Pulp Era Writing Tips by
Bryce Beattie
A review by Teel James Glenn
Pulp magazines were the popular
entertainment for the American masses from the 1920s to the mid 1950s- the
precursers to the paperback explosion of the 50s and 60s. In fact many of the
pulp writers with new work –and reprints of their pulp work—supplied the
material for paperbacks.
The pulp writers were pure and solid
commercial wordsmiths some with massive word counts and incredibly wide ranges
of stories from horror to detective to ranch romances and straight up
adventure.
Bryce Beattie has done an amazing
service to writers by scouring writers’ journals, yearbooks and other
professional magazines for articles written by these workhorse wordslingers for
other potential writers.
The range of subjects covered in this
book- from how to write fight scenes to how to revise a novel, how to write
detective mysteries and several examples of fiction formulas that allowed these
writers of old to turn out solid, salable work on a day to day basis- is
amazing.
And the writers who share their
secrets were not just also rans, many were stalwarts of the era like Robert J.
Hogan(the man who created and wrote all
the G-8 air war stories), William Benton Johnston (who wrote many westerns), Lee Floren(who wrote hundreds of western tales under dozens of pseudonyms),
Nelson S. Bond (who wrote hundreds of
pulp tales then went on to write for tv and film), Marjorie Holmes (over
134 books- 32 of which hit the bestseller list), Carol Kendall(who wrote a dozen best selling YA books), Lurton Blassingame (writer/editor and eventually agent to Frank
Herbert and Robert A. Heinlein) and others.
While some of the advice is more a
time capsule to the period and its attitudes than others, most of the
information is universal not only to the creation of ‘pulp style’ stories but also all solidly created fiction.
Mr. Beattie has given a great gift to
all writers, beginning and advanced by collecting all this information in one place.
I highly recommend it to anyone, writer or reader who loves a good story!!!
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