What Pulp Can Teach Us

WHAT PULP CAN TEACH US I know I’ve been speaking about pulp lots these days, but bear with me. I’m in the midst of instructing a two-session Pulp Fiction Workshop, with the second session coming this Saturday. Students have been sending me their tales and I’ve sent them mine. And mine also happens to be the pulp jungle story I talked about in terms of character bullet points, which will be published beneath Pro Se’s Signature Series within the fall. So, yeah, pulp and new pulp have been on my mind a bit. I don’t need anyone to assume that now I’ve become Phil, Master of Pulp and that there’s some exclusive Oath of Allegiance that I’ve taken or that I’m asking you to take. I’ve said before that I’ve at all times, personally, been drawn to the opposite ends of the genres I love, with an equal curiosity in the most literary or avant garde (authors like J.M. McDermott and Harlan Ellison) on one end and the adventure-heavy pulps (Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs) on the opposite fini sh. The middle floor, or “mainstream,” I can often sort of take or depart. So what can pulp train you if you’re writing both within the center, or the mainstream of the style, or aspire to be one of many few authors who push the genres into uncharted new territories? I think it could possibly train you numerous. But first, let’s run via a pair things which may have folks maintaining pulp a bit at arm’s size. Though a lot of probably the most important genre authors, particularly science fiction authors, received their begin within the pulps we have a tendency to consider one of the best as having started there and progressed out of it, and anyway the SF pulps tended to be a bit more brainy than the remainder of the pack. But both method, the heyday of the pulp fiction magazines ran roughly from the mid-20s to the early 50s, and there have been two social conventions at play during those instances which are troublesome for lots of latest readers to get past: institutionaliz ed racism and violent sexism. It’s onerous to take a look at magazine covers like this: In case you thought hating Mexicans was a brand new invention! . . . or this: The variety of magazine covers featuring ladies in bondage or being sexually assaulted was ridiculous. . . . and never marvel what the hell is going on. But what was occurring was a segregated America, the era of Jim Crow, and a time when the Women’s Movement was, pardon the pun, barely transferring. The stories inside those purposefully lurid covers had been often simply as racist and sexist as the covers themselves, and I’m not making an attempt to offer any apologies for that, or let you know that was okay, much less encourage you to undertake these “ideas” in your own writing. But think by way of learning from the pulp storytelling custom. What I educate in that workshop, and practice in my own writing, is to look at the pulp plot structure, then construct on that construction from our extra enlightened, c ontemporary point of view. This is what we mean once we say “new pulp.” Take my jungle story, as an example. The unique jungle pulps tended to be overt knockoffs of Tarzan, and almost exclusively featured white heroes rescuing white women (and in the pulps ladies came in certainly one of two types: victim or villain) from black savages. I can’t write that story in 2014, and never as a result of I wish to however nobody will let me, but being a toddler of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement, I just don’t know how. Those old stereotypes simply ring false to me. So in my pulp jungle story, the function of Tarzan is played by a black woman who is greater than able to taking good care of her own society, thank you very a lot, without the “civilizing influence” of some white man. Instead, the white guy turns into my POV character serving double duty as fish-out-of-water sufferer (ala Tarzan’s Jane) in occasional need of rescue, and as a narrator just like Dr . Watson was to Sherlock Holmes: a sidekick observing the master at work. Yikes. But I suppose I have a fun story, and that’s what’s actually important, and what we can all be taught from pulp. I’ve written before about how I suppose science fiction novels have stopped being enjoyable, to the clear detriment of gross sales. What I also hope to fight is this notion that studying always needs to be difficult, and that getting into with the primary function to entertain is one way or the other unhealthy. It’s not. So what the pulp story structureâ€"and I use Lester Dent’s well-known “formula” as a starting pointâ€"teaches us may be applied to something: any style, any approach. All Mr. Dent really does is remind us to inform a narrative, and that a story at its coronary heart is characters in conflict. What I advised my college students, and have tried to bring to my very own writing, is that when Lester Dent says things like “homicide method” and “kill the villain, ” we don’t need to take that literally. He wrote that “formulation” to cowl hardboiled detective tales, but if you replace “kill” with “defeat” and “villain” with “antagonist,” and so forth, you'll be able to see that there’s a common thread for any genre, and any approach. It’s about making your story readable, entertaining, and targeted. I simply won't accept that any of those three issues are bad, and that a narrative is better for not having all three of these parts, no matter how heavy a message you’re intending to convey, or the infinite variety of word alternative, worldbuilding, etc. that goes into making your story completely unique, Lester Dent or anyone else be damned. I suppose every single writer ought to take Lester Dent’s “method” and take a look at one brief story using it as a guide. What’s the worst that can happen? After all, there is no Spicy Western Stories to sell it to anymore, and also you’re under no obligation to writ e to their racist cowl art. Don’t throw the baby out with the tub water! â€"Philip Athans P.S. If you wish to read some actual vintage pulp magazines, you can find a bunch of them, and their offensive covers, right here. About Philip Athans