When does good fiction become pulp fiction?

[DaringNovelist]

MV64 - agreed. The very best writers out there started out learning their craft by writing for money. From Shakespear to Dashiell Hammett.

I actually think the problem that the people here are identifying is really caused by the fact that many modern authors DIDN'T learn their craft in the pulps, and just don't have the stamina for sustained good work. Unfortunately the publishing industry for the past few decades has actively discouraged the kind of prolific work a writer needs to truly become a master.

[Steven Lake]

Yeah, I'm not disparaging people making a profit from their work. I'm against people who produce utter and complete crap in the name of profits, and do it intentionally. It's one thing if you suck and don't know it. It's another if you do know it and do nothing to resolve the issue. I'm constantly and forever fighting to get better at my stuff, always learning new tricks, finding new ideas, etc. I never want to turn into a money focused hack.

If I had to chose between being paid millions to write a hack story, or getting pennies to write a good one, I'd take the later every time. What's the point of writing if you're just in it for the money? The money is nice, but it should never be your primary driving motivation. Being the best and entertaining people should be what you shoot for first, and the money should be a nice little acknowledgment that you have, and sort of a thank you from the fans for your hard work.

[MV64]

Like romance books? Working at a bookstore it drives me up a wall how cookie cutter those are. Even the titles are all copied from each other, just switching out a word or two. I can only imagine that the plots are similarly "updated."

[Steven Lake]

Well, I completely agree. My mom even agrees and she reads them. They're all more or less the same story with a few names changed out, and that's it. No real character development or anything. Just boy meets girl, they fall in love, *boom*, book done. That's definitely a fine example of hack fiction done with only profit in mind. I put months of thought into every book I write, and end up doing so many blasted edits to get everything right that I'm pretty much sick of the story by the time I'm done. But I refuse to send out any of my books that are less than 100%.

Too bad there's a slice of the author population who doesn't see it that way. I love what I do, and I know there are plenty of others here too who love what they're doing, as far as authoring and writing books. And yet there's jokers out there who make us look bad by producing garbage and selling it for a mint.

[ellenoc]

I'm just reading this thread this evening and still hung up on the definition of pulp fiction since no one gave it the definition I always had. So I looked it up on the Internet, and while there were several definitions, most are along these lines: "fiction dealing with lurid or sensational subjects, often printed on rough, low-quality paper manufactured from wood pulp." The lurid and sensational were always part of my idea of what made for pulp fiction.

As to quality of writing falling off, for the mysteries I tend to read, if it happens, it tends to happen in the 10-12 book range. I think some authors simply run out of story line ideas, and in fact one English author whose books I made an effort to get put a forward on the last one saying basically just that - there wouldn't be any more of the series because he just couldn't come up with more story ideas.

[Steven Lake]

Yeah, I've got a 15 book series myself I'm working on, but I found a rather ingenious way to keep the storyline fresh, by rebooting the entire series at two separate points, allowing it to start with a fresh set of characters and a new point on the timeline, more or less allowing me to start all over while continuing the actual parent story. Some people don't seem to do that and thus burn out along the way. Heck, I'm already finding myself a bit stretched for the last two books in the first saga, but I've already found a decently creative way to ramp things up still another level so as not to disappoint. But yeah, I'll agree that it does get harder to stay original the farther you go into a long series. I also found that if you toss in a few mind benders along the way, it helps to mix things up a bit and keep the storyline original and inventive.

[DaringNovelist]

Certain kinds of romances are indeed pulp fiction (or at least were in the relatively recent past - I haven't kept up with the industry because I'm not into regular romance). These are the ones that are written under pseudonyms and where the publisher name or line name is as important as the author name, and the publisher sets the formula for the stories. That's what originally defined the pulp market: written quickly for hire and published on the cheapest untrimmed "pulp" paper for mass consumption.

While it's associated with the later lurid science fiction, action and noir, it actually encompassed all genres that were "popular" or commercial. Romance, melodrama, children's stories, confessions, success stories.

Personally, I have nothing but respect for pulp writers - including the writers who turned out those cheesy formulaic romances anonymously.

A long time ago, a writing teacher of mine in a literary writing class gave us all an stern lecture. "When you find that your great novel is tough to write, and you think those trashy writers are making more money and maybe you should give up and write trash, just remember this: If you can't tell the difference between the good trash and the bad trash, then you are missing the point, and you can never succeed at writing trash. If you try, you'll be the worst of the worst - a _lousy_ trashy fiction writer that even the fans of trashy fiction despise. You simply cannot understand it or write it unless you love it."

The thing is, successfully writing trash is not easy. It's not a matter of plug and play, or "changing a few words." It may be really painful to read for people who don't like the genre, but that's because those who read the genre are not interested in the same things as you are. To succeed at it, you have to get the stuff they ARE interested in right.

Writing that kind of formula stuff can actually be very good for you, and your skills, because it forces you to focus on audience and intention. It's like sprinter starts, or scales or gesture drawings - it allows you to focus.

Camille
The Adventure of Anna the Great, Smashwords, Kindle

[Steven Lake]

Wow, good insights DaringNovelist. So I guess that, based on what you've said, and taking into account what the others have commented, then pulp or hack fiction is more or less dependent on the reader's personal tastes, and not so much on a set list of fixed criteria.

[DaringNovelist]

Yeah, I would say that pulp and hack written fiction basically caters to the audience.

I'm not saying that there is never laziness or cynicism involved. There's a gradation of cynical and lazy and all that. But I am saying that there is skill and passion involved in even the cheesiest of fiction. AND that if you don't please the audience, you don't sell.

It is true that, especially in the best seller category (which is by definition, not pulp) there is often a fall off of that passion as the industry pushes to replicate the same success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I can't really blame the authors, though. At that level, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to replicate success. Publishers very often won't buy something "different" from a successful author.

Sometimes you have an author like James Patterson who just applies the old pulp strategies to best selling fiction, and I have to applaud him for that. When he stops pleasing his audience, his audience will go away.

Not every author should be catering to the audience, but it is an exercise in communication, and I can't see it as a bad thing in general.

Camille


The Adventure of Anna the Great
at Smashwords, for Kindle

The Wife of Freedom
at Smashwords, for Kindle

[Greg Anos]

I'm going to pitch my oar in on this. I'm of the view that people have only so much creativity in them. Some have a little, some have a lot, some seem to have endless amounts of it, but there is an actual limit. Writing, as with any other form of artistic expression, use it up. And when it's gone, it's gone.

The act of writing is separate from the creativity involved. One can have the writing ability, but have run out of creativity, leaving a "hack" writer. Also, the act of creating a "new" work often gets stopped by doing a series of books or stories on the same character/universe. It becomes so self-limiting that the results are "hack/pulp".

In addition, like any other task in life, after a certain point it gets boring. As the interest wanes, so does the creativity. This becomes a chicken-or-egg situation - did the waning of creativity cause the loss of interest, or did the losss of interest cause the wane of creativity.

[Moejoe]

All genre writing is pulp in my eyes. It is throwaway, it has little significance other than entertainment. It has the same cultural weight as a visit to a water park or a fun-fair.

That does not mean it is bad, or even badly written. It serves a purpose and serves that purpose well. But we should not kid ourselves that it is much more than entertainment, or that it will ever be remembered by anybody but the fanboys and girls. Good, bad, it doesn't really matter when it comes to genre. You can write dozens of books that are essentially the same story (Koontz, King), or you can write thousands with the prose finesse of a microwave oven (Asimov), as long as it's entertaining you'll get a pass. Of course, if you wish to do more , genre and commercial fiction really aren't the places to do so.

I'll give you a case in point; Laurel K. Hamilton, arguably the single worst writer in the history of fiction (barring Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer). She continues to pump out absolute, god-awful, scraping the bottom of the barrel pseudo-bestial-gothic-porn but she's a best-seller. Her one duty is to entertain and she does that with aplomb. People still buy her dreck, and they still enjoy that dreck. She is successful. This then, is the only measure we have in genre - sales figures. There is no good or bad, no light and dark, no Luke and Vader. It's McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut, not an expensive meal at a five star French restaurant.

As to money, well, if you can write any story you want now without thinking about price, why write stories that are in genre? Why write what has essentially been written time and again if money and markets aren't the driving force? You might say it's because you enjoy the genre, but the genres we've all been raised on are diluted forms of original ideas by original creators. Shadow puppet-shows of the shadows cast by the original puppeteers. Genre is a set of expectations and tropes influenced, at least in part if not fully, by the marketing departments of publishers to increase sales. Step outside of that system and any writer, even Dan Brown (well maybe not that git) as a chance of writing something meaningful and lasting. Within the circle all you can ever do is add the proverbial digital clock to the already existing product (and maybe that's all people want in the end. Something that blinks. Ol' Familiar.)

Saying all this, I now don't give a tinker's cuss about writing or what it means any more. It's all product in a product-orientated world. It's Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Heinz Baked Beans. It's Subway Sandwiches and HP Sauce. We're never going to see the likes of another Steinbeck or Harold Pinter, nobody is going to discover another drawer full of Emily Dickinson or see the beard of a Ginsberg grow. As an art form, as an enrichment of culture, fiction is pretty much dead in the water now (as is most of our mass culture), so there's no need to worry about good or bad, better or worse. Stick some explosions in there, make the chapters short, no difficult words to confuse the under fifteens (or the YA's as the soulless marketers want us to think of them), don't mention religion, politics, or anything even remotely important, not even metaphorically, be sure that you have a bad guy who gets his comeuppance in the end and you're golden.

[TGS]

I have tried discussing the issue of literary quality on other threads on MR, only to be shot down and told that what I was saying was elitist snobbery. So first, let me say that I don't think literary value is equated with some kind of moral value - books of literary value are not "better" than books of no literary value - except, obviously in terms of there literary value! That having been said, it seems to me clearly bonkers to maintain that Sophie Kinsella produces work of equal literary value as that of Iris Murdoch (apart from her last couple when she was losing it to Alzheimers). We might not be able to say very clearly in what that difference consists, but that there is a difference is undeniable.

The topic of the thread then I think was, are there some authors who start off by producing works of literary value that is towards the higher end of the scale but later produce works of value towards the lower end of the scale, and do they do this because they've found a formula from which they can make money.

I suppose there must be some, but I suspect that most active authors know where their work is pitched from the beginning of their authorial career. Of course, they might be mistaken, Dan Brown may have aspired to produce a work of literary genius but simply misjudged what he was producing. It is difficult when art - in all media - is commodified sometimes to tell the difference between the art and the commodity.

[TC Beacham]

Fascinating thread - thanks!

[Moejoe]

Oh and I have my rule of thumb about good turning to crap. As soon as the name of the author is bigger than the title, you know that the fiction doesn't matter any longer. At that point the author is a brand and not much more.

[Steven Lake]

TC Beacham: You're welcome. I'm good at stirring up interesting conversations. ^_^