Enter the Asylum

Stick It

Notes on a New Heroic Pulp

As I was pondering genre tropes, thinking about trying my hand at the Lester Dent Master Pulp Plot, I started (quite naturally) looking at Dent’s most famous creation, the Doc Savage series, and thinking about what made it distinctive — about what was worth keeping from his formula, and what I wanted to break.

Looking around, it occurs to me that there’s actually quite a bit of heroic pulp still being published. The stuff that identifies itself as such hangs out mostly on the Internet, and it tends to be pastiche — glorified fan fiction, some of it, usually with a 1930s setting. I could see the appeal of that — not only is that kind of time period an immediate and identifiable signifier placing you’re your stories in the pulp tradition, but the world of the ‘30s was a perfect place for an adventurer. For one thing, there were still new frontiers, new places to explore. The idea of stumbling across a lost civilization hidden somewhere in a remote jungle — a staple of pulp stories — seems somehow faintly ridiculous in a world with GPS and satellite imagery. You’d have so much explaining to do.

But I rejected the period setting. I wanted something that lived in today’s world. Now, the pulp spirit lives on in the contemporary best-seller lists, in the many formulaic action-thriller series. And in larger-than-life figures like Jack Reacher we see a debased version of Doc Savage, with all of his natural ability but none of his refinement, and none of his extravagant altruism. Doc spends his downtime between missions performing neurosurgery and inventing new kinds of scuba gear; Reacher spends his digging swimming pools. If Clark Savage, Jr. had been allowed to go feral, instead of receiving intensive training in all the arts and sciences, he might have become a psychologically-aberrant superman like Reacher, whose abilities are nigh-supernatural, but whose social conscience is nearly nonexistent.

Reacher is presented as an aspirational figure — women want him! men want to be him! — but it’s a solipsistic, libertarian aspiration. Reacher has no ties to anyone or anything, he’s a badass, he doesn’t get hassled by The Man. He’s got no interest in actually making the world better or fairer; his moral sense, inasmuch as it exists, extends to personal vengeance and a general sympathy for the underdog. Doc Savage aimed higher than that, and following his lead I wanted my pulp heroes to be, well, heroes — thoroughly modern figures, not just aspirational but inspirational.

You wouldn’t think that characters like that would even be plausible in today’s world, but I found one — on a TV show about fishing, of all places…

And the wheels, they keep on grinding...

Water Water

If you follow my Twitter feed — and really, why wouldn’t you? — then you might have seen this dispatch from the corner of gratitude and horror:

There are times when a great new idea is welcome. There are times when a great new idea is a form of writer's block.
— Jack Feerick (@JackFeerick) July 23, 2013

That note of panic is only partly for comedic effect. I’m trying to get at something that is, for me, the central and ongoing crisis of the writing life: How to respond when confronted with an Idea.

“Where do you get your ideas?” is every writer’s least-favorite question — not because it’s a dumb question, but because it’s the wrong question. Ideas are everywhere, as cheap and plentiful as water. And they are, in themselves, quite useless. A man with a bomb in his head; that’s an idea. A painting of a street scene that acts as a spatial portal to that street; that’s another idea. But they’re not stories, either of them.

Ideas, like water, are the river flowing beneath our fictions, the current moving them along. What makes a story is what we construct on top of that flowing stream. It might be a raft or a ship to follow the current where it leads, or it may be a water wheel or mill to capture the force of the flow and turn it to other ends.

If the idea is very strong, or the story is very short, or both, your contruction may be almost insubstantial. Look at Hemingway’s famous six-word story:

FOR SALE: Baby shoes, never worn.

Or Alan Moore’s:

time machine. Somehow, I’d invented a

Or a story by Larry Niven, which read in its entirety:

There are some things that man was not meant to know.

Or the famous

The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.

In all of these, the writer’s construction is like a cunningly-folded origami boat; tiny, perfect, delicate. The care and craft are apparent, but they were never built to last.

So the right question is, “How do you decide what to do with an idea?” And for that, there’s no one answer. Sometimes the form of the structure is implicit in the idea itself, and with practice, I think, you get better at recognizing which ideas are waterfalls and which one are raindrops.

But you can’t always tell at first. And free-writing, interrogation of concept, research — these are all tools to help you. They’re nothing cunning or crafted, in themselves: Notionally speaking, they are nothing but a stick that you use to poke your idea.

Poking your idea with a stick can give you some idea of how deep it is, of how strong its currents might be. And just as when you put your straight stick in water it appears crooked and distorted, the process of inquiry tells you how and in what interesting directions your story might bend and break.

And that’s when things get really interesting.