Tonight I'm headed out to Film Forum to watch a 60-year-old movie (Phantom Lady) written by my favorite pulp fiction novelist. Seeing this film will do more to help my writing than an entire semester of literary theory.
Reading pulp fiction as a novelist is like reading Shakespeare to write a better contemporary play. Writers should always know and emulate the early masters of their form.
Cornell Woolrich was the godfather of the noir fiction, and his paranoid, twisty prose inspired masterpieces like Hitchcock’s Rear Window. While his hardboiled characters lived out adventures, Woolrich lived in hotel suites with his mother for 30 years.
Over the course of a rocky career, this guy wrote the template for the modern thriller--a road map for all writers on writing suspenseful, gripping plots. If you need more help, Sarah Weinman has a beautiful collection of film noir dialogue, all of it handpicked by contemporary crime writers--earn your Ph.D in pulp fiction.
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