#DentSeries #LesterDent #PulpRev .
Lester Dent’s Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot was written for the pulp era, when men and women made a living writing stories for dozens of different pulp story magazines. The first pulp-type magazine took all sorts of stories, but later specialized pulps came out for adventure stories, love stories, Westerns, detective stories, war-air stories…. There were even romantic Western pulps as well as the standard Western ones.
Lester Dent describes his formula like this:
“This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.
No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell.
The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.”
The original pulp era, is, alas, over. There are very few anthologies or periodicals to which to submit shorter works of fiction, which most of us need to do before we can write longer works, and even if we sold everything we wrote, we wouldn’t be able to make any sort of living at it.
A limited anthology series I liked was the Planetary Anthology, each one named after a planet of the Solar System. I have Mars and Luna of that series, since I know some of the writers involved. But the anthology series got ‘unpublished’ and is no longer available, due to poor sales. Compared to the pulp era, when there were pulp magazines for a nickel or dime at every newsstand (there were newsstands back then, too,) not enough people learn about any anthology or e-published zine in time to make reading these things a habit.
But the pulp-era’s habit of pushing reader-friendly stories that the ordinary guy could use as a form of entertainment is a good one to continue. People these days are more accustomed to television or movie entertainment. But as the moviemakers and television industry go ‘woke,’ the consumers are left behind. We don’t want a lady Captain Marvel who is unlikeable, and then when we complain we get called sexist for not supporting the movie industry blindly.
In the pulp era, writers knew better. If they wrote a story that most readers thought was a stinker, you couldn’t complain that the readers were not ‘good enough’ for the story. The pulp editor paid you for stories that readers would like. If your stories were unlikeable, they would not buy. The pulp writer had to work out for himself how to make his stories reader-friendly, or he wouldn’t get paid and his typewriter might get repossessed.
This is post 2 in the #DentSeries – read Dent Series post #1 here.:https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/
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Recommended Reading:
Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing. Dean Wesley Smith. 2016.
Pulp Era Writing Tips. Edited by Bryce Beattie. 2018.
How to Write Pulp Fiction. James Scott Bell. 2017.
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Dent Series post #1: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/
My Antimatter Life 