GOT PULP?
I was asked the other day to explain what makes pulp
storytelling different from other types of fiction. My kneejerk reaction was to
claim, it’s hard to define, but I know it
when I read it – which does little to answer the question. I’ve since thought
a lot about what constitutes the pulp style of storytelling, which engenders
both excoriating scorn from critics and fanatical devotion from acolytes.
By now, most readers know the term pulp was coined in reference to the thousands of inexpensive fiction
magazines whose heyday spanned the 1920s through the 1950s. Printed on cheap
wood pulp paper, the pulps were typically
7 inches by 10 inches in size, 128 pages long, and sported eye grabbing,
luridly colored covers, and ragged, untrimmed edges. Today, the original pulps are more often collected for their
gaudy covers than for the fluctuating quality of the words in between.
At the height of their popularity there were hundreds of
pulp magazine titles gracing the newsstands each week. The demand for stories
was as voracious as the pay per word was cheap. To make a living, a writer
selling stories to the pulps had to be a word machine, churning out prose for a
quarter to a half cent per word. The result of this constant demand was a
straightforward, often formulatic, style of writing designed to entertain a
vast audience of everyday, hardworking, folks looking for vicarious thrills and
chills to escape the humdrum of their daily lives.
The pulps were also a refiner’s fire for many writers who
are household names today – Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Louis L’Amour,
John D. MacDonald, and others. To these men belonged the battered typewriters
and hard drinking tropes, which themselves have become a cliché within the
public conscious.
There were also giants of the pulp writing field whose names
are not as familiar, but whose characters have gone on to become iconic
examples of pop culture – Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian, Edgar Rice
Burroughs’ Tarzan, Walter B. Gibson’s The Shadow, Lester Dent’s Doc Savage, to
name just a few, all started in the pulps. We all know their famous creations,
but most would look blank if asked who the creators were.
The downside of the insatiable demand for stories to fill
the pages of pulp magazines was it also guaranteed much of what was published
was slapdash gruel of little to no lasting impact. It is this explosion of
dross that gives pulp dismissing critics a place to hang their clichéd hats.
However, the beating heart of the true pulps – the best of the stories and
characters born within their pages – has shined for almost a century of popular
culture.
Pulp has experienced a number of waxings and wanings over
the decades, all leading to the current eruption of the New Pulp movement. Pulp
in this new millennium encompasses not only a resurgence in reprints of the
best of the original pulp tales, but new characters and stories, created in the
pulp style, by some of the best up and coming scribes, developing their writing
chops in the same way as their counterparts once did in the original pulps –
check out Barry Reese’s Lazarus Gray
or The Rook series, Derrick
Ferguson’s Dillon tales, or my own Fight Card series for just a few
examples.
So, what is this pulp style of writing? What makes
literature snobs turn up their noses at the mention of pulp?
First and foremost, pulp storytelling is for the masses. It
is accessible, not particularly deep or thought provoking, and gets to the
heart of a tale with simple, descriptive, action filled words. It is storytelling
at its purest, capturing the imagination, taking the reader outside of
themselves and dropping them into a world of fantastic slightly larger than
life characters.
A lot of what passes for thriller writing today, even those
on the bestseller list, are pulp inspired, yet for me they miss the point,
consisting of bloated filler designed to turn books into 400 – 700 page
doorstops under the false assumption more is better. If you’re like me, you don’t have the time or
patience to plow through 700 pages to read a story better served in 300 pages –
or far less.
The writers who wrote for the pulp magazines back in the day
understood this. Their audience wanted
stripped down yarns filled with action, twists and turns, all with the point of
providing reader satisfaction.
In the 1930s, Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage and The
Avenger, famously shared his Master
Fiction Plot formula for a 6,000 word pulp tale, which he claimed had never
failed him. If studied in depth (http://tinyurl.com/94vtmh),
it provides a concise insight into what makes a successful pulp-style
story. To break it down, I refer to
iconic author Michael Moorcock, who summarized Dent’s formula to aspiring
authors stating, "Split your six-thousand-word story up into four fifteen
hundred word parts. Part one, hit your hero with a heap of trouble. Part two,
double it. Part three, put him in so much trouble there's no way he could ever
possibly get out of it...All your main characters have to be in the first
third. All your main themes and everything else has to be established in the
first third, developed in the second third, and resolved in the last
third."
I love the lyricism of Jane Austen and Dickens, the thought
provoking works of Thoreau, Asimov, and Neville Shute, and the expansive
panoramas painted by Larry McMurtry and Hammond Innes. My reading vistas are as
wide as they are eclectic, but pulp always provides the spice and zest that
keeps my readers synapsis firing on all cylinders. Pulp is fiction stripped to
its essentials, storytelling in its most raw and powerful form. It is engaging,
enigmatic, and always entertaining.
Have you been pulped
lately?
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