Reviving Pulp Era Writing Wisdom #DentSeries

#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 But the anthology series got ‘unpublished’ and is no longer available, due to poor sales.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/

How Does a Newbie Writer Get Started? #DentSeries

A lot of folks these days think of the pulp era of fiction as a golden age when writers actually wrote things that entertained their readers, instead of appalling them by grimdark despair that’s supposed to be ‘good for you,’ especially if that one attractive character turns out to be transsexual. A popular guide to writing pulp-style fiction is ‘The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot: http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html

The Dent is specifically about writing a 6000 word story for one of the pulp magazines of the day. Neopulp writers today use it as a way of outlining longer yarns, even novellas and novels. Lester Dent said that his master plot worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air stories, and that Dent’s yarns written to the formula never failed to sell. 

In the pulp era, writers made a living from writing short stories— often short-shorts to break into the writing business, since more experienced writers wrote longer yarns to get more money, and editors needed the short stuff as well and didn’t get as much of that submitted. They got paid enough if they kept writing and kept submitting to support themselves as they honed their writing skill. The pulp magazines, alas, have died out, and so at least since 1979 when Lawrence Block wrote Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print neophyte writers have been urged to start out with writing novels.

Since Block’s book was my very first how-to-write book, I was taken in. I wrote so many novel-beginnings I joked about cramming them all together and selling them as an avant-garde novel. 

That wasn’t even the way Block learned to write— he started with short stories, which sold. To me, as a person with Asperger Syndrome, which can mean organizational difficulties, it’s a little like being an infant who has just been advised to avoid those useless first baby steps and jump right in to running a marathon. 

So, my advice is this— go visit the website link to the Lester Dent formula and PRINT IT OUT and put it in a file folder. I keep mine in a red file folder. Also, if you can, get some books of short stories, or e-reprints of pulp magazines, so you can read some good examples. I got the whole Conan the Barbarian series for 99 cents. 

Write some yarns to the formula. Don’t worry, you don’t need a market for your first efforts. I once would have suggested posting your completed yarns to Wattpad, but Wattpad gets more and more toxic, encouraging the teenage ‘smutwriters’ to post their raunchy material, evidently unworried that these teenage writers may be attracting sexual predators who may be interested in molesting these young authors in real life.

I still do recommend online ‘publishing’ especially for beginning writers to get reactions. If all the Wattpad-type services are too ‘woke’ or toxic for you, consider using a WordPress or Blogger blog. Please think ahead— if you are going to be generating a lot of short stories, short-shorts and flash fiction, don’t start a blog for each one— start a general fiction blog, using tags and categories to sort your stories so the reader can find the first chapter of each one.

ASSIGNMENT: Find and print out the Lester Dent formula. Use it to write out the plot for a 6000 word or so ‘yarn.’ Write that yarn. Finish it. Celebrate your success! (If you write a story as part of this assignment and post it online somewhere, mention it in a comment and share a link to your story.)

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Recommended Reading:

The Pulp Mindset – JD Cowan.

Pulp Fiction – Robert Turner.

How to Write Pulp Fiction – James Scott Bell.

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Coming Soon to this Blog!

My new online novella, A Lycian Patriot. Story of a young man escaping the dystopian Harmony government to the scary Wildlands, where criminal patriots live.

[An earlier story in the Lycian series, available free on Wattpad: Banned Books, Banned Girl : A girl with an autism spectrum disorder escapes government confinement and works a ghost job removing banned books from bookshelves.: https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745 ]

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Follow me! 

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