Rules for the Lawless

The Revolution is Here!

Due to the recent success of the Pulp Revolution's free anthology officially making #1, it is time to look back at just how far we've come [The anthology is also available in print for dirt cheap here]. It's been a long road.

But it's not over yet.

It has been two years since I made this post on the Pulp Revolution, and I wanted to do a bit of an update. Two years is enough time to take a bit of a look back and gain perspective on where we are now. What has changed in that time, and what have we learned?

First, I want to reestablish some of the first ideas that came out of the early rumblings of the Pulp Revolution. That's right, we're going back to the glory days of 2016 and 2017, even further back than my post. It's easy to forget just how much energy there was at that time to try and understand just what was being discovered. Late 2016/Early 2017 was about the time the idea got solidified, and the writers soon began furiously typing their tales of adventure and the unknown.

It's time to take you back to the past.

At the end of 2016, the first to hit at a formula as to what gives pulp its identity was author Misha Burnett with his Five Pillars of Pulp. We will sum them up below:

Action: The focus of the storytelling is on what happens. 

Impact: These actions have consequences. 

Moral Peril: Consequences are more than just material. 

Romance: Pulp heroes are motivated by love. 

Mystery: There are many potential unknowns—the setting, the true identities of other characters, the events that led up to the current crises. Something is going on and neither the protagonists nor the reader should be quite sure what.

You can read his full explanations in the above post, but we will talk about them as a whole. These pillars allowed much discussion to take place very early in the movement's life, and gave much to think about.

Allow me to go over them briefly to describe why they are important.

The first pillar is self-explanatory. Action, movement itself, is essential to a pulp tale. The story must get in, get out, and say everything it can in as few words as possible. Because pulp writers had to hook the audience quickly they had to pack as much as they could into magazine guidelines. Even though they paid by the word, if a writer didn't cut the flab editors would just print another story in its place. Sharpness is essential; sluggishness is death.

The second and third are intertwined with each other. If the story is brief and quick, the stakes need to match this fast pace and give readers a quick and dirty reason why they should care. The fastest way to do this is by targeting the protagonist--the character the audience must care about no matter what. There are two layers of conflict, one that assails the protagonist on the inside and one on the outside. They don't need to be perfectly congruent in intensity, but it is enough to show that the character is alive and full of the red blood needed to carry an adventure. He is human, and that is a good thing.

This ties into point four which is about love. What Mr. Burnett is referring to is not simply romantic love. That is the go-to, but it is not the only kind of love there is. While the action is hot, and the impact is high, the main character needs a motivation on par with the blitzkrieg occurring around him. What other motive is pure enough than love of the world around them? Girlfriend, buddy, town, planet. The world is a place worth saving, which means it's a place worth loving.

Heroes should be worthy of respect. If the audience can't respect them then there is nothing in the story for them, is there?

She persisted!

This also means that the antagonist must represent the opposite of this love. In some capacity they must want to destroy.

Since the antagonist should be the opposite of the protagonist he should be taken to the farthest end of the scale that is possible. He should be unlike the hero in every respect that counts.

When you have a villain, he naturally needs to be the worst that the story can offer. He needs to oppose the protagonist, and in every way that counts must be his complete opposite. This dichotomy naturally leads to black and white morality. Neither character has to be a perfect representation of either, but they each must represent one side to the best of their abilities. This means the villain must represent a hatred towards the world, and the hero must represent some good in the world. In other words, the hero must love the world and those in it, and wants to preserve the place he lives.

Romance is the celebration of all that is good. When a villain tells the hero how much alike they are they reader should roll their eyes and know that it is a blatant falsehood. Antagonists don't understand romance: they loathe the world worth saving.

In an action story you have to be fast. Action works best when it is sharp, dynamic, and over in a flash. It takes the audience by surprise and leaves them wanting more. We've dealt with how that is important, but not how to make it important on a larger level. This goes with the last pillar on the list. Beyond motivation and setting, how do you create a sense of scale?

Mystery is an ingredient we need more than ever for the simple reason that mainstream fiction has little of it left. One hesitates to even be able to find an example of it done well in modern mainstream fiction. Everything must be explained, or explained away, and no reader is tasked with exercising their imagination to do any sort of heavy-lifting. It's all spoon fed. While fiction shouldn't make the reader do anything, the form's advantage over visual mediums is that it relies on imagination in order to deliver its full effect. Writers that don't take advantage are blunting the impact of their stories. It's the best weapon they have!

And imagination is frowned upon in the Oldpub world. It's about checking the right boxes. The best fiction is about imagination first--not pleasing the right people.

This hatred of imagination goes hand in hand with the walling off of genres to neuter and take the fangs out of fantastical fiction. Everything needs to fill a correct checklist to be considered part of specific genre, depending on who decides to stock the shelves on whichever store they wish to be put in. No other genre has this issue, because no other genre has tried to fit wonder into neat little boxes t get headpats from self-appointed masters of fandom or their corporate overlords. You can see how wonder has died many times over the 20th century. It's expected, at this point.

Mr. Burnett brushes into this a bit in part of his post:

I have deliberately avoided any references to genre in what follows. This is because I don’t think it is significant to the Pulp Aesthetic. The guidelines can apply to Detective Fiction and Westerns just as readily as to Science Fiction or Fantasy. The Pulp era made no such hard distinctions, while some magazines specialized in a particular form of genre fiction, most were open to anything thrilling and exciting. Pirates rubbed elbows with cowboys and spacemen and barbarians from the bygone past in the pages of adventure magazines.

The Pulp Archivist himself sums it up here. We're already living in a pulp world--we just don't realize it. It's just the natural state of things. You can currently only do some things, you once could do anything, so why don't you do everything?

No one is blocking you, anymore. So how do you remember what it was like to be free? You have to look to the past where Oldpub had it more than they do today.

Pulp has no limits, and it has no rules. The above pillars are not so much a rule-set as they are a natural consequence of writing a pure adventure. Those are things that are just going to happen, whether the writer intends it or not. If you want to write an exciting story those things are just going to come natural to them.

It's just the way it is.

Corona-Chan's peak

It's not so much a formula as it is simply the way it works out. Story craft came to this point because your ancestors perfected it and knew how to appeal to the most amount of people without having to pander. It exists because it works.

In order to fool with the formula you would have to either be taught subversive rules against it, or deliberately attempt to overturn them yourself. You would have to put your ego first. There was no "pulp formula" in the days of the pulps because every writer instinctively knew these truths to be self-evident. Readers didn't want subversion, and they weren't yet taught to hate their past, so they just enjoyed the adventure.

This falls in line with what editors of the past have used for their own guidelines:

“Primarily there must be real emotion in our stories; in addition to the physical conflict, they should have emotional drama. A story, for example, on which conflicting forces are at work, in which the hero has strongly conflicting desires, where he must make a choice that will reflect his true character, his most vital interests and desires require one course of action, but a debt of honor demands sacrifice of his own free will. And while he is sorely tempted to protect his own interests, his better nature triumphs.”

Is it really revolutionary to use common sense? When writer's workshops clamor for failed formulas and ideas that the common reader has no interest it, then yes. Yes, being normal is a revolution. Relating to your neighbor is taboo.

It's not about the pulp format or paper style, but what it implies to choose to be pulp. Back in the day you were pulp or you were slick; you were for the majority, or you were for the chosen few. There was a choice for those who wanted to write. The publishing world has since chosen to be slick, and has abandoned the pulp. Half of the target, and the majority of the audience, has been abandoned. Because of this few people have cause to read anymore. This is what the revolution was actually about. It's a revolution of common sense.

But Mr. Burnett wasn't the only one to discuss what made pulp what it was. There was also the human sunbeam, Jesse Lucas--one of the editors behind the PulpRev Sampler. He constructed his own seven traits of pulp. Here they are, listed below:

1. Pulp Revolution is not New Pulp
2. Pulp Revolution is not a Puppy movement
3. Pulp Revolution is a Superversive movement
4. Pulp Revolution does not care what you write
5. Pulp Revolution is trying to rehash the good parts of the pulp era
6. Pulp Revolution seeks to polish forgotten gems as well as produce our own
7. Pulp Revolution rejects sycophantism and triumphalism

Check the link if you want a more in depth explanation of each. I will instead try to sum up the entire point of his seven traits.

To go with above, the Pulp Revolution is about rediscovery and reapplication. It's not about writing to formula, market, or to litfic professors. It's about taking what worked, can work, and will work again. It's about rejecting what replaced the good and true and chased normal folks away. It's about putting ego in the backseat behind story craft and writing for people instead of cliques. It's about going back and taking it all forward.

This is about asserting the Good and True exists, is worth fighting for, and is far beyond our petty day to day squabbles. It's about wonder.

One can look over the trends of the 20th century to see how everything slowly rotted away by bad caretakers who cared more about the here and now than what would come after them. This very blog is full of such stories-- even linked a cavalcade of them above.

The "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" movement of the 1960s was just one part of it--the 1970s was the decade of hedonistic death. Anything left of what we were given was forcibly choked out by the time disco ruled the radio. It was about you and your worst vices, not about you in relation to everyone else. It was not about connections, but about my, myself, and I.

Not only did wonder take a backseat to pleasure, but so too did amoral posturing take the place of heroism. If you want to know why that Brand X space opera that came out in 1977 was such a surprise megahit it is because such things were long thought dead and gone. Big publishing and Hollywood decided heroism was over. We'd evolved past it--now it was time to live in the "real" world of hateful and hopeless misery. No one was allowed to be a hero anymore. It was kid stuff. The world was dead, it was only a matter of time before you were, and you just needed to accept it. This era is with us again today.

Funny to see that this exact poisonous attitude is what ended up killing said Brand X space opera's new movies in recent years. It is as if they were deliberately sabotaged in order to send a message. Heroism isn't real, and every hero you thought you had was a phony because that's life! It's a meaningless series of random events and then you're dead. So stop having hope, stop having an imagination, and keep your head out of the clouds.

There's nothing worth fighting for beyond political policies of the Good Guy Party, so there are no heroes. There are only revolutionaries for the status quo. This is all backwards and inverted, but that is how it goes when you upturn your roots for ego.

The love for heroism is just one thing lost in the morass of the 1970s. It was a hopeless time, and has justifiably been forgotten today.

This loss of perspective is best shown in this exchange from Clint Eastwood's Magnum Force, a movie which tries to show the difference between an anti-hero (IE a selfish do-gooder) and a real hero. This came after Harry Callaghan was accused of being a villain in Dirty Harry by critics. Why is he taking justice into his own hands?

It turns out he took justice into his own hands because everyone else forgot what justice was. And though the movie ended in typical grim '70s fashion, the overall point was fairly clear. Audiences loved it and it led to a boom in action movies not long later. Critics, however, didn't want to be reminded that justice is real.

Clint Eastwood then starred in Magnum Force, the sequel. This movie is intended to show the difference between an anti-hero (what the critics thought Harry was) and a hero who upholds justice (what Harry actually is), and it does this extremely well.

The following exchange explains it clearly.

God is dead, heroism is dead, society is a free-for-all, and yet Justice remains? No, I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. An anti-hero is no hero. He's just using it as excuse to feed his own ego. It is pure 1970s wankery, and is a concept that has far outlived its usefulness. There's nothing clever or fresh about the concept of anti-heroes, they're nearly half a century old, at this point. And yet we're still told to this day how great and original they are.

As explained above, Magnum Force was a response to Clint Eastwood's previous Dirty Harry in which he was accused of being a fascist character. Even back then "fascist" was a word that had lost all meaning. What Harry represents is the last stand of heroes in a world that has forgotten the good and the true, and merely operates on the momentum of dead men whose influence is scrubbed away more and more every day.

And this is the same with every other form of fiction. If you don't have clear good and evil then it only comes down to who has the bigger gun in the end. And if your definition of good and evil are mere caricatures of what you learned in public school, cobbled together out of nowhere not based on any real standard, then it's not going to ring true. As sales for modern books can attest: they don't ring true. Because they aren't true.

This path is a dead end. Chain bookstores are on the way out as it is. No one reads anymore, and less are reading every day.

What's the solution? It's to go back. It's to assure everyone that reading isn't what they were taught it was because of the miserable books they were forced to read in government mandated prison campsschool. It's to show them that there's a whole world out there they've been missing. Wonder brightens anyone's day.

To do this, we have to go back. We have to go so far back that we have to find the last time reading appealed to a mass of people on a wide scale. And wouldn't you know it? It's the golden age of pulp fiction: the very fiction that inspired all their favorite movies, TV shows, and video games. But because so many have been "educated" to write fiction as anti-pulp and anti-consumerist as possible, it requires a louder approach to get attention. It requires a revolution.

So how has this revolution been working out? Very well! Every writer who fell into the Pulp Revolution years ago and are still coming into it now has gathered steam, is seeing increasing success with every release, and is reaching more and more readers every day. The road less traveled turned out to be the one everyone wants to wander down. It's only a matter of time before the revolution becomes what it should be: standard.

This is a long way to show that the Pulp Revolution still marches on years later. It's not about tooting our own horn, but to show that this is the way forward. The old ways are better, and will lead us to a better future. The future is bright, and the clouds are parting.

Onward we move, and we can only do but one more thing.

We're doing it!

Check out Corona Chan's anthology! It's a good time for all, and it's free!