"Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?"
About this Quote
Tanith Lee is side-eyeing the whole bookshelf. With a few clean sentences, she deflates the comforting idea that genre is a natural law rather than a marketing tool, a reader’s habit, a library’s filing system. “Writing is writing” has the plainspoken bluntness of someone who’s watched critics build ornate fences around the same basic human act: arranging language to produce an effect. “Stories are stories” doubles down, insisting that plot, mood, voice, and obsession don’t suddenly become different species because a dragon showed up.
The sly pivot is “Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction.” Even that binary, she implies, is a convenience we cling to when the borders get messy. Lee wrote across fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and fairy-tale retellings; she knew how often “genre” functions as permission (to be strange, lush, excessive) and as dismissal (to be unserious). Her line reads like a defense of imaginative writing and a critique of the gatekeeping that polices it.
Then comes the needle: “And even there, who can be sure?” That’s not relativism for sport. It’s a reminder that non-fiction is narrative craft wearing a badge, and fiction is full of lived truth smuggled in as invention. Memory edits. Research selects. Voice persuades. Lee’s intent is liberating and slightly ominous: if categories can’t guarantee honesty or value, the only real test is the work itself - what it makes you feel, what it makes you see, and how artfully it gets away with it.
The sly pivot is “Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction.” Even that binary, she implies, is a convenience we cling to when the borders get messy. Lee wrote across fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and fairy-tale retellings; she knew how often “genre” functions as permission (to be strange, lush, excessive) and as dismissal (to be unserious). Her line reads like a defense of imaginative writing and a critique of the gatekeeping that polices it.
Then comes the needle: “And even there, who can be sure?” That’s not relativism for sport. It’s a reminder that non-fiction is narrative craft wearing a badge, and fiction is full of lived truth smuggled in as invention. Memory edits. Research selects. Voice persuades. Lee’s intent is liberating and slightly ominous: if categories can’t guarantee honesty or value, the only real test is the work itself - what it makes you feel, what it makes you see, and how artfully it gets away with it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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