High-Speed Pulp Writing: How Did People Do It?

Those who delve into the history of the more commercial kinds of fiction--the old pulps and paperbacks and so on--encounter what seem like extraordinary feats on the part of writers from the standpoint of sheer volume of output, authors cranking out whole novels in days (a Lester Dent, for example, particularly famous for this approach).

The prospect of being able to do the same is, for many, enormously appealing. After all, who hasn't wanted to finish a piece of writing more quickly? Who doesn't dream of being more productive?

Just how did they do it? The answer is that there were several enabling factors, not least in regard to the sort of books they were writing:

1. They were shooting for short works--50,000 words or so.
2. Those short books tended to be formulaic--the writer simply coming up with different factors to plug in rather than thinking up a narrative arc from scratch.
3. These short, formulaic books were also simple books, with relatively straightforward structures and straightforward prose, and minimalist in such respects as detail. This meant that they didn't have to do so much fleshing out of their scenes, which was another time-saver.
4. There was a certain tolerance for roughness and repetitiveness in the product--like a good deal of serviceable but awkward phrasing.

There was, too, the manner in which they worked.

1. They had to be able to work without interruption, with working through the night, and the next day, a common feature of the approach.
2. They had someone ready to take the work off their hands when they were done, so that they could move on to the next thing, rather than being stuck poring over what they'd finished.
3. They had the opportunity to do this again and again and again, putting such work out as much as they were physically capable, building up experience at this kind of endeavor.

The combination of the kind of project with its particular demands (and the things it didn't demand), their opportunity to work without interruption and then let go of a project to start a new one of a similar type over and over and over again, are a very far cry from how today's aspiring novelist is likely to work. They are expected to shoot for works of 100,000 words or more, books which are not just longer but more complex. Producing this longer, more complex book they are apt to hold down a day job, which by itself not just commands a large and perhaps critical part of their time and energy, but chops the rest to pieces, with fatal consequences for any sort of intuitive flow. And they are, of course, very unlikely to have a publisher waiting to take a work off their hands as soon as they are done. (Especially if they are unpublished and unagented, they might have it on their hands for years, and maybe forever.) If a writer feels that they must strive for originality, get the facts right, polish their prose; if they have been subjected to lots and lots of form rejection letters that wound enormously while teaching nothing, leaving them insecure and self-conscious; then the approach of a Dent is that much further outside their reach.

Those of us who would find their seemingly unselfconscious, spontaneous, intuitive approach a relief, or even liberating, can only breathe a sigh; but it may be some comfort to consider the reality that in today's market we would have a very tough time selling the result.