 In The Review Review, novelist Dan Chaon expresses surprise that his writing students don't read more or spend more time engaged with the literary community: The writing community is full of lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in. These people deserve the rejections that they will undoubtedly receive, and no one should feel sorry for them when they cry about how they can’t get anyone to accept their stories. But J. Robert Lennon says in Salon that the problem with this advice is that so much of contemporary literary fiction is, well, boring. (He used a swear word to describe how boring he thinks it is.) If a writer of literary fiction wants to be great, she needs to poke her head up out of the echo chamber every now and then and absorb the genuine peculiarity of human striving. And that means reading stuff that is not literary fiction, and, sometimes, not reading at all. Maybe one solution is for students to write the un-boring kind of literary fiction?
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