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.