Conflict is at the core of great stories, so it’s no surprise that those on the backside of great stories often find themselves involved in great debates. One of the most recently sparked debates grew out of a discussion on the monetary value of creative works. Boiled down to the bones the great question is: Should we write for art or for entertainment?

No doubt many of you now are immediately responding with “Both!”, which is a fine point, save that a great deal of the “junk” in genre was written to be both. Each genre has its tropes. Readers pick up a book with expectations, which is where genres as a classification device came from. It wasn’t a way for writers to judge or value their own work. It was a means of marketing departments reaching readers who knew what they wanted in a good story.

Horror has death and twist endings that never allow for any real victories. Science fiction prospers on space ships and the end of the world. Fantasy has its heroic journeys and unfathomable evil overlords.

These elements became trademarks of their respective genres for a reason—because readers loved them. The lowbrow, the “genre trash”, the plebeian and the mundane elements of the books we love are ordinary and expected because they’ve already met their audience, thrilled them, and become the trademarks of how future fiction should be.

The genre vs. literary debate is void from the beginning. The first strike is that “literary” is a genre of itself, with its own tropes and audience and expectations. The second strike is the idea that only high brow stories, whose stories push or redefine the borders of the genre, are worthy of merit. Pardon me, but what a load of bunk. Sure not every story is Stoker, Nebula, Hugo or Edgar material (and I’m sure the voters are glad of that). In fact, there are three primary levels of stories to each genre, each subjected to the tastes and opinions of individual readers.

First is the truly horrible. The pale imitations of past masters, the weak first attempts of a budding writer. It’s not that these tales don’t have a place in the genres, it’s that they don’t have places as stories. They’re stillborn, half-formed and ineffective at the core.

The second is the meat and potatoes of the work out there. It’s the three and four star books, the ones that are fair to excellent reads, but don’t offer much in the range of new genre elements. Some are books we’ve read before with new names and locations, some are shiny new styles wrapped around the familiar genre elements that we seek out and love (or hate). The binding element here is that no matter what individual readers think the books do have their audiences and therefore their place in modern publishing.

The final category is the bold, the new the definitive. Here are your Stranger in a Strange Lands and The Exorcists. These are the books that change the way the audience thinks about the genre, and the stories of the those genres.

The thing is we can’t all be in the last category. If we were, the whole marketing angle of genres would be invalid because how could you reach the audience if you’re trying to sell them a schizophrenic mess of plots and characters that’s nothing like the books they’ve loved?

The fact also remains that the tropes sell for a reason. People don’t always want a life lesson, or a mind-blossoming collection of experiences to make them think. Sometimes what they need is a break from the thinking, where they know the orphaned farm boy might just be able to face down the overlord who killed his parents. Where the spaceship will take them to bold new worlds with new conflicts that are nothing like the daily grind of mortgage paying and taxes that we live in. And sometimes we need something reliable, familiar, to forget for a little while that we’re sick, or alone, or unhappy.

More than most other forms of writing, genre fiction is a balm to the world around us. Which works are of merit and which aren’t, aren’t for writers to decide. That’s the role of the audience. As writers, the only conflict we should be bringing to our audience is the kind that climaxes and ends before the reader finally closes the cover with a satisfied little sigh.

Michele Lee writes horror, science fiction and fantasy from the relative safety of her haunted house in the oldest section of Louisville, Ky. When she isn’t writing, she reviews books of all genres, spends too much time on Twitter and grows monstrous vegetables. She can be kept track of at www.michelelee.net

Michele’s zombie novella, “Rot,” can be purchased from Skullvine Press.