Post-Modern Pulp Fiction
This week, I’ve been writing topics which really spell out some fundamental aspects of my writing process. I’ve been doing this because I’ll often have an idea for an article, and then realise that it references something I simply haven’t talked about before.
Today, I wanted to write about something I may have mentioned on the blog previously; writing at pulp speed. Pulp speed is a term coined by Dean Wesley Smith (I pimp out his site enough here, so you’re probably already aware of the address.) It basically means writing at the speed a pulp writer would have done back in the day.
Pulp speed is something I aim for on a daily basis – and some days my figures massively exceed anything Dean has mentioned. (Some days they definitely don’t.) So, writing about pulp speed is a great topic. However, I haven’t ever talked about pulp fiction (not the wholly overrated movie) before.
Today then, I’m going to talk about post-modern pulp fiction. It’s a term I made up because I needed a title and it sounds cool, so don’t go and put it in an academic essay or anything.
Pulp Fiction: What Was It?
Back in the day when people used to read words on paper, production costs could range from cheap to astronomical. In the same way that back in the 8th Century it cost the labour equivalent of a whole monastery to create a bible, from the advent of the printing press through to the digital age, printing books was expensive.
Pulp fiction takes its name from pulp magazines. Pulp magazines were named because they were cheap to print. They were cheap to print because they were made of wood pulp; lower quality paper-making material that was basically a by-product of making more expensive stuff.
Before aforementioned overrated movie came out, pulp fiction was a term synonymous with low-quality fiction. The reason for this was that pulp magazines were serial and so weren’t made to last. Like a daily newspaper. This inevitably led to low pay rates for the writers that were published in the magazines, and due to the tight deadlines and low-pay, the quality was mixed to say the least.
That’s not to say that pulp fiction was filled with terrible writers. In fact, many fantastic writers have been considered pulp writers: I’ve seen Ivory Tower references suggesting that Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens should be considered pulp writers. Those are slightly stupid examples, but real examples include Isaac Asimov, H.P. Lovecraft, Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain were all pulp writers. Agatha Christie wrote for pulp magazines. So did H.G. Wells. The list goes on.
Enough History Lessons: What Are We Learning Here?
Pulp writers wrote to tight, tight deadlines. They were paid by the penny and by the word, and because the stories they wrote were often in monthly publications, there were no long-term royalties waiting for them. (Sound familiar, freelance writers?)
Their payment was their payment.
They weren’t just writing short stories either. Some pulp magazines had full novel length works. There are writers who were cranking out novels in a couple of days, then sitting down the next day and starting all over again.
Clearly, the modern idea that a writer can only write one book a year and writing any more means they’re a hack hasn’t always been the prevailing wisdom.
If you are a writer who doesn’t like writing, then take a chance with a traditional publisher, write a book every three years and don’t write very often. I prefer to read about people who could write well, fast and were good at business. This brings me onto my next point:
Pulp writers had to be a lot more savvy about business than modern day writers. The average stereotype of a writer who wanders around parks and sits in Starbucks with a notebook, constantly “working on their novel” would have got you destitute in the days of pulp writers. When you’re earning pennies per word, then you need to have your ducks in order.
A lot of pulp writers didn’t do this – and they went broke. H.P. Lovecraft is the most glaring example of this. Don’t be like Howard.
On the other hand, there are some truly magnificent tales of business savvy contained within the careers of pulp writers. Some pulp writers had teams of people they dictated to. Some writers sold their stories like clockwork to multiple different publishers and had intimate knowledge of their rights and licensing law. Some writers wrote short stories that would go on to be big blockbuster movies decades later.
These are lessons that writers in the modern day need to learn from.
What Changed?
Publishing became big business. This isn’t just something that occurred in fiction writing; over time, the big publishing houses all merged and now there are four major book publishers. However, journalism suffered the same fate as well, and non-fiction tends to fall somewhere with those two. Mostly, massive conglomerates own the majority of the publishing world.
This has meant that for a couple of generations, writers have been employees in all but legal status. To get a book published, you had to be hired by a publishing house. To become a journalist, you have to work for the BBC or one of Murdoch’s companies. To become an ad-writer, you had to work your way up from serving tea to fat cats in an unpaid internship through to becoming a middle manager of an advertising agency.
All the business acumen was lost, and the productivity went with it: Publishers want you to write one story a year so they can fit it in their schedule to come out two years from now. News companies only want stories about the latest outrage and you’re on the payroll along with 900 other journalism graduates.
Is there a point to this article? (Post-Modern Pulp Fiction)
Yes. It’s my firm belief that we’re entering (or have entered, but writers tend to be a slow bunch) a new pulp era.
The proliferation of the internet and all its associated goodies means that pulp fiction is back on the cards. Want to write a short story? Amazon will take it. Want to write a hundred short stories in a month? Amazon doesn’t have a five year plan for its authors, and even if they do… you can sell somewhere else.
Want to write a book about something that nobody would ever greenlight at a shareholders’ meeting? You can.
Need to write ten books a year in order to make enough money for a new car? You can do that too.
Want to be a one-man (or woman) publishing house? That’s more possible than ever.
About half-way through this article, I decided that this article is going to be a multi-part one, and the above sentence seems pretty accurate as a description of the series, so I’ll leave it there.