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.