Friday, November 21, 2008

Getting All Pulpy

With David's announcement about Beat to a Pulp, I remembered an essay that I printed out from a post on the SMFS' group last year. The essay was written by Lester Dent and it's called "The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot". The essay is geared for writing a 6000 word story but I'm sure today's writers could tighten that down if needed. I did a search and found a link to the essay here http://www.miskatonic.org/dent.html

Another essay I have is called "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories". This one written by S.S. Van Dine (pseud. for Willard Huntington Wright). It was written in 1928 but still contains some of the best advice for writing a PI story that I've found. The url is http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/vandine.htm
*Just an added note here. I can't seem to make this url work but when I did a Yahoo search of the essay title I could click on the site with no problem. And it's the same exact url. Go figure.
**Figured out what I did wrong and corrected this link and posted it to the left.

Now, I'm not a scholar of the pulps, but I believe that both of these gentlemen were considered greats of their time and probably still are today. I'll post the links over in the list section so they're available if anyone wants to go back and read them after this post disappears into the archives.

And one final Pulpy thing. I found a new market for Pulp stories called "Big Pulp" and I've put a link in the ezine section to the left. I'd found this market last year but after writing a story to submit, found that they'd shut down for a bit. They seem to have gotten things together by setting up reading periods and meeting publishing schedules. I also saw a few writers I know over there. So check it out and spread the word.

3 comments:

Barbara Martin said...

Thanks very much for these helpful tips.

sandra seamans said...

You're very welcome, Barbara. I've been lucky enough to have other writers pass along information to me so I try to return the favor by passing it forward. And thanks for the link on your blog.

David Cranmer said...

I remember seeing this Lester Dent essay a couple years back. Thanks for the reminder and link.