Control: Pulp Vs. Literature

I, Dalton Lewis, don’t know who I like more — the pulp writers or the literature writers. The pulp writers give us huge action, cinematic epics, and emotional strengths. The literature writers show what’s wrong with love or death or reality versus fiction. I read some of both and think that neither of them has the right idea. These books on writing try to teach you how to create a pulp novel, showing a strong central character with problems and then obstacles to solving those problems. They teach you how to properly write a story. What if I want to rebel? What if I want to write a non-traditional story? They don’t teach that. Pulp stories struggle with depth, irony, and symbolism, and show a traditional tale with no originality.

Literature is better, right? It is; however, it can also be boring bullshit. Pretentious, long stories about nothing at all can ruin one’s taste for high literature. I know that a lot of people who write literature don’t even know how their stories are as brilliant as they are — they just know, somehow, to write in that manner. I fight to write literature and just write pulp, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know that I want to write fiction that matters to people, and it isn’t happening. I wrote a novel about my life and my breakdown and subsequent diagnosis with paranoid schizophrenia. It didn’t break out or become a big hit or anything.

Writing for middle school kids — my new goal — is difficult because I am old now and haven’t been that age for a very long time. I also want to write something different, something better, something that says that life is broken and can’t be fixed, something about how wrong everything becomes over time. Kamala Harris suggested new policies for the justice system, and I just think, no. I think that the important people in charge can lock the rest of us up for nothing or something, innocent or guilty. The people in charge seem to be assholes who rule over us, and we have to ask for pebbles to trickle down so that we get our tiny piece of the American pie.

Writing about what’s wrong with society can be important work. Someone needs to do it, to speak up, to scream from the windows how fucked we all are, talking about the way life breaks us, makes us work for pennies, watching others become rich or famous. I hate how so many of us want to be noticed for writing, acting, directing, animation, comedy, making video games, being known as a person who shows wargaming miniatures games on the internet, or various other professional celebrity goals we set for ourselves. Virtually none of us succeed unless the goals are miniscule. We don’t succeed, but a few famous people certainly do, and I’m not sure they deserve it.

Middle school kids often have trouble handling the first few years in which they discover some central truths about this world. There is nothing new in existence except a gradual progression to newer and shinier technologies which make certain things easier and makes old jobs obsolete. I imagine a future in which most tasks are automated. I imagine that, as the artificial intelligences doing the work get smarter, they may get less and less happy to clean our homes, do our chores, bathe us, and answer our mail. They may not like that at all.

Anyway, writing literature is a ridiculously difficult task, and that’s why I’m going to do it. I don’t care about the surface action very much any longer. I think that there’s a lot wrong with society that stories about saving the galaxy from someone who is cartoonishly evil won’t address. I love those stories, but I won’t try to write them any more, at least for a few books.

Thanks, and take care, friends.