Traditional Pop Story

Here’s an example of my take on today’s standard-style pop story, “Hoppenngger House,” up at my Literary Mystery blog. I wrote the story more than ten years ago, found it when I was putting stuff in storage prior to my recent move out of Philly. I tweaked it a bit and posted it. Check it out. It’s designed to be not a slog, but a read.

http://literarymystery.blogspot.com/2012/09/hoppenngger-house.html

For me now it’s only a starting point. In future efforts I expect to move beyond this, while maintaining a pop style framework.

The Return of Plot

The noteworthy development accompanying the rise of ebooks is the importance of plot. For decades, university writing programs have stressed the primacy of the sentence, and denigrated plot. This resulted in authors like David Foster Wallace crafting ever more convoluted sentences, obscure and complex, into nonsense.

But the public is proving that it wants plot! It’s no accident that inventive plotters like J.A. Konrath are at the forefront of the indy ebook movement.

The New Synthesis of American literature will also need to stress plot—plot ever more creative, more intelligent and fresh, full of surprise and knowledge, melding with setting and character, and stimulating to the highest intelligence.

Does Pop Lit Need a Vehicle?

This is a question I’ve been discussing with others at another blog--

www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com

Right now, what’s known as pop lit is a huge but diffuse entity with no cohesion and little coherence, a mass of publishing wannabes with little focus and no direction toward any future outcome for American lit. Only a gargantuan avalanche of recycled social media spam shouting, “Me me me me” with thousands of titles of imitative works which refuse in any way to stand out.

The solution is a vanguard outfit of authentic populists who know where literature is going-- who have strong ideas of how to save the art.

Pop or Populism?

Is it a choice? Which is the best direction for American literature to take?

These are questions I'll be exploring. I'll also introduce soon another blog, one devoted to the struggle for literary and cultural democracy in a land where fake culture is imposed from on high by controlling overdogs.

The New Synthesis

TO THE NEW WRITER

New writers, if they’re to be relevant, must reject the moldy standards of the literary establishment. The old modes don’t work, if they ever worked.

Everything about American literature is in flux. This includes how writing is made and sold. It must include as well new theories about what constitutes literary art, so we can create better stories, novels, and poems which are popular and populist yet at the same time, literary art. Works more readable and meaningful, which portray and discuss where we as a people and civilization are today.

My own example of what the New Synthesis looks like is an e-novel, THE TOWER, which presents the best of both camps, literary and pop.

Styles of Pop Fiction

WITH my four ebooks to date I present four different styles of pop Do-It-Yourself writing. If you want to see roads toward the literary future, they’re worth reading.

1.) Ten Pop Stories is straight pop, simple and quick, with the emphasis on fun reading. Within that guideline, each of the ten pop tales is unique.

2.) Mood Detroit starts out the same way, but the backdrop of the three novelettes in this collection is America’s toughest city. The three tales here are, each in a different way, literary-pop hybrids.

3.) Crime City USA, as much based on Philly as the Motor City, is pulp-style pop fiction about two rival criminal gangs, with hyped-up emotion and pace. This ebook is a hybrid between noir fiction and the graphic novel, with literary aspects simplified and intensified.

4.) The Tower is an ambitious pop novel of ideas, the conflict of ideologies, the story of a protest amid a tumultuous city: an evocation of the madness of contemporary life. Dramatic, over-the-top characters are caught up in currents of madness not of their making. It’s not the ultimate pop/populist novel, but it’s a step along that path.

All four of these ebooks are ridiculously affordable. You have no excuse not to buy them. No one has studied current American fiction and where it’s going, and should go, more than I have. Read these new works now ahead of the crowd.

Where Are the Populists?

The Old System for producing writers in America is focused on expensive institutionalized writing programs which encourage craft and refinement over the maw of experience and the big picture clash of ideas. The System has inhibited the creation of populist poems and novels. Attempts to remedy this have met with an unbreachable stone wall of arrogance.

But now the earthquake represented by DIY ebooks threatens to bring down that wall.

Where are new populist American writers prepared to jump into the breach with exciting literature?

When the wall comes down, tame literary fiction and poetry will be buried under the rubble and the dust. As replacement, barbarian outsiders need to provide more than recycled genre fiction which escapes from the realities of American life into fantasy and nonsense. We need new populist writers prepared to examine American realities with clear thoughts and clear writing.