Goodwill Hunting

Turns out it's not so easy to make a story from well-used furniture.

SF and Fantasy are primarily about story. All genre fiction is. But part of what the reader expects is originality. That's a problem there. The more original invention, the less it is a pastiche, a throwback. I thought this was about deconstruction -- and deconstruction is so much the default this days it is hard not to go that direction -- but it really is that we can't invent, today, the way the writers of 1950 would. Or, more importantly, appreciate that invention the way the readers of 1950 would. Our picture of the world is different and the intersection is small enough that staying within the bounds of what we understand they would do is too narrow a box and the results look artificial.

Not to say there aren't a lot of people trying their hands at the consciously retro, and some number making it work (there are probably as many failures in genre fiction that isn't trying to be consciously retro. Sturgeon's Law, after all).

Too many. You might think the well-used tropes and familiar props are easy to pick up, but enough people are also familiar, and have also used them (often in new and interesting ways, as well) that the modern reader is going to be just as familiar with them. If not more so. Once again, there's no easy route. You still have to read up and research and think about what you are doing.

But past that, especially when the invention of truly new worlds or exploration of new technology and science is taking a back seat to the rest of the material, emphasis is thrown on plot. We've emphasized character in different ways, and some of this is expected by the modern reader, but when you are talking pulp the big emphasis is plot.

I'm not a great plotter. The Athena Fox stories are lightweight mysteries in which my protagonist and POV character pretty much walks around learning clues. If they were a video game they'd be a walking simulator.

(And just as well. I liked a lot about Deliver us Mars, probably enough to sign on to the Kickstarter for the third game, but...the platforming sections with the ice pick were ghastly. I do like the action sequences I have in the books, but for what they are, they are best without more of that than they have.)

All of this realization came slowly as I was pulling at threads that didn't even look like they were connected to the sweater. I had set out to work up the top level of the outline, but in the process discovered that I wasn't nearly ready to do so.

Well, now I am there. And this may just take a more detailed and iterative outline because there is a lot of plot there. Not the themes-and-arcs stuff (which is what primarily populates the Athena Fox stories). But the mechanical stuff of fights and chases, sneaking and climbing and surviving and all the rest of the stuff that fills most of the pages of a pulp story.

And it is going to take a while to work out.

Unless...the old-school writers could be seat-of-pants, too. Especially, the more you divorce the mechanics of the action from the mechanics of the universe. You can always have a man come through the door with a gun to get you out -- or into -- a plot problem. Or a jaguar come through the jungle with claws, your choice.