How to Write Pulp Fiction (Bell on Writing)

by James Scott Bell

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;...