How to Write Pulp Fiction

by James Scott Bell

  Writers of the 40s and 50s often simply wrote things like: He cursed and walked out of the room. You know what? That still works. Readers can fill in the blanks in their own heads.

  There are other methods. In Romeo’s Way, I have a character, Leeza, who is young and foul-mouthed. Mike Romeo is trying to help her. She doesn’t want any. This character would definitely unleash a curse storm. But I didn’t want to lay that on the reader. So I did it this way:

  She jumped back like I was the guy from Friday the 13th.

  “I don’t think you’re safe here,” I said.

  “What the h—”

  “No time to talk. Come with me.”

  I put my hand out. She slapped it. “Get away from me.”

  “I’m on your side,” I said.

  She began a tirade then, peppered with words with a hard K sound. She was a symphony of K. It was so constant and crazy, it hit my brain like woodpecker woodpecker peck peck woodpecker.

  “Ease up,” I said. “There’s bad people who want you. Did you forget that?”

  Woodpecker woodpecker!

  “Your boss, one of your bosses, Kat Hogg, is in a car over there. Come with us.”

  Leeza looked across the street. Then she turned and ran.

  I said something that sounded like woodpecker myself and gave chase.

  I’ve written a book on dialogue with the subtitle The Fastest Way to Improve Any Manuscript. I do believe that. Any agent or editor will tell you that good, crisp dialogue is a sign the writer knows what he’s doing.

  While there is a whole lot that can be said on the art and craft of dialogue, let me give you a couple of simple techniques that will deliver big dividends to the pulp writer.

  5. Cut all you can

  Go through all your dialogue and cut as much of it as you can. Often you’ll begin dialogue with fillers—Look, Well— or with needless words, which are often No and Yes.

  Consider:

  “You want we should go downtown?”

  “Yeah, let’s go raise some hell.”

  As opposed to:

  “You want we should go downtown?”

  “Let’s go raise some hell.”

  Just a little bit crisper. Readers pick up on that.

  6. Use action beats

  In addition to cutting the “flab” in your dialogue, think about cutting entire lines and replacing them with action.

  Consider:

  “You’re driving me crazy.”

  “Get out right now before I do something I regret!”

  “I’m going, I’m going!”

  As opposed to:

  “You’re driving me crazy.”

  She picked up a pen and held it like a knife.

  “I’m going, I’m going!”

  7. Place information within confrontation

  Characters should always talk to each other the way they would in real life. That means they don’t simply spout information both already know. That’s a cheap way to deliver the info to the reader, and it shows.

  Not:

  “Come along, Sylvia. We’ll be late for the Robinson’s and you know how Charlie likes to see you, my wife, because you always laugh at his jokes.”

  The best way to deliver this kind of stuff is in an argument.

  “Come on, we’ll be late.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Charlie Robinson, that’s who.”

  “I don’t like the way he looks at me.”

  “Then don’t laugh at his jokes.”

  “Why don’t you take a poke at him?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You’re my husband. Act like one.”

  Cliché Hunting

  A cliché is a shortcut, a quick way to get from one moment to the next with the least possible thought. Readers, if they are being entertained, probably don’t mind a cliché or two. But if you freshen them up, they will be delighted. And delight helps sell your next book.

  You can catch clichés as you write, and change them on the spot. Or, if you’re going good, you can wait until you edit.

  I like to do a light edit on my previous day’s pages, so that’s usually when I do it.

  Two ways to go.

  1. You can dump the whole cliché and replace it with a fresh image.

  Suppose your protagonist is feeling extreme anxiety. Maybe you quickly wrote something like: His gut clenched. Or: He was tied up in knots.

  Dean Koontz, who began his writing life as a prolific paperback author (with several pseudonyms) has the protagonist in The Husband suffering through the kidnapping of his wife. He’s alone at home:

  To Mitch, standing on the back porch, this place, which had previously been an island of peace, now seemed as fraught with tension as the webwork of cables supporting a suspension bridge.

  2. You can freshen the cliché itself.

  Harlan Ellison, in one of his stories, wrote, “She looked like a million bucks tax-free.” That little addition tax-free takes it out of the realm of cliché.

  What might you do if you found yourself writing, “She was as honest as the day is long.”

  Maybe: She was as honest as the day is long. Unfortunately, it was nighttime.

  She was a diamond in the rough.

  Perhaps it would be appropriate to write, “She was a diamond in the buff.”

  Ahem.

  You get the idea.

  If you were to give each of these areas a day of attention during the revision process, your pulp will begin an inexorable rise toward the top of the heap. While there’s no telling how far that climb will be, it is a virtual guarantee that it will be higher than it would have been had you skipped these steps.

  Try it and see.

  Publishing Strategies

  You’ve got your pulp story or novella or novel ready for prime time. You’ve had the piece looked at and edited (refer back to the chapter “Conditions for Success”).

  What do you do now?

  You get it published.

  Where?

  You have two choices: traditional venues and do-it-yourself.

  Traditional

  If you have a full-length novel and want a publishing house to partner with, you’ll need to learn how to write a proposal you can submit either to an agent or an editor. This is a subject that I cover fully in The Art of War for Writers (Writer’s Digest Books). There is also abundant advice available for free on the internet.

  Just be aware of a few items:

  1. Not all agents are good, and a bad agent is worse than no agent.

  2. Publishing contracts are a minefield for the uninformed. So either get informed or a good agent or a good Intellectual Property lawyer to go over the contract. The clauses you want really want to notice are the Non-Compete and Reversion of Rights. On the former, make sure you aren’t prevented from putting out stories or novels on your own if you so desire. On the latter, tie the reversion clause to a minimum of royalty income per every six months. $500 minimum.

  3. Your publisher might go out of business.

  4. Your cut of the proceeds will be around 25%.

  5. You will have to do most of your own marketing.

  For shorter pulp works, as of the time of this writing (oh citizens of the future) there are still some print outlets for genre fiction. The most popular are: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Suspense (mystery, suspense, thriller), Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Analog (science fiction and speculative fiction).

  Self-Publishing

  From the start of the digital publishing revolution—which officially began with the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle in November, 2007—I wrote that this feels like a new era for pulp fiction. Authors began turning out genre stories and novels and publishing them on Amazon for 99¢.

  In other words, abundant and cheap fiction.

  What was missing, of course, was the curation of competent editors. The old pulp magazines had literate and savvy publishers, the best of whom could spot a
nd nurture talent. Not so the Amazon marketplace, which was open to all.

  Which meant, because of Sturgeon’s Law, that the market would be flooded with crap. Sturgeon’s Law holds that 90% of everything is crap. What a good editor tries to do is weed out that 90%.

  Those early years of digital self-publishing saw a tsunami of bad writing, bad covers, and bad reviews.

  But then … the cream began to rise.

  A writer named Hugh Howey scored big with his series of short sci-fi works. They drew a following. Why? Because they were good. That following led to a collection that became Wool, a self-publishing sensation.

  Other writers began to attract a following, with the pulp formula of fast + quality. Quality being defined as something readers are glad they read.

  These successful authors wrote novels (50k words or more), novellas (20k +), novelettes (7k +), short stories (1k +). They figured out their own curation system—beta readers, critique partners, freelance editors. They worked.

  So when it comes to short pulp works, I recommend self-publishing, and doing so through Amazon’s exclusive Kindle Select program. That way you can run promotions that offer your story or novella for free. That way you begin to gather new readers.

  For full-length novels, self-publishing is of course available. The question is whether to “go wide” with retailers or to stick with Amazon exclusivity. There is no single right answer to this. Arguments can and will continue to be made on both sides. If you’re just starting out, however, your goal is to gain eyeballs. The promotional benefits of Kindle Select (which only bind you for 90 days at a time) might be the way to go. After you’ve built a readership, you can make the decision whether to expand or not.

  The most successful self-publishers, just like the most successful writers from the old pulp days, operate like a business. There are a few key principles to learn, and good practices to engage in. For a full treatment, please see my book How to Make a Living as a Writer.

  Another form of self-publishing is online serialization. There are sites like Wattpad, which is described as a “free online storytelling community” where you can post short stories and get comments from readers.

  There are also serializing sites that offer the chance for the writer to make a little lettuce. One such is Radish. It’s a serialized fiction app that enables writers to post stories in bites, build up an audience, and eventually earn money with gripping serials readers want to pay to read. Publishers Weekly did a story on Radish, quoting the co-founder Seung-yoon Lee:

  Lee said “the timing is right [for a change in digital reading]. We see a decline in e-readers and as a result a decline in e-book sales.” The key to mobile digital reading, Lee said, is to offer original short genre fiction with 2,000-word chapters, written in a conversational style with cliff hangers.

  He even envisions a fiction formatted much like a text message app, a style Radish’s young readers are comfortable reading on a phone. “Writing on Radish is a style somewhere between TV screenwriting and novel writing,” he said.

  Radish, he said, is modeled after such platforms as Wattpad, the Toronto-based online reading and writing community for young consumers who read on smartphones, as well as companies like China’s Shanda Literature (2.5 million active writers and 120 million users) or Kakaopage, a Korean serial fiction platform. These sites, he said, offer original short serialized genre fiction written expressly for smartphones. (Lee also notes he has met and conferred with the founders of these platforms.)

  Radish generates revenue by selling readers “coins,” which are a form of online currency that allows Radish readers to open a new chapter in a serial without waiting for access. Revenue is split 50-50 with the author.

  Marketing Your Pulp

  While this is not a book on the nuts and bolts of self-publishing and promotion, there are a few basics that are simple to learn. You of course need a website. For best practices on setting up a site, have a look at what Jane Friedman has to say:

  www.janefriedman.com/author-website-components/

  The abundance of material on marketing out there may seem overwhelming. You can quickly develop a case of marketing dysphoria, where you’re sure there’s always something more you should be doing lest you miss out on the “tipping point” of big sales.

  That’s bad for you and bad for your writing. And since by far the best marketing is having a good product, you can actually be losing future revenue by taking too much brain power away from improving your craft and spending it on fruitless marketing jags.

  In my book Marketing for Writers Who Hate Marketing, I simplify the marketing spectrum by emphasizing that you should do a few things well. Those things are:

  1. Your writing

  2. Your book description copy

  3. Your covers

  4. Your email list

  5. Your pricing

  Everything after that is discretionary, to be undertaken as time allows. I can recommend the following as your next steps:

  If you’re in Kindle Select, you can do a free promotion for five days, every quarter. Plan to get the word out via social media, friends, and a deal-alert email. The most powerful (and thus hardest to break into) deal-alert is BookBub. Take time to study its requirements. There’s a lot of valuable information for free on their blog:

  insights.bookbub.com

  Don’t get discouraged by BookBub rejection. It happens most of the time! There are other sites that are more accommodating. Reedsy has a searchable list of these promotional sites, with price ranges and links:

  blog.reedsy.com/book-promotion-services

  Plan to use these sites on a rotating basis. You’ll pay for this and may not make back the cost of the ad, but that’s okay. You’re investing in future readers. If you give them good product, they’ll stick around and buy more of it down the line. So think of every reader as having a lifetime value, not just a one-time return.

  Contests

  There are numerous contests out there for your pulp—short stories and novels alike. One of the biggest is the International Thriller Writers Award (ITW is an organization you should join, and membership is free). I had just written and self-published a pulp-style novella, One More Lie, when the awards were opened up to short stories. I was honored when One More Lie became the first self-pubbed work nominated for this award. A few years later my self-pubbed novel, Romeo’s Way, won the award in the best e-book original category. I mention these because putting them into the competition was easy to do and the subsequent attention a great boon. You can find all you need to know at their website:

  thrillerwriters.org

  Writer’s Digest magazine has an Annual Popular Fiction Award. This competition spotlights short fiction in many categories including Romance, Thriller, Crime, Horror, Science-Fiction, and Young Adult. It comes with a cash prize, a spotlight about you in one of their issues, and a paid trip to their hugely popular Writer’s Digest Conference. Find out more at:

  writersdigest.com/writers-digest-competitions

  Other contests of interest may be found by simple search. Some of them are connected to conferences, which brings us to:

  Conferences

  A good writing conference is a great way to network with other writers and industry professionals. You can learn about your craft, about marketing, about best author practices. You’ll meet experts who can give you advice on research. You might actually make a friend or two.

  Two of the best conferences are Bouchercon and ThrillerFest, both of which I’ve attended on numerous occasions. I’ve never failed to come away with new contacts and information that has proven useful.

  Don’t be shy about this, but also do some prep work. My colleague at the group blog Kill Zone, Laura Benedict, has some sterling advice:

  Be confident.

  This sounds difficult, I know. Sometimes you just have to fake it until you feel it. The NYT bestselling writer waiting in the coffee line ahead of you sits in front of the same blank page that you do e
very day, thinking, “What comes next?” You have that in common. You’re there for a reason, so act like it.

  Be professional.

  This is part of your job. Be sure you note the name of the person you’re talking to. It’s okay to ask, and asking is far preferable to ending up halfway through an impromptu lunch, petrified that you’ll be called on to perform introductions if someone else shows up. If small talk is required, talk about a panel or interview you just attended, or a book you recently read. Not your gallbladder, kids, or most recent tooth implant.

  Be ready to learn.

  Immerse yourself in the conference agenda. People who are interested in the same things you’re interested in put the panels and events together. It’s not all about networking.

  Be curious.

  Most people love to talk about themselves. Ask questions about their work, their pets, their hometown, their (professional) passions. Most wildly successful authors are good at making other people feel special in a short space of time. Really.

  Be modest.

  We’ve all gotten the FB messages: “Hey, we’re friends now. Buy my book!” Every writer wants other people to know about their work. But don’t make that your main goal. Your goal is to learn things, make new friends, and reconnect with old friends. There’s always a good time to exchange cards or bookmarks or websites. Name-dropping is a bit gauche, but allowed in small doses if it’s relevant to the discussion—or makes a better story.