Pulp Fiction

Lester Dent wrote a brigade of stories in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, under his own name and, more famously, as Kenneth Robeson. It was as Robeson that he wrote both magazine and novel versions of the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage.

Dent is also well-known for his "Master Fiction Plot" for creating 6,000-word pulp magazine short stories. It's an outline into which an author inserts his or her own ideas and creativity in order to create a short story that will grab readers and, more importantly, publishers who write checks.

The formula is no doubt a good one, and scans of pulp stories show that many successful writers used it. It also, of course, helps to have talent, an intense curiosity about new things and an ability to understand them, which Dent did.

There are probably a lot of important modern writers who would give Dent's formula short shrift, seeing as how his mainstay character was a near-superman who could also operate on his enemies' brains in order to "remove their criminal tendencies" and send them back into society as productive citizens. But he built himself a long and profitable career with it and entertained an awful lot of people. And you have to wonder: In today's world of doorstop-sized multivolume arboreal slaughterhouses, would one of these critics be able to actually write a 6,000-word story?

Of course. I suspect most of them could, as long as you gave them a 1,500-word limit.