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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