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There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. That’s the opening of the classic pulp story “Red Wind” by one of the greatest practitioners of the form, Raymond Chandler. The paragraph sets a tone. It gives you a sense of what’s coming. We know it’ll have at least one dead body and plenty of sharp gab. Pulp
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the seven critical success factors: plot, structure, characters, scenes, dialogue, voice, and theme.
Start by creating what’s called an “elevator pitch.” That is, a three-sentence squib that gives you the basic, high-concept spine of your story. Sentence one is character + vocation + current situation. Sentence two starts with “When” and is what I call the Doorway of No Return––the thing that pushes the Lead into the main plot. Sentence three begins with “Now” and the death (physical, professional, or psychological/spiritual) stakes.
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
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Mickey Spillane, the hard-boiled paperback king who was once the best-selling author in the world,
John D. MacDonald. He wrote a string of paperbacks in the 1950s that I would place alongside any output of that time.
Elmore Leonard got his start in the 50s with pulp-style Westerns before moving on to crime paperbacks.
At minimum, pulp fiction has a straightforward, storytelling function. Isaac Asimov had some thoughts on this in his memoir I. Asimov. Reflecting on how to be prolific, he said: If you try to turn out a prose poem, that takes time, even for an accomplished prose poet like Ray Bradbury or Theodore Sturgeon. I have deliberately cultivated a very plain style, even a colloquial one, which can be turned out rapidly and with which very little can go wrong.
entire book on Voice: The Secret Power of Great Writing, which is my complete statement on this subject.
Put a mark after the word lukewarm. This is the place where we’re going to go a little deeper. Open up a new document. You are going to write a “page-long sentence.” This is a run-on, fast-as-you-can-write sentence exploring as much of Dirk’s emotional landscape as possible. If you really are feeling it, please don’t
Dialogue
1. Be Witty
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.
But I didn’t want to lay that on the reader. So I did it this way:
Leeza looked across the street. Then she turned and ran. I said something that sounded like woodpecker myself and gave chase.
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
6. Use action beats
7. Place information within confrontation
That’s a cheap way to deliver the info to the reader, and it shows.
Cliché Hunting
“She looked like a million bucks tax-free.” That little addition tax-free takes it out of the realm of cliché.
If you were to give each of these areas a day of attention during the revision process,
The old pulp magazines had literate and savvy publishers, the best of whom could spot and nurture talent. Not so the Amazon marketplace, which was open to all.
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.
So when it comes to short pulp works, I recommend self-publishing, and doing so through Amazon’s exclusive Kindle
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:
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.)
1. Your writing 2. Your book description copy 3. Your covers 4. Your email list 5. Your pricing
In 1912, a little book called The Fiction Factory came out. The subtitle was: Being the Experience of a Writer Who, for Twenty-Two Years, Has Kept a Story-Mill Grinding Successfully. It was by a man named William Wallace Cook using the pseudonym John Milton Edwards. (You can access the entire public-domain book at Gutenberg.org) The book is his no-nonsense account of becoming a successful pulp writer through discipline and hard work. His mind and his typing fingers were, to him, a factory, producing product for the various publications open to him.
The libraries, as they were written by Edwards, were typed on paper 8-1/2" by 13", the marginal stops so placed that a typewritten line approximated the same line when printed. Eighty of these sheets completed a story, and five pages were regularly allowed to each chapter. Thus there were always sixteen chapters in every story.
