTunes or whatever). Everyone's gonna pick the one that suits them best, regardless of all the "crap" they consider to be on the stand around it.
I agree- oh, wait, sorry I want to sound real smart here, I concur! with much of what you say.
But the tone in which the thread was started and others followed is one of "literary" as in being above the mere mortals here struggling to eek out words that have more than two syllables and the readership that claps their hands and says "yay, boobies!"
Literary can be as simple as a well written entertaining tales that does the trick.
But what's being pawned off as literary here is along the lines of being pompous and more than a little full of themselves.
To pretty much say the readership is uneducated and stupid goes beyond the discussion of the quality of writing.
Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H G Wells, Rudyard Kipling, didn't try to write 'literary' works. They wrote books to make a living.
In their own way, each of these ‘streams’ has a right to be considered literary. But what is all too often considered to be literary is simply pretentious waffle.
Four Lit. forum pages into a thread, you expect it to still be responding to the OP's points? You really must be new to the forum.
The ability to write is important - and it is reasonable to say, in the case of producing a work of fiction for the purpose of entertainment, that this ability should have more to it than the utter basics needed for simple communication.
We are not talking about scribbling a shopping ist...
In the case of the majority of the works here, we are.
However the OP is wrong in thinking it is a new thing.
Most of the stories have always been "Got cock, found hole, pushed, squirted, made happy."
Some readers want that.
From the ratings I would guess most readers want that.
I have seen people comment they voted one star because it wasn't a description of sex (although I wonder how brain dead you need to be to need a simplified description of sex to get off).
So some of us try to write stories, most try to write descriptions of sex acts.
The shopping lists get 4.80 stars.
Some spot-on comments.
All I would say is that, with the dumbing down of education (at least on this side of the Atlantic), those of us who are looking for any elegance/originality/craftsmanship as far as presentation is concerned will be having an increasingly hard time of it.
The unstated but unavoidable conclusion would appear to be: maybe go and form another Literotica with 'higher' goals...
It is my impression that the masses are becoming lazy as video offers them everything they need and their imaginations no longer are required. Old movies had effects that still required you to "believe" and see past the wires, rubber costumes and other trickery, now we nearly create reality visually. This means less and less people have the inclination and perhaps the skill to use words to conjure images inside their heads, and if those folks try to write they simply use words to draw pictures.
If the written word is currently struggling to keep up with the visual world, I think it is because not enough writers strive to tap into their readers brains. And, in some ways, who can blame them? It’s the money. I suspect that if JRR Tolkien was alive today, he would be working at Weta Workshop rather than being hunched over a keyboard.
In the case of the majority of the works here, we are.
However the OP is wrong in thinking it is a new thing.
Most of the stories have always been "Got cock, found hole, pushed, squirted, made happy."
Some readers want that.
From the ratings I would guess most readers want that.
I have seen people comment they voted one star because it wasn't a description of sex (although I wonder how brain dead you need to be to need a simplified description of sex to get off).
So some of us try to write stories, most try to write descriptions of sex acts.
The shopping lists get 4.80 stars.
Is good erotic literature exclusively a complex, believable plot in which sex plays a pivotal role, or is there space in the definition for well-crafted scenes which carry a basic plot (shopping list) but aspire to do so believably and move the reader nonetheless?