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Author: Charlie Huston

Links:

    -AUTHOR SITE: Pulp Noir
    -FREE E-BOOKS: by Charlie Huston
    -EXCERPT: Chapter One of Mystic Arts
    -WIKIPEDIA: Charlie Huston
    -INTERVIEW: Charlie in Charge (Anthony Rainone, January Magazine)
    -INTERVIEW: with Charlie Huston (Paul Fuhr, Paradigm)

The name of your website is "pulp noir." What is it?

[...] A good noir story doesn't necessarily have to be a mystery. It will always have darkness of the soul, a morally ambiguous world, a world where everybody has a secret and has a price. It's hard when you try to transfer that into books. [Noir] is classically a film definition. Noir refers to a visual style as much as a context. It's "dark film." The traditions evolved out of these B-movie crime stories where they didn't have very much money to produce them. So they tended to have a lot of shadows. The good directors ended up coming up with a visual style that tried to capitalize on the lack of money, the lack of equipment, the lack of lighting. It became a signature of [noir].

[...]

The pulp aspect, for my writing, I've come to believe that pulp has less to do with trenchcoats and laser guns and swords and and loincloths. You know, these kind of trappings of classic pulp novels and pulp stories and pulp magazines. In the last couple of years, I've been on a schedule where I'm writing two genre novels a year (one in crime, one in horror) and also doing a comic book [Moon Knight ]. I'm working in classically pulpy territory here.

The aspect that I've come to think is related to pulp more than anything else is the speed with which you are required to work. The reason traditional pulp is looked down on, and so often is looked down on, is that it's classically paycheck writing. You're working on short deadlines, you're working for x number of cents a word. In order to make a living, you've gotta work fast, you've gotta hit your deadlines, and you have to produce a certain amount of quantity to pay the bills.

When I read classic pulp, I can I look at it and go, well, the writer really dropped the ball here with this plot point, this character is inconsistent, or the prose really faltered. This is an otherwise original genre writer indulging a lot of cliches, but what I've come to realize is that a lot of those things are classic symptoms of writing with velocity and writing on deadline. It encourages you to embrace cliches.

The pulp aspect really has a lot to do the economics of writing the genre on a certain timetable. You might want to take a week to revise a sentence. You might want to, after finishing a first draft, put it in a drawer and come back to it three months later with new eyes and really rework it. But writing true pulp on a true pulp schedule doesn't really allow that. There are times, looking back at my own work, when it's not necessarily that I didn't want try to do my best. There were just times where I made a decision about a character, a plot point, or a phrase that I used. And I got to a point later in the story where I realized the choices I made earlier got me in trouble, but I don't have time to go back. I don't have time to rewind fifty, six pages and rewrite fifty, six pages to take care of the ripples from the one big change.

That has a lot to do with what I think really defines pulp. It's a warts-and-all classification. That's part of what's beautiful, part of what's exciting about pulp. You have to write with a great deal of velocity and, with pulp, I think that shows up on the page: the intensity with which the writer is working shows up on the page when it's really clicking.

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (2009) - Charlie Huston (-) (Grade:A-)