Reading novelist Derek Haas‘ column “The Code of the Thriller: Never Bore Them” in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal made me think of the fiction in the pulp magazines.
His column could easily have been written for Author & Journalist or Writer’s Digest back in the 1930s by any number of pulp scribes. Take, for instance, this quote, which also applied to the pulp fictioneers:
The best examples of popcorn fiction create unforgettable, three-dimensional characters and drop them into places that force us to rip through the pages. If you want to be a genre writer, I say forget the “rules,” leave your thesaurus on the shelf, and just be a storyteller.
As he also says, writing genre fiction — horror, crime, science fiction, westerns, etc. — “doesn’t limit your artistry as a writer.”
I think many of us fans of the pulps agree wholeheartedly.
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