Pulp Fiction Formula
Dent's "Master Fiction Plot", often referred to as the "Lester Dent Formula" is a widely circulated guide to writing a saleable 6000-word pulp story. It has been recommended to aspiring authors by Michael Moorcock, among others. Moorcock summarizes the formula by suggesting: "split your six-thousand-word story up into four fifteen hundred word parts. Part one, hit your hero with a heap of trouble. Part two, double it. Part three, put him in so much trouble there's no way he could ever possibly get out of it...All your main characters have to be in the first third. All you main themes and everything else has to be established in the first third, devloped in the second third, and resolved in the last third."
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Famous quotes containing the words pulp fiction, pulp, fiction and/or formula:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“Tell me, how many hands have palpated the pulp that has grown so generously around your hard, bitter little soul?”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)