A Quote by Robert Gottlieb

With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.
In general, fiction is divided into 'literary fiction' and 'commercial fiction.' Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn't stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.
I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in.
I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.
I'd love to do an action film. I'd love to do a film based on a book series; I love to read the book and then go see the movie. I'd love to have a show on Disney; I love working for them. And I'm also working on getting some new music out of my own.
I used to write fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction and have a clear pattern because I'd need a break from one style when going into the next book.
Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.
I have never written a book that I wouldn't want to read. The trouble is, I love to read horror, sf, fantasy, mysteries, hero pulps - romantic fiction, in the original, traditional meaning of that term, as opposed to mimetic fiction. But most of all, I love thrillers.
I've read pretty broadly on the Holocaust - both fiction and non-fiction - and to me, 'The Lost Wife' is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.
'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.
If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.
I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.
I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.
It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.
Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.
If you do approach a comics publisher, make sure it's one that publishes the kind of book you want to make. Don't take your literary fiction to Marvel or DC; don't pitch your Spider-Man epic to Image.
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