On Writing Pulp - Writing Plot

This is the third part of a three-part series about writing pulp.

This is the last part of the series and we’ll wrap everything up with a look at plot. The most important thing for every story, for a story without a plot is like a Porsche without an engine - a nice vessel, but not doing its real job. There are some aspects in this post which I already mentioned in the first one, but this one is discussing them from a different angle.

Let’s start with some of those aspects I already mentioned about writing pulp in general. A pulp story is action-based. There’s no long philosophical discussions, no page-long descriptions of rolling vistas, but action scene after action scene.

In most cases, the action in those scenes is physical. People are on the run, they fight, they dodge bullets, they climb walls. It’s much easier to write an action-packed scene about someone dangling from a cliff by their little finger than about someone about to lose a very important decision in parliament. And, yes, in case you’re wondering, ‘cliffhanger’ comes from people hanging from cliffs at the end of an episode - go figure.

That doesn’t mean that every action has to be physical, but it’s much harder to write a tight, action-packed political drama than to write a tight, action-packed story about a guy with a whip who is looking for artefacts. Thus the adventure of that guy with the whip is much easier to plot out - just give him a worthy enemy and something interesting to look for, send him across the globe, have fights and flights, and Bob’s your uncle. If you’re really good with suspenseful writing, though, you can also make that political drama work in pulp form.

Action in a pulp story shouldn’t be unnecessarily paused, either. Ideally, there’s no real pause in the action from the first to the last word of the story, so a pulp plot shouldn’t have any on-screen downtime. The hero doesn’t have a right to rest, they need to keep on going, jumping from cliffs, evading the enemy, rescuing the damsel, saving the day. They can and should have their black moment when everything seems lost (often when they’re inevitably caught by the villain, but not simply shot already), but that moment is no downtime, it’s simply a slower moment before the story takes up speed again.

You can sneak in some downtime when the damsel tends to the hero’s wounds while telling them what the villain said, but even that downtime needs to be limited, it must be clear that danger is just smoking a cigarette around the corner - and it’s smoking quickly.

The good thing about keeping the tension in a pulp story is that they are, by their very definition, larger than life. Pulp stories are always about heroes who are just that bit bigger, better, and faster than the rest, who laugh danger in the face, and who come out of their ordeal unchanged. This means it’s hard to go over-the-top in a pulp story, because the top is pretty high up.

At the same time, the factions are usually easy to pick out, the morals of pulp are often very much black and white. The hero is good, the villain is evil. Complicated morals are technically possible, but more often than not unnecessary. You don’t want the reader to have to figure out which of the factions to root for, so the villain comes off as evil early on and it’s clear that the hero, even if he’s more of an anti-hero, does have a certain set of rules which are good to follow. The pulp anti-hero is more of a chaotic good character than of a neutral or even evil one (this sentence was brought to you by D&D). They are not necessarily spending their spare time building homes for orphans, but they’re still good people deep down. The plot needs to reflect that. Simple ‘black and white’ morals don’t work any longer, clear factions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do.

Stakes in pulp are high by nature. The reader’s interest needs to be caught and kept and the higher the stakes, the higher the interest. High stakes can be personal, but in most cases, they’re something more general. Rescuing a damsel is a more personal stake, stopping the villain from using that ice-ray is a more general one. Both work well in pulp, but the interest will be higher when the villain threatens more than two or three people. Keep that in mind when building your plot.

It’s possible to start out with a lower stake which becomes higher as the hero learns about the villain’s true plan, but even the lower stake should already be high enough to interest the readers. Perhaps it looks as if the villain only wants to dominate the hero’s village, but it turns out they have set their eyes on the kingdom’s throne and are doing well so far. That is a good push in stakes, the ones at the beginning being high already (although more personal), but the ones for the big confrontation at the end being much higher still.

Stakes are keeping the tension and tension needs to be kept, but varied in a story. It might be a good idea not to start out with ‘saving the universe’, even if that is going to be the end conflict. Hinting that there’s more to it, though, is always possible.

One interesting plot point for pulp are hidden wars - fights between factions not in the public eye, often not even known by the authorities. Spy stories often have hidden wars between two or more spy organisations - or a spy organisation and a criminal one. It’s in the nature of espionage that most authorities are not in the know. Supernatural dangers and those who fight them are another aspect of that. In urban fantasy and the like, the general populace and the general authorities don’t know that magic and monsters exist (that is the Masquerade), so someone else, someone with the right skills (your hero) must fight them instead. Hidden wars go well with the classic ‘girl reporter’ damsel, by the way. A curious character who gets into hot water by poking their nose into the wrong place, only to be saved by the hero on another mission.

Pulp stories are also escapism, people read them to forget about their real life and imagine something more interesting and more exotic. What better than using exotic locations in this case? The problem is to define what is exotic today. For the readers in the US in the 1930s, essentially everything outside of the US was exotic, no matter whether it was South America, Australia, Europe, Asia, or Africa. Today, people travel a lot and can look at every place on earth through satellite and other pictures. It’s hard to get something exotic out of that. Well, there’s always space, fantasy worlds, or the hidden world behind the world (see the last paragraph).

How to end your story, though? Well, in pulp, the hero almost always wins. Even if the villain happens to get away (and villains die with high frequency in pulp), it’s clear that they’re beaten (for now) and the hero has triumphed.

That is true for all aspects of the plot except for one. If we’re talking about a series and the hero has a love interest, they’re not getting a happy end there. The hero will always prefer the heroic life to the one with the lovely damsel, because they have to stay alert and make sure the world stays protected.

As said, that’s only for series, though. If you write a standalone story with no plans for further adventures, the hero and the damsel can and should get together at the end.

This it is, my series about writing pulp. Keep in mind that pulp always has larger than life things: personalities, plots, stakes, worlds. Pulp is the style where you can’t go wrong with thinking big. Keep your plot full of action, keep the morals easier (though perhaps not black and white), make things hard for the hero, but give them a nice happy end, with or without the damsel.

On Writing Pulp - Writing Characters

This is the second part of a three-part series about writing pulp.

Even though the plot drives the story, the characters more often than not drive the plot. Therefore, this post is all about writing characters for a pulp story.

Pulp stories more often than others are crowded with stereotypes, but that is neither the best way to do it nor the only one. Don’t use stereotypes, but give all important characters (hero, damsel, villain, essentially) a full-fledged character. Give them needs and wants and, most of all, an agenda. With the hero and the villain, that may seem obvious - they usually are at odds because their agendas make their paths cross. They may want the same thing or they may want something they can’t have if the other one gets what they want. The villain may want world domination and the hero may want a free world and that won’t go together at all, so one of them has to lose. They might also both be after the same MacGuffin - you know, that object which everyone wants and the readers couldn’t care less about. In the worst case, they’re both after the damsel - who then often won’t pass the sexy lamp test, but more about that a little later.

You can build a whole story on stereotypes, but stereotypical characters are very limited in their uses. Fleshing a character out opens up much more different paths and that can lead to many more different stories. You can use a lot more different plots with a fleshed-out character, so especially if you’re toying with the thought of starting your own series, it pays to put more work into recurring characters. Those also include henches who survive by the villain’s side, the hero’s friends, mentors, old flames, and other characters who might come back at one point or other.

Damsels are a topic on their own in pulp stories. Pulp stories are infamous for having damsels in them, since it’s an easy way to make life even harder for the hero and it’s a second character who gets a lot of time in the story whom the readers can worry about. Yet, the classic damsel who sits around and waits for the hero to rescue her is an old and tired trope which does need to be reworked these days.

It helps, though, that a lot of damsels in classic pulp were in journalism - quirky girl reporters who stuck their noses into the wrong affairs and got caught because of that. This gave them agency, which is what the aforementioned ‘sexy lamp’ is missing. Essentially, the sexy lamp test is just asking yourself if this (usually female, but male damsels exist) character could be replaced by a sexy lamp without any major changes in the story. If the answer is yes, your character needs more work.

Agency is the easiest way to avoid the sexy lamp - a character with agency not related to the hero has their own way through the story and their own actions to take. While those can lead them into the villain’s lair and there into a cell to be threatened, they are no longer passive and no longer merely there to motivate the hero. They’re their own person, even if said person is locked away for a good portion of the story.

Another way to upgrade the damsel is to make them either try to escape on their own (even if they fail - characters are allowed to fail) or make them gather information from henches who talk too much or from the gloating villain (bonus points for a moustache to twirl - well, no, not really). They are doing something, they are active on their own, and that means they’re not just a sexy lamp.

Apart from the hero, the damsel, and the villain, there’s usually a host of characters you want the reader to keep in mind, either because they’re needed again later in the story or because you’re planning a series and they’ll make a comeback. Those minor characters usually don’t get fleshed out as much as the big three, but there’s a relatively easy way to make them more memorable: make them quirky.

Give those minor characters something easy to recognize them by. That can be a specific way of talking (remember Yoda? I bet you do). It can be a signature outfit or overall look (how often has Rowling pointed out Snape’s hair is in a constant state of greasiness?). It can be a mannerism as well. Just make sure not to give two characters the same quirk and don’t overdo it. Quirks are, when all’s said and done, flavours. They help making your story better and they keep the reader interested. If every character speaks in a different dialect, it will tire the reader out and do nothing to make them memorable (also, I will personally hunt you down and punish you, because writing dialects is a horrid thing to do). If two thirds of your words are all about the signature outfits of your hero’s colleagues at work, it won’t help the story at all. Pick a few minor characters and a few different quirks and help the reader to understand who is more important than the other minor characters and should be kept in mind.

As far as the hero is concerned, pulp is rather flexible. It’s true that a lot of the old pulp heroes are completely good heroes (although lawful, neutral, and chaotic good are all possible). They save the day, save the damsel, and usually refuse recognition. They do their good work in hiding and are just glad to know they did good.

Pulp also has space for anti-heroes, though. Perhaps not the classic pulp with its clear black-and-white morals, but the more modern versions. Those anti-heroes often have a high kill-count and few recurring villains. They do not believe in the good of mankind and they may work for money rather than their own ideals, but they’re still good. They don’t kill indiscriminately, they don’t commit crimes themselves (or if they do, they have a good reason for it), and they save the day. They do it with more grumbling and more grit, but the same end result.

You may not believe it, but the villain is actually as important (if not more so) as the hero. Heroes are easy enough to figure out, but the villain needs real work, because his intimidation and threat level decide just how much tension the reader will feel, how sure the reader will be that the hero can win. The more efficient, competent, and powerful the villain, the better the hero can look after their inevitable success.

Especially power plays a big role with a villain. There has to be a power imbalance between hero and villain (with the villain having more power) for any kind of story to work. A hero can’t look good when they’re more powerful than the villain. Bringing down someone with two helpers when you have an army is not a heroic deed. Bringing down a full army of henchmen with two friends, on the other hand, is very heroic. That’s why your villain needs power and influence. People must fear or adore them. They must seem untouchable at first glance, as if they can get away with everything.

Yet, villains are often no recurring characters in a series. While there are pulp heroes with a nemesis who comes back every other week, this is more common in comic books. In pulp stories, the hero goes up against a new threat every week, so it’s also entirely possible to kill off the villain at the end.

Another trope used often is ‘Two Sides of a Coin’, which means that the hero and the villain have something in common, that they are equals in some way. The easiest and best-know example for this might be Holmes/Moriarty. Both have a vast intellect, but work on different sides of the law. It’s easy enough to imagine that, under other circumstances, their positions in the story might be switched. While this can be interesting, it’s not something to use too often.

Characters are important in any kind of story, but especially in pulp stories. Don’t rely too much on stereotypes, flesh your characters out, give them agency, make them quirky, if they’re going to be important in some way. The hero can be good to neutral, but the villain is always evil. Give the villain more power, even if you want to kill them off at the end.

Next up: Writing Plot.

On Writing Pulp - Writing in General

This is the first part of a three-part series about writing pulp stories.

Pulp is not a genre, it’s a way of writing every genre, therefore, it makes sense to kick off a short three-part series on writing pulp stories with a post on writing in general. The other two parts will focus on writing characters and on plotting such a story.

Pulp writing is action-based, that means there’s not much about characters musing on life or their own past. A pulp hero, no matter the gender, tends to slip from one dangerous situation into the next and the writing must reflect that. One way to do it is to keep very close to the viewpoint character (the hero, the damsel, and the villain or a trusted hench of the villain are classic; depending on the genre, others are possible). This way, the viewpoint character’s emotions and reactions to what is happening can help to intensify the situation.

Say you are writing a thriller pulp story and you want to introduce the threat. Theoretically, you could be using the villain or a hench close to the villain, but it’s even better to make the character who gets killed by the villain or according to the villain’s plan the viewpoint character. Like this, the reader will follow the last minutes in the character’s life and, if you manage to make the character sympathetic, will want to know that the villain will pay for what happens. The threat is introduced and the reader knows what is at stake without long dialogues or internal monologues from anyone - they’ve seen what happened and know it will happen again, unless the hero steps in.

Action-based writing also comes in when it comes to the very start of the story. Introduce the viewpoint character in the middle of the situation, while danger is already close by and they know or suspect it. Draw the reader in by showing them immediately that people will die until the hero saves the day. That is what is generally called a hook in writing - because the right situation at the beginning of a book or a story helps to reel the reader in, like you would reel in a fish on a hook.

Related to the general action-based writing is that you should avoid giving your characters on-screen (or on-page) downtime. Downtime is reached when characters are allowed to rest, to sit by the fire and drink tea, to come down from the heights of the danger they were in. In writing, downtime is often used to introduce lore or deepen the impression of the characters. Pulp should have little to no downtime, the characters should drop from one dangerous action scene into the next. Of course, they can have downtime off the screen - usually, a story isn’t covering the character’s life 24/7, so between the scenes you show, the character can calm down or at least take care of their injuries.

A little cheating when it comes to downtime is to give it by putting characters in a different version of an action scene. Instead of running from an undead mob of villagers or diving off a cliff to avoid being shot down by a group of enemy soldiers, your character can contact someone who gives them necessary information. The can have a heated duel with words and then have to run away at the end, because the enemy has caught up with them. That is, strictly speaking, downtime, but it furthers the plot and sets the next action sequence up.

Tropes are the building blocks of writing, they are specific people or situations or plot points which always work out. It might seem like cheating to use them while writing, but using them well or even masterfully takes a lot of time and practice. In addition, tropes can be subverted which then allows for them to surprise the reader who has seen them before. Plots need twists and turns and a good use of different tropes can provide those. What you should avoid is only using very popular and common tropes - they’ve been done to death and, most likely, have already been subverted in all possible ways recently as well. Pages like TV-Tropes can be very helpful for picking useful tropes and reading up on tropes in general.

It’s important to question tropes, especially the really old ones. Quite some of them can be racist or sexist, which can bleed into your story and give it undertones you might not want in it. While it is possible to subvert such a trope well, it’s not something to tackle or use lightly. In addition, tropes are not an instant solution for writing. Piercing a plot together only from tropes, without any other things in between is going to get you a formulaic story at best and a disaster at worst.

Even though a lot of the original pulp stories were set in the 1930s and 1940s (the golden age of pulp), pulp as a such is not bound to these decades. You can write a pulp story set in the 1700s or set in the year 2587.

The same goes for the genre. You can write erotic pulps, western pulps, crime pulps, sci-fi pulps, fantasy pulps, and whatever other genre you can come up with. There is no pulp genre, although adventure stories, for instance, lend themselves extremely well to the pulp style.

Hard sci-fi is not necessarily a forte of pulp, on the other hand. In pulp stories, science tends to be malleable. You can have ice-beams or medieval star-ships and strange creatures can live under the sea. Magic is entirely possible and can coexist with science, which is normally hard to pull off.

Yet, there are limits to what rules or facts to bend for the sake of pulp. It doesn’t pay to bend facts which are easy to check or which everyone knows - unless you set your story in another reality or on another planet or world. For instance, the Night Watch by Rembrandt is large enough to fill a wall on its own - it was a work Rembrandt was paid for and he painted all members of the group full-sized (presumably, he was paid by the hour). Yet, in a ‘Secret Agent X’ story, a thief steals the painting and carries it away alone. That is a situation where suspension of disbelief can be very, very hard. Whenever you think something up, you’re free to play with it and shape it whatever way works best. When you work with something real, research is necessary.

Exotic locations are another thing which you can and should use (everyone loves it when adventures take place somewhere they’ve never been). Remember, though, that some readers might actually live in exotic location known as Bombay, Paris, or Moscow. They will know what their place looks like and will find it hard to stay with the story while so many mistakes turn up.

Streamlined writing is the last thing I want to talk about for this post. It’s always a good idea to edit your story ruthlessly and remove every scene, line, or word which is not strictly necessary. This is true twice for pulp stories.

They’re supposed to draw the reader along from the first to the last word, so it doesn’t pay to throw in difficult sentences which the reader needs to analyse. Stay with active sentences, leave out unnecessary words, and show what is happening, then you can keep the reader interested and thus make sure they devour the story in as short a time as is possible for them.

This is my advice on writing in general when it comes to pulp stories. Remember to keep the action flowing, be careful with the tropes you use, remember you can use every setting and genre, don’t stress out over scientific details and keep real facts, and edit ruthlessly.

Next up: Writing Characters.

Women Everywhere!

On our planet, about fifty percent of all humans are female (moving towards fifty-one percent, as it were). This means a large number of people you meet when going out on each day should be female, too - unless you live in a society where movement of women is severely limited by the laws. Why, then, does it seem to be so different in stories?

This isn’t just about having female heroes or at least some female members of your hero’s team. This is also about all the people the hero talks to, buys stuff from, asks for assistance. Even if the hero group is just hitting the local tavern in the evening, why is it shown to be filled with men only? Why are the only women around there often the ‘serving wenches’ the heroes can comment on or lust for?

A lot of fantasy novels are based on medieval Europe and at that time reading was a rare skill (even most nobles couldn’t write and read, it was mostly down to priests, monks, and nuns), so the women certainly didn’t stay at home with a good book. Radio, TV, or internet weren’t invented already, so there was little to do for relaxation in your home. As soon as one of the children was old enough to look after the rest of the kids, there was no reason why a woman shouldn’t come with her husband every now and then. A few women peppered in with the men would, therefore, make sense.

As for the ‘serving wenches’ - in most cases, they might actually have been the innkeeper’s wife and children. Families worked trades, shops, or inns together, so the husband might keep the bar, the wife might do the kitchen, and the children would help out wherever needed (taking care of mounts brought in by guests, serving meals and drinks, assisting in the kitchen, taking care of rooms, etc.). Therefore, the innkeeper probably wouldn’t take too well to the heroes interest in his waitresses.

Apart from that, women were far more visible in medieval times than they are in most fantasy stories. As mentioned, trades were a family business, so while the blacksmith was hammering metal into submission, his wife might very well sell the finished products or do the first talks about what the heroes would need. Most likely, she’d be able to tell how hard it would be to repair that sword or she might sharpen their weapons - a less strenuous task than actual blacksmithing.

It’s not unlikely some shops might even be owned by women - women were allowed to own land and operate shops (unlike some crafts and trades, where only the widow could continue the work of her late husband). The heroes could very well be buying their provisions from a couple of women on the market or a woman keeping a store.

Yet, even the side characters which only exist for purposes of giving those heroes what they need more likely than not are male in many cases. It also doesn’t get better in stories set closer to our own reality or in our reality. There are many women who work jobs the heroes could make use of, yet healing (whether in fantasy or real settings) seems the predominant way they come in (that and the love interest). What about the woman who sells guns under the counter? The female hacker? The lady who knows all and sundry (what with women supposed to gossip more than men)? They can exist just as well.

Women make up fifty percent of the world population. They don’t have to make up fifty percent of a hero party (though it would be nice), but they should exist in a story. The heroes should meet them every now and then.

Of course, some will argue that there are settings where few or no women are present, such as a jail or the barracks. While that is true to a degree, those are very specific settings which aren’t used that often in stories. In most cases, heroes pass through regular towns and villages and visit regular places. In those cases, there’s no need to omit women. They’ll be there, so show them.

In case you have a society which does keep women from public spaces, you should think about why that is the case. Are women in that society so rare they need to be protected in every way? Are they not considered fully human? If yes, why? It’s not lightly that any society would confine fifty percent of the populace to the private space. Most societies don’t keep one gender locked away in general, so if you have a society which does that, it should come with good reasons (at least within that society’s logic).

Again, this is not about making fifty percent of your hero party female. While I could think of good reasons to have more than the one ‘tough girl’ in a group of heroes (representation, for one thing, is much easier if you can spread traits and characteristics across several people), there can be good reasons to have more men than women in a group - even no women at all. They could be former mercenaries (in a society where female mercenaries don’t exist) or they could be monks (not all monks are peaceful), for instance.

On the other hand, the more diverse your group is in every aspect, the more ways there are to solve the quests they go on and to win the fights. Just as different types of fighters in a group are good, different ethnicities, genders, or sexual orientations can have a lot of advantages for the writer. They make the world bigger, more vivid, and more lived-in - more organic. The more organic and lived-in a world seems, the easier it is for the reader to live in it, too.

In most cases, your world will have as many men as women around. Keep that in mind when you’re writing a scene. It usually doesn’t hurt when side characters change gender, because they’re just there to perform a service for the heroes. Make your world feel more lived-in and make it diverse and interesting for the reader.