On the Beat - a lost skill in writing?

I have been thinking carefully about the pulps lately, in particularly about what made some of the early pulp SF greats so enduring.  

What was it about was perusing the excellent Center for Fiction website today when I came across this article by Victor LaValle.

In a nutshell, this is the tale of two skilled and educated writers who have suddenly come face to face with the fact that narrative had never been a big part of their training.  In LaValle's words:

There's a kind of blind spot, an essential flaw, in the workshop method that contributed to our problem. In class we'd discussed each submission seriously, were schooled about our characterizations, our use of language, our voices, our ideas. But we rarely, if ever, discussed the structures of our stories. Never examined the reasons why we'd told this story in this order.

This epiphany comes to them when LaValle's friend calls in a daze, realizing that the comic book panels he has been scripting in his new job are just sudden cut scenes from conversation to conversation. What could it all mean? Did their prose stories boil down to much the same?

What they realized, suddenly, was that the demands of writing for comic books were exposing a gap in their training: it wasn't necessarily that they couldn't write a coherent narrative, but that the focus of everything they'd done so far had been elsewhere, and they were suddenly realizing: they didn't know how to think about the narrative.

A tightly written story is a beautiful thing.  Even when the characters are cut-outs, the dialogue wooden, and the cliches are thick on the ground - if the beats come just right then odds are good that's a story you will have trouble putting down.

Reading this little blurb about the way in which comic book writing had thrown their lack of narrative training into relief reminded me of my question: what was it about the best of the early pulp writers that made them work so well?

These modern writers were learning how to analyze their narratives, how to think about the attack and decay of beats, the sequence, how to build a climax and how to pull together disparate threads to make a point, all this by looking at their writing through the lens of comics.

The pulp greats?

Detective stories.

Looking back, it seems obvious. If you take a look at some of the best known names from the 30s and 40s, which is arguably the peak of pulp SF, the best were known as much for their mysteries and their detective fiction as for SF.

Look at C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner - between the two of them they turned out any number of mysteries and hard boiled detective stories.

Look at Leigh Brackett - as well known in some circles for her hard-boiled novel No Good From a Corpse and her screenplay for The Big Sleep as for any of her space opera in SFandom.

Look at Dorothy Sayer, look at Dennis Wheatley.

All of these writers worked with mystery and detective stories just as much as Arthur Conan Doyle did with his Sherlock Holmes tales and later Agatha Christie with her murder mysteries. And the one thing that ties this all together is that for a mystery of any kind to work effectively for the reader the author must master two things:

1. The timing of the story beats
2. The weaving together of divergent narratives into a whole

The proof?

Further forward, let's look at Ray Bradbury, Moore and Kuttner's young padawan - his stories may never have drifted into detective territory, per se, but they have that same fine grasp of timing and control.  He takes that mastery of tight storytelling he learned in his mentors' livingroom and applies it masterfully to build a sense of otherwordly disconnect in his Martian Chronicles stories, to misdirect and surprise in tales such as The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, to build tension in stories like Chrysalis.

Look at H. Beam Piper, whose detective slate novel Murder in the Gun Room is perhaps his best work, but whose skillful handling of timing and complex threads shows itself in his story He Walked Around the Horses and others of his paratime police series.

Look at Andre Norton, who again draws on the legacy of the pulp era greats and like them in her early work she wrote crime fiction as well as SF - and you can see that way of thinking in the structure of her Time Traders stories.

These writers were writing across genres at a time before the development of our modern silos, and the majority of the early masters wrote at a time before genre publishing was any way to make a living. Those who truly wanted to earn their bread with their type-writers couldn't possibly rely on science fiction alone - even if their output was sufficient to buy food at a penny a word (or less!) there simply weren't that many dedicated venues.  No, to pay the bills they needed to think in terms of the full range of possibilities, and they wrote not only science fiction but also crime, detective/mystery, western, fantasy, adventure, and weird fiction.

The majority of pulp era authors faded quickly of course - they burned out, perhaps, or were simply never really good enough to last.

But the best?

The best pushed on and were well known well into the 60s and 70s, before The Great Delisting - and we're starting to rediscover them again now (though of course they were never completely forgotten, just so difficult to find that only grey-haired or truly dedicated young fans would be likely to come across them).

The best of their protégés obviously learned these same rules, and added to it the next generation's ideas to enhance characterization and colour.

I think it's no mystery why so many of the best writers of the pulp era and the generation after wrote for radio, film, and TV as well as for print - many of the "beat" rules they learned transfer very well to the demands of visual storytelling.  And this, of course, is why attempting to write for comics threw the lack of focus on these rules in modern writer training into such sharp relief.

In modern writer training, the kind of close one-on-one mentoring that previous generations enjoyed is less common.  On top of that, many of the tools that those pulp masters forged and passed on to the next generation have come to be seen as "obvious" - so workshops and similar training venues tend to focus on other things: the artistry of character and colour, the feats of worldbuilding that we've come to expect.

Basically, what's happened is that literary fiction has gained the luxury of being somewhat lazy: it's become possible to obsess about painting scenes and generating atmosphere without much consideration for the other dimensions of a good story.  Make no mistake, there are great authors today - maybe better authors in some respects than in decades past (though I submit that the best of the pulp era would fare as well today as they did then). But there's hardly anyone teaching this generation of writers how to keep a beat.

Partly, I blame the siloing of genres - it's possible now to make a living writing nothing but science fiction, perhaps nothing but a specific sub-type of science fiction. And the sheer volume of writing being published is astounding - even if they wanted to, many writers can barely keep up with what their peers are writing, let alone delve into other realms of publishing to see what the others are doing.  And of course the pay is much better - oh, it's still not a lot, and the majority of writers will still need to heed that advice: "don't quit your day job" but it's no longer necessary to add crime fiction and westerns, and radio plays and TV dramas and film scripts to your bibliography just to ensure enough income to justify the time spent writing.

So if you're a writer, here's your challenge:

If you haven't done it before try this - read something in a dramatically different genre (write SF? read a western. write steam punk? try a spy thriller), pay attention to how the story works, how the narrative is built. Then and only then turn around a try something completely different. Write something new - try a new genre, try a new format!

Do you write prose? Try poetry. Try a screen play. Try a radio drama. Try thinking about how your story would work in a comic - and if you have the skills, sketch it out, see how it works.

Writers need to grow. And yes, writers can grow by simply hunkering down and hammering out what they know, refining their skills and honing down to an ever finer focus. But:

What's growth without adventure?

Try it!

Henry Kuttner: Another forgotten master

Kuttner and Moore working on a manuscript

Imagine:

It was April 7^th, 1915.

Near Basra in Mesopotamia: Turkish troops were assembling,preparing to launch an offensive against the British fortifications. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, in Los Angeles, California, science fiction writer Henry Kuttner was born.

Coincidence?

OK, probably.  But it’s no coincidence that, from the publication of his first short The Graveyard Rats in 1936, to his untimely death in 1958 at the age of 42, Kuttner was not only incredibly prolific [1] but incredibly well received.

Kuttner was very much a cerebral writer – many of his stories (though still just a fraction of his output!) are well enough crafted that had he not specialized in genre fiction he would surely be studied today alongside O. Henry as a short story craftsman.  Sadly, specializing in genre meant that his income depended on a prolific output in order to make a living at the penny-a-word rates of the pulps, so the range of quality in his work is quite wide.

Truth be told, the biggest challenge in his early work isn’t the ideas – it’s the execution and the styling, which for Kuttner seems to have been something for which time was required.  A master of complex stories, pacing, and surprise endings, his tales early are often interesting and engaging even when they’re (frankly) not all that well written from a stylistic perspective.

As genre grew and pay rates rose, it became possible for Kuttner to make a better living with his typewriter and his quality evened to the point where he became known for the literary quality of his prose.  But frankly this is no mystery: starting with letters to Weird Tales in the 20s and continuing with his engagement with the Lovecraft Circle (a collection of young writers and fans who essentially had an early fanzine kind of correspondence with Lovecraft himself) Kuttner was busy developing his craft, and while his early work may have suffered somewhat from an over-intellectual style, after meeting C. L. Moore in 1936 [2] they began collaborations – most intensely after their marriage in 1940.

This was surely a match made in literary heaven – Moore was herself an incredibly gifted and justifiably admired author in her time, but it seems to me that her skill with style and colour was just the thing Kuttner’s work needed.  Indeed, some of their most popular work was written in intense collaboration – so intense in fact that L. Sprague de Camp, who knew them both well, once said that once completed it was impossible for them to tell which sections of a story had been written by which of them. [3] You can almost watch Kuttner’s writing improve after the match – and Moore herself said that she thought her own writing owed a great deal to what she learned from working with Kuttner. [4]

Now, Moore’s work was excellent [5], her styling and pacing sublime, but the more hard-core of the two when it came to pulp writing was probably Kuttner – thus the more prolific bibliography over a huge variety of publications.  Kuttner’s styling may have suffered from the sheer volume, but he was nothing if not versatile.

This combination of skills is what drove much of the pair’s production in the 40s and early 50s – Moore contributed the style, Kuttner the page-rate and to some degree the cerebration for which he was justly famous.  Sadly, production waned when Kuttner started working on his masters degree [6] and really never recovered – Kuttner died in 1958, and Moore sadly remarried to a physician who for some reason loathed SF and SFian society so much that he induced her to have nothing more to do with it – even to preventing the SFWA from honoring her as a Grand Master.

Still, the mystery here is less why they both stopped writing but why – after so many years – Moore is still (somewhat) known but Kuttner has been all but invisible for ages. 

It’s strange indeed – especially considering that even 20 years after his death, Ray Bradbury (whose first horror story “The Candle” was reputedly finished by Kuttner, and who so desperately wanted Kuttner’s career in the beginning) named him a neglected master in his Introduction to a collection of Kuttner stories in 1975.  In the same volume he acknowledges Kuttner’s amazingly fertile mind by referring to him as “a pomegranate writer: popping with seeds.”

Indeed, Bradbury may be the most literary and respected of the writers who claim Kuttner as an early influence, but he’s not the only one; Roger Zelazny (the Amber stories), Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and William S. Burroughs all owe this man a debt, among many others I’m sure.

Kuttner does still turn up of course – how could he not?  In particular, over the years his mythos stories have often been included in collections, including occasional collections of only or mainly Kuttner stories.  But somehow he never seems to get the level of recognition that his best work demands – in fact, while his name remains well known among long-term fandom and of course among lovers of Lovecraftian mythos much of his work remains fairly obscure. 

He has begun to regain visibility in recent years, in part because of the film adaptation of The Last Mimzy (2007) and a small number of recent collections [7], but he still remains sadly underappreciated by genre fandom.

Part of this is surely snobbery – you’d think that a fandom that essentially revolves around the nerdiest of pastimes would be willing to take any accomplices it could get, but the truth is that since the late 50s sword & sorcery and Lovecraftian horror have been increasingly sneered at as unworthy – could this be part of the reason why Kuttner’s work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves?

As I said, at his best Kuttner’s tightly plotted, intricate stories are surely at least in the same league as O. Henry – I think any real fan of early genre writing owes it to themselves to explore at least a little of his work.  You never know what you might learn.

--30--

1. Seriously: check out his summary bibliography at isfdb.

2. Amusingly, Kuttner’s relationship with Moore begins with a fan letter he wrote to her in 1936, around the time of his own first professional publication, in which he assumed she was a man.

3. Apocryphal, and possibly part of the mystique de Camp was building about them, but the story goes that they would just leave the page in the typewriter – sometimes even mid-sentence – for the other to continue, alternating constantly until the tale was finished.  This sounds wonderful, but it seems unlikely that a story written in this way would ever be fully coherent, and it was surely the following editorial stages (with both their skillful input) that led to such tightly written stories.

4. Hmm.  While I don’t typically enjoy full collaborations, perhaps there’s an idea here?  I can think of a few authors who have great ideas but less great writing – or amazing writing but not to amazing ideas. Could we force them to marry?  You know, for the good of the genre?

5. And in terms of averages at the very least, probably also superior to Kuttner’s.

6. With the intention of becoming a psychologist of the head-shrinking rather than rat-mazing variety.

7. Yay for e-books and the publication of out-of-copyright anthologies I guess.