When I think of the great pulp writers, I always include Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Cimmerian. Those stories would combine Action/Adventure and Fantasy. Howard found his most sustained success with this series character.
But that did not stop him from selling other kinds of stories in horror, detective, boxing, and Westerns. He was a pulp writer, and proved it with his wide reach and production, all before his tragic suicide at the age of thirty.
So choose … write … experiment … and when you hit on something that works, hammer out more of it.
Especially if you come up with a great series character.
The Pulp Writer’s Insurance Policy
“The pulp writer's insurance policy: continuing characters.” — Erle Stanley Gardner
Pulp fiction writers of old made much bank with a hit series character.
Sherlock Holmes is the best example of the concept. So popular was Holmes that his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, couldn’t get out from under him. At one point he killed off his detective, but the public demanded he be brought back. His resurrection was by way of the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. When it was first published in The Strand magazine, the circulation of that periodical went up by about thirty thousand.
In other words, Doyle, though feeling a bit trapped, took that feeling all the way to the bank.
What Makes a Great Series Character?
I see five qualities in the best series characters. If you can pack these in from the start, your task is half done. Here they are:
1. A point of uniqueness, a quirk or style that sets them apart from everybody else
What is unique about Sherlock Holmes? He’s moody and excitable. Among the very staid English, that was different.
Jack Reacher? Come on. The guy doesn’t own a phone or clothes. He travels around with only a toothbrush. Funny how every place he goes he runs into massive trouble and very bad people.
Writing in First Person POV presents a further opportunity: a unique and memorable voice. This was my choice in a series of pulp-style boxing stories I’ve written about a character named Irish Jimmy Gallagher. I was inspired to try this by the Sailor Steve Costigan boxing stories of pulp master Robert E. Howard. (A sample story is included in this book. See Appendix 4.)
2. A skill at which they are really, really good
Katniss Everdeen is killer with the bow and arrow.
Harry Potter is one of the great wizards (though he has a lot to learn).
3. A rebel
The series hero should rub up against authority, even if it’s in a quiet way, like Miss Marple muttering “Oh, dear” at the local constabulary. Hercule Poirot is a needle in the side of Inspector Japp.
4. A vulnerable spot or character flaw
Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian has a vicious temper that sometimes gets the better of him.
Sherlock Holmes has a drug habit.
Stephanie Plum keeps bouncing between two lovers, who complicate her life.
5. A likable quality
Philip Marlowe has some of the greatest quips in the history of crime fiction. We like them because Marlowe is also vulnerable—to getting beat up, drugged, or otherwise manhandled by forces larger than himself (like Moose Malloy).
Wit is one of the great likability factors.
Another is caring for others besides oneself. Stephanie Plum has a crazy family to care for, not to mention her sometime partner Lula.
Will the Character Grow?
One decision you need to make early on is how much character growth there will be. While you’ll hear a lot about the necessity for character arcs, they aren’t always necessary.
For example, Jack Reacher doesn’t change. I once heard Lee Child talking about this on a panel, and he said, “Arcs? We don’t need no stinkin’ arcs.”
Ahem.
Michael Connelly, on the other hand, has brought tremendous change to his series character, Harry Bosch. He decided, too, that he would age Bosch right along with the books, a decision he has come to ruefully regret. Bosch is getting up there!
At the very least, your character ought to grow stronger with each adventure. Why? Because without that there is no tension or conflict in the story. Each new tale must challenge the character in some way that threatens him with death (physical, professional, or psychological).
Test Marketing
Self-publishing today provides the pulp writer with a way to “test drive” a potential series character. You can do that in a number of ways.
You can write a story and send it to several beta readers. These are people you know and trust to give you honest feedback.
You can publish in a free venue, like Wattpad, and collect the feedback that way.
There’s always the option of going to Kindle Direct Publishing and using Kindle Select exclusivity so you can promote the story for free. Promote the heck out of it. Read the reviews.
The pulp writers of old weren’t shy about testing a character and then moving on if that character didn’t create enough buzz. Their big problem was the lag time between sending in a story and waiting months for it to appear.
Today, you don’t have to wait.
Generating Plots
Pulp is plot.
The characters in pulp serve the plot.
Of course you can go inside a character. Just don’t get stuck there.
Readers of pulp fiction want action. Kiss kiss, bang bang as the old saying goes.
Thus, the prolific pulp writer spends the majority of his creativity time coming up with ideas for ripping-good stories.
And relies upon certain “formulas.” Which is a word often sniffed at by the literati. Allow me to unsniff it.
In Theme & Strategy (Writer’s Digest Books) Ronald Tobias gets it right:
We say we prize originality above all else in art. Originality is the artist’s brilliance, that indefinable something that is distinctly the artist’s and no one else’s. What gets lost in all that praise of individuality is that originality is nothing more than seasoning added to stock. Seasoning gives distinct flavor, its character or charm, if you will, and seasoning gives the distinct taste that immediately identifies the dish as unique. But we forget that the foundation remains the same, and that the chef and the diner both rely on that fact.
A chef’s genius is not to create a dish from original ingredients, but to combine standard ingredients in original ways. The diner recognizes the pattern established in the foundation of a baked stuffed turkey, and we look for the variation, the twist that will surprise and delight us. Perhaps it’s in the glaze or in the stuffing, something that makes that turkey different from all the other turkeys that came before it.
As you develop an idea for a story, start with the foundation, the pattern of action and reaction that is plot.
In my workshops I’m sometimes asked how to keep plot and structure from devolving into formulaic writing. My answer is similar to what Tobias says above. You don’t cook an omelet with a watermelon. If I want an omelet, I want it made with eggs in a pan with some ingredients and spices. What those add-ons are and how they are proportioned make up the distinctiveness—the originality if you will—of the dish.
In the same way, eggs are the basis of the formula. It’s what readers expect from a story. They don’t want to be confused or frustrated. Of course, an author is free to write experimental fiction, which is also known by its unofficial name, Fiction That Doesn’t Sell.
But if you’re in this game to make some dough, you’ll use familiar ingredients but you’ll spice them up with your unique brand of characterization, dialogue, and voice.
The late, great writing teacher Jack Bickham wrote the following in Scene & Structure (Writer’s Digest Books):
Mention words such as structure, form, or plot to some fiction writers, and they blanch. Such folks tend to believe that this kind of terminology means writing by some type of … predetermined format as rigid as a paint-by-numbers portrait.
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Nothing could be further from the truth
In reality, a thorough understanding and use of fiction’s classic structural patterns frees the writer from having to worry about the wrong things, and allows her to concentrate her Imagination on characters and events rather than on such stuff as transitions and moving characters around, when to begin or open a chapter, whether there ought to be a flashback, and so on. Once you understand structure, many such architectural questions become virtually irrelevant – and structure has nothing to do with “filling in the blocks.”
Structure is nothing more than a way of looking at your story material so that it’s organized in a way that’s both logical and dramatic.
So don’t get ensnared by the ruinous idea that formula is the enemy of originality.
Instead, become a great chef. Know your ingredients. Cook up a delicious tale by mixing the familiar with your unique blend of spices.
Your readers will eat it up.
Plot Ideas Are Everywhere
Write down every idea you get, even if it’s only one line.
Ideas are everywhere. You should never ask yourself, “How do I find a great plot?” Your question should be: “Which one of my long list of ideas should I develop next?”
Your imagination is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. It begins to work on its own. Stephen King called this phenomenon “the boys in the basement.”
The boys (or girls if you prefer) get trained the more you ask yourself What if?
When you see a billboard: What if the people in that scene were kidnapped?
When you see a woman standing on the corner waiting for the light to change: What if she is a hit-woman out on a job?
When you’re waiting in line for coffee: What if this guy in front of me has taken on another identity?
When you see a news item: What if I twisted that item a little bit? Made the man a woman, or vice versa? Or set it in a small town instead of the city? Hmmm …
Write them all down.
Play the first-line game (one of my favorite exercises). Just write some great opening lines. You don’t have to know anything about the plot or the characters. Just make it a line that would absolutely grab the lapels of a reader and make them read the next line.
Keep a file of these.
You will have many more ideas than you can get to in your lifetime. This is a comforting thought to the pulpster.
Now you decide which idea you want to develop into a plot.
My own practice is to go through my lists periodically and sense which ones jump out at me. Get me wondering. Have me seeing a potential story.
I put these into a file I call “Front Burner Concepts.” I’ll then spend half an hour typing a free-form document, talking to myself about the idea. I’ll put down potential plot twists, stakes, characters, motivations. A story will begin to take shape.
This is similar to the development process in a movie company. Last of all I’ll consider the marketability of the concept. I need to have the following:
A lead character I care about deeply.
A unique spin on plot and setting.
Death stakes.
A cast of colorful supporting characters.
When I green-light a concept, I develop my elevator pitch (as described in the chapter “Conditions for Success.” And then I map out my signpost scenes (as explained in my book, Super Structure).
Then I give myself a SID—Self-Imposed Deadline.
And I’m off.
The Quintessential Pulp Plot
In his classic book on fiction craft, Techniques of the Selling Writer, the pulp writer turned writing teacher Dwight V. Swain recounts a letter he received from an editor who was “riding herd on a chain of pulp magazines.” The editor, one Howard Browne, wanted Swain to provide him with some content. This is what he wrote:
I’ve got an assignment for you, keed. I want 25,000 words a month—one story—that is ACTION! The type of yarn, for instance, where a group of people are marooned in, say, a hilltop castle, with a violent storm raging and all the bridges out and the electric power gone and the roof threatening to cave in and corpses falling down stairs and hanging in the attic and boards creaking under somebody’s weight in the dark (“Can that be the killer?”) and flashes of lightning illuminating the face of the murderer only the sonofabitch is wearing a mask that makes him look even more horrible, and finally the girl has been given into the safekeeping of the only person who is absolutely not the killer—only he turns out to be the killer, but he has taken the girl where no one can get to save her and you damn well know he is raping her while everybody stands around helpless. Do these stories in the style [Edgar Rice] Burroughs used to use; you know, take one set of characters and carry them along for a chapter, putting them at the end of the chapter in such a position that nothing can save them; then take another set of characters, rescue them from their dilemma, carry them to a hell of a problem at the end of the chapter, then switch back to the first set of characters, rescue them from their deadly peril, carry them along to the end of the chapter where, once again, they are seemingly doomed; then rescue the second set of characters … and so on. Don’t give the reader a chance to breathe; keep him on the edge of his chair all the way through. … GIVE ME PACE AND BANG BANG! Make me breathless, bud!
There’s never been a better—or more entertaining—definition of pulp plotting than this. Absorb the philosophy, and add to it your own settings and characters and themes and inner fire.
Plot. Action. Entertainment.
Make the readers breathless!
Frank Gruber's Foolproof Plot Formula
Frank Gruber, author of The Pulp Jungle, had his own plot formula. Here is his checklist:
1. Colorful hero
2. Inside info on the subject matter
E.g., police procedure, or facts about an enterprise, like cock fighting. Readers like to learn things.
3. Villain
Stronger than the Lead
4. Colorful background
Find the unique details
5. Unusual murder method
Can be gun or knife, but used unusually
6. Motive
Only two—hate and greed, with subsets
7. Clue
Key clue must be there for reader to find
8. Trick
When all seems lost, hero gets out with unusual method
9. Action
Not talk, talk, talk
10. Climax
Grand, smashing, unusual
11. Emotion
Hero personally engaged, above and beyond merely being paid.
Erle Stanley Gardner’s Plotting Philosophy
In a book about Erle Stanley Gardner’s methods, Secrets of the World's Bestselling Writer, Gardner’s philosophy is evident. “I served the reading public,” he once stated. “The reading public is my master.” Thus:
In my stories I try to figure myself as a prospective buyer of a magazine standing in front of the hotel newsstand. Would my story title make me pick up the magazine to look at it? Would the first hasty glance through the story make me buy the magazine, and would the reading of the yarn make me a regular subscriber? I know it can’t be done, not right at the start anyhow, but there's no harm in being ambitious.
In one of Gardner’s notebooks he wrote:
Work on every plot until you have:
1. Unusual opening incident
2. Complete character conflicts
3. Some emotional appeal
4. Some unusual slant of characters and situation
5. All stock situations eliminated
Make genuine reader suspense in which she doesn't know what will happen next and is surprised either by (A) what does happen; (B) the way in which it happens.
Here are a few more thoughts from Gardner:
A good plot never hops into a person's mind … A plot has to be built. … The public wants stories because it wants to escape. … The writer is bringi
ng moral strength to many millions of people because the successful story inspires the audience. If a story doesn’t inspire an audience in some way, it is no good.
The point is that a writer in starting a story should first decide what lowest common denominator of public interest, or what combination of common denominator he’s going to put in the story. Once he puts them in the story he knows he is starting on a firm foundation. If he doesn’t have them in the story he doesn’t have anything.
People love to dream, people love to yearn.
My definition of a mystery is that it consists of a series of interesting events which have sinister implications and the logic of which cannot be instantly comprehended by the audience. Therefore it seems almost essential to me that we should open our stories with some event which attracts the interest of the audience, which seems to have somewhat sinister overtones because they know they’re going to be watching a murder mystery, and which simply intrigues the hell out of the audience.
Lester Dent’s Master Fiction Plot
One of the most successful of the pulp writers was Lester Dent (1904-1959). In his relatively short life he churned out at least 175 novels, most of them about the titular character Doc Savage (these books and stories were published under the “house name” Kenneth Robeson).
Dent famously championed a formula for his pulp fiction, and shared it with readers of Writer’s Digest in 1936. He used the 6,000 word short story as the template. Dent divided up that word count into four sections of 1,500 words each. With a little adjustment, you could apply the same principles to a novella (20k-50k words) or novel (>50k).
FIRST 1500 WORDS
How to Write Pulp Fiction Page 3