Viewing Chick Lit From the Future – Guest Post by Author JF Kristin

on Sep23

Viewing Chick Lit From the Future

When I was getting ready to query literary agents about my novel, Rock Star’s Girl, I came across something that surprised me.

Very few agents listed chick lit as a genre they were interested in representing. Some agents had even blogged about their opinion that chick lit was very much dead.

A former writer of chick lit whom I’ve exchanged a number of emails with over the years mentioned to me that indeed, the perception was that the market had been oversaturated, and that chick lit was likely to be a hard sell.

Knowing this was enough to make me adopt fancy rephrasings of the genre when describing my manuscript to friends and colleagues, and when querying agents.

If people were stating that chick lit was dead and wouldn’t sell, then clearly they were right. Weren’t they?

I had to find out. And my findings told me that even though it had been somewhat banished to the margins of traditional publishing, chick lit wasn’t dead.

When searching for the term “chick lit” on any major search engine, you’d be surprised that a sour opinion of the genre even exists. The number of web sites and blogs that focus specifically on chick lit is significant, and many of these sites and blogs have a large following. In my social media travels, I’ve come across multiple chick lit communities on Facebook, and popular Twitter pages devoted to chick lit fans.

While it may be more difficult to get chick lit published now than it was five or six years ago, the interest is clearly there. The ongoing enthusiasm for and discussion of the genre got me to thinking about literary studies, and how chick lit will be viewed fifty or one hundred years from now by literature scholars.

There are those who may scoff that chick lit isn’t something that’s likely to be on college English courses, or to hold a place in history. I’d argue, though, that those holding this opinion are wrong.

Any genre that has had a significant following is fair game for academia. During my own graduate studies of literature, some of the topics delved into included the rise of cybertext, the way it experimented with literary form, and even the place of fanfiction. We may be too close to the initial rise of chick lit now to see it, but when something resonates with a large group of readers, there’s a reason for it.

One of my college English professors once noted during a lecture that to truly understand history, we should look to the literature, movies, and television programs of the time. I’m paraphrasing, but the general idea was that the entertainment of a time period will often say more about the time than one can truly discern from documented historical facts.

What will chick lit say about the time of its rise, what readers were ready for, and why they were ready for it? What will the evolution of chick lit, its various subgenres, and the reason for these subgenres be seen as?

I can’t tell you how chick lit will be viewed from the future. I am confident, though, that it will be viewed from there. So if you’re a chick lit fan, be proud to be a part of literature’s history. Even though readers may increasingly have to seek out independently published chick lit novels, and yes, the plots and protagonists of chick lit novels are very much growing and evolving, chick lit isn’t dead.

J.F. Kristin (Jennifer) has been writing since the day she picked up a navy blue Crayola as a toddler and began scribbling on her parents’ freshly painted white walls. When not writing novels, Jennifer writes about both writing and ecommerce, and previously spent a number of years as a freelance promotional writer and web designer for musicians. In the early days of the Web, she ran the Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer (SPPNTCJ), a tongue-in-cheek web site that welcomed millions of visitors during its run, received coverage from print, broadcast, and online media, was included in an academic textbook, and was studied on a college course. Jennifer is currently at work on her second novel. Grab her book, Rock Star’s Girl!

A book and the sun, everything else just works out stock photo by www.pixmac.com

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LadyX

LadyX loves... stilettos, big sexy hair, dirty music, a perfect French manicure and anything that shows some cleavage. More often though, she can be found in a Lulu hoodie and slippers, her amazing daughter in her cross legged lap while she types ferociously at her laptop. Very few things make her blush, but many things make her uncomfortable. Namely, Savasana, sitting through a whole movie at the theater, and anything else that requires sitting still or concentrating on one thing.