From Robert Boswell’s excellent The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction:

This could be material at the heart of a literary story. It makes the events the result of motivated action rather than contrived coincidence. It makes the relationships among the characters multifaceted. It substitutes familial connections for celebrity. It moves the center of the story away from the surface event and into the inner life of the main character. Rather than blithely ridicule the woman, the story would attempt to investigate the real and gnarly interplay among familial loyalty, good intentions, malevolence, racial fear, and sexual politics. Not that it would attempt this by means of a calculated journey through each issue; rather, it would engage these subjects through the investigation of this character’s complex responses.

While the conventions of some genres are usually very obvious (crime fiction, for example, is crime fiction because it includes, you know, crime), the conventions of the genre of literary fiction are often less obvious. Boswell’s paragraph usefully describes those conventions, which can be helpful for writers trying to create examples of that genre.

Notice as well, from Benjamin Percy’s outstanding Thrill Me, this description of literary fiction:

Sentences were now more than vehicles for information; I pleasured in the arrangement of their words and read them aloud as if they were songs. Structures did not march forward with a chronological doggedness; they were cyclical or modular or framed or even arranged backward. Characters didn’t act purely in the service of plot; they flirted their way into digressions, lingered in conversations and on windowsills, and in doing so became more than puppets, but as alive as anyone I knew.

Percy argues persuasively for using the best strategies of both literary and genre fiction.

[F]iction is thought stylized.

from The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley

“[I]t’s impossible to separate character from plot from setting. The body is the apparatus of plot. The body is what characters use to do things.”

Elizabeth McCracken, in A Long Game

Paraphrasing the hosts of the podcast Writing Excuses, someplace in season 19: When I say a narrative needs risk, it almost always needs a relationship. How does the failure affect the community around the character? People feel tension about things they can relate to, especially about things they can relate to being taken away from characters.

Now, as the present crumbles away into a future that evolves more quickly than most of us can track, it seems impossible to write about contemporary life without writing science fiction. But the secret to doing it well doesn’t lie in suspenseful chase scenes, weighty messages, or mind-blowing existential puzzles. That stuff can be fun, but it can also feel pretty thin without something that’s supposed to be a specialty of literary novelists: the fullest appreciation of humanity in its infinite variety and intricacy. Do justice to that, and the wonders will take care of themselves. 

Laura Miller

The goal of writing should be to produce something that feels like a spontaneous joyful outpouring but that is, on closer inspection, too finely made to be (merely) that—the story as fossil evidence of a deep process of exploration that, in our reading experience of it, is as fast and natural as a pop song.

George Saunders