In the story I dreamed of being Hemingway, but ended up a pulp fiction writer, Christopher Farnsworth writes about how “a life filled with adventurers, mad scientists, strange creatures, weird plagues and mysterious plots” became his raw material for story telling.
Pulp fiction may not receive the accolades that literary fiction gets, but it’s a huge market. Though Farnsworth tried every trick in the writer’s book, he couldn’t ignore the robits, zombies and vampires that called out to him.
“I put my comics away long enough to read the classics. In college, I attended lectures by post-structuralist theorists, studied the romantic poets and tried to write a deeply meaningful novel about America. I wore a lot of black.”
When Farnsworth worked as a reporter he came across strange cases and began to conclude that life was more pulp than fiction could ever be. If you have doubts about the kinds of characters that you create and are obsessed with reproducing the real world, think again. Maybe realism isn’t for you and who knows what is real any more?
