The pulps were once an incredibly popular medium of entertainment known for publishing stories printed on inexpensive, leftover paper at incredibly cheap prices. These could be formatted as books but were just as often magazines collecting short stories or sometimes serializing novels on a monthly basis. Because there were so many magazines with so many stories they tended towards two major characteristics. The stories were experimental and they were short.

By experimental I mean they hit on any and every genre they could imagine and created a couple new ones along the way. By short I mean shorter than a similar story would be today.

Pulps are often considered to be the peak of fast paced storytelling, quickly setting up a character, situation and stakes and resolving the situation in a few thousand words. Pulp novels rarely last longer than 80,000 words and frequently got down to 50,000. By contrast, the modern novel is usually much longer, running around 75,000 words and up. Most acquisition editors today prefer longer manuscripts to shorter ones.

There is a fair argument to be made that the shortest story that says all it needs to say, and no more, is the ideal. From this point of view long novels are not ideal. In point of fact there are a lot of modern writers who admire the pulp era and strive to recapture some of the brevity and verve of that unique time in their own writing. Brevity being the soul of wit, I wish them the best. However, I think that trying to write in a style from a century ago for the modern reader is a bit of a mistake. After all, the ideal length of a story is the length that says all it needs to say.

The question is, how much do we need to say? Does it change from one era to the next?

This is a topic none of the pulp aficionados stop to examine so let us do so for just a moment or two. At the dawn of the twentieth century the world was a much different place. There were no high speed, intercontinental communications, for example, and schools of pedagogy tended to agree on an established set of classic literature and preferred interpretation. In short, cultures were more homogeneous and shared many cultural touchstones. The importance of this cannot be understated.

Let me reframe this using an example from my experience partaking in Japanese entertainment. There is a form of address in Japanese known as “keigo” which creates a structure of social relationships between speakers. There are loose equivalents for some keigo terms in English. The -san suffix could be thought of as a gender neutral version of a respectful “Mr.” or “Mrs.” while the term sensei refers to a person of learning and is often used for a teacher or a doctor.

There are also many keigo terms which don’t translate well. A senpai is someone who has proceeded you. In what have they proceeded you? It could be anything. A senpai could be an upperclassman, a colleague with seniority in the workplace or just another person with the same hobby who’s been involved with it longer.

A kohai is the opposite of a senpai, someone who came after you. The culture of Japan places a lot of importance on the relationship between senpai and kohai, loading implied duties of respect, care and even affection behind these two words. This cultural weight cannot be directly translated into an English word and often results in one of two things. Either the words will be left as-is, with footnotes or endnotes explaining their meaning and implications, or clunky and illfitting equivalents will be forced into the dialog. Neither one fully encapsulates the ideas the words imply.

All this from just two words in the keigo system, which is full of dozens or hundreds of such terms from different time periods and dialects. It’s a lot to take in for new readers. Both methods of adapting keigo come with considerable drawbacks but the concepts cannot be omitted from the story or the characters will not make sense. This is to be expected from a work written in another country.

They say the past is a foreign country as well.

As I mentioned before, the pulp writers were drawing on shared traditions, shared culture and shared education. If they mentioned Achilles, for example, we could be reasonably sure they were all drawing from the same source. The Iliad was still in on most secondary education reading lists. Just as importantly, there were very few other interpretations of the character to muddle the meaning and significance of his name.

Furthermore, pulps were primarily publishing to people in their immediate area. Books rarely went overseas due to the expense of shipping them, just for starters, but also due to frequent language and legal barriers it tended to be impractical. In the modern era, these obstacles no longer exist. Everything from distribution to copyright law is much simpler and that has made media audiences much broader and yet much narrower. Past audiences were quite restricted in what media they could afford and access. By necessity those audiences engaged with a much broader array of media and were much less picky about its genres and quality.

Now, when an audience can easily access media from anywhere in the world, new problems arise. You can no longer be sure what cultural context your audience comes from. If they find themselves unable to parse your prose there is a real possibility they will simply set aside what you have to offer and move on to something else. Dense prose full of allusion that doesn’t make sense or requires research to understand rarely holds attention now. Audiences are looking for something they can relate to what they know and yet anticipating what they know is harder than ever.

Even if your goal is to tell your story in the fewest words possible you must still face the reality that more words are needed to explain yourself now than in the past.

Added to these hurdles is the reality of modern day mediums. Brevity may be the soul of wit but prose is ill suited to the modern conception of brevity. The shortest, most information dense communication mediums in the modern era are all transmitted via the Internet and facilitated by companies like Twitter/X, TikTok and YouTube. They are multimedia and visual as much as verbal. Audiences craving the brief and concise turn to these places for their media fix. Rather than compete along the lines of brevity most successful prose opts for depth, the one angle of communication where it remains unrivaled. By exploring ideas as thoroughly and deeply as possible prose can still compete for audiences when up against these much more concise, information dense mediums.

It’s all well and good to admire punchy, fast paced storytelling. Again, I have no beef with the pulp fans who want to explore that style of writing in their own work and come back to that kind of writing over and over again. However I am not one of those writers who believes we are on the cusp of another golden age of pulp prose. The media and cultural environment just doesn’t suit it. Audiences who want that kind of story can get it many other places in forms that capitalize on the strengths of pulp far better than the written word. I believe we are now in the era of deep prose, and that is the style of writing I strive to achieve. Perhaps your experience is different, and if so please let me know. In the mean time, it’s probably time I started getting ready for my next project…

In the mean time, if you’re interested in supporting my work check out my previous project give a look at Have Spell, Will Travel, my weird western anthology on sale on Amazon! Give it a look using this handy link: