If you want to win an award for writing, you’re better off sticking to literary fiction. If you want high sales, better stick to genre fiction. But if you want to try writing something that’ll be as much fun to create as it will be to read? Then try your hand at writing pulp fiction!
This 6 point guide should hopefully get you started! Lester Dent’s four-part pulp plot will be invaluable to you. If you want to read his article about it, here’s the fuller link, and it’s well worth the visit, but I’ll give you the shorter version here.
1) Read Pulp is The Key to Writing Pulp Fiction
But the Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access archive and digital research initiative that aims to study and preserve pulp magazines, including Amazing Stories, Frontier Stories and Out of this World Adventures. You can even read some of them on their website. You can also check out ThePulp.Net for all things pulp. PulpSerenade.com is another great resource.
Bottom line is, you have to read it before you can write it. But it’s so much fun to read.
2) Decide On Your Main Elements Before You Start Writing
Dent suggests coming up with a murder method for the villain to use, something for the villain to be seeking, a location, and some sort of menace “which is to hang like a cloud over hero”. Personally I think the formula works with other options as well; I’ve changed it to include things the villain wants to prevent, rather than seek.
Either way, knowing where you’re going to set the story helps you to come up with a murder method (maybe it’s location specific?) as well as your protagonist.
3) Split Your 6000-word Story Into Four 1500 Word Chunks
I know, I know, the traditional structure dictates you use three acts, but we’re writing pulp fiction, okay? Four quarters is perfectly fine. And before you shoot me for recommending anything formulaic, it’s when you learn to write within constraints that you really hone what it is that you’re doing.
What You Need
Part 1 needs suspense, a mystery, and the hero attempts to solve the problem…but it’s too soon. He fails. Drop him into hot water – and I mean REALLY hot water. There should be a surprise twist somewhere towards the 1500 word mark.
Part 2 has more suspense, but growing menace. Pile on the trouble and the problems, give him plenty of struggles, and preferably another physical conflict. Whack in another plot twist at the end of this part. It’s in this section that you can try adding surprises to add mystery. Remember to show, don’t tell. The reader needs to feel like they’re there.
Part 3 is even more grief for the hero. You still need suspense, but now the hero needs to be making some progress. Maybe he corners the villain, or a lackey. Another physical conflict! And round out the part with another plot twist. Just remember to build atmosphere and use description – the reader should be able to ‘see’ the action!
Finally, in part 4, you pile everything you can onto the hero. It looks like everything is lost! This is the part where James Bond is strapped to the table with the laser advancing towards his privates while the countdown to Armageddon ticks down beside him. The hero gets himself out of it using some kind of skill or training. There’s a final twist, perhaps in the ‘reveal’ of who really did it, and there should be some kind of punchline.
4) You Get To Use Solid Guidelines To Structure Your Story
You might be thinking that if you stick to the quarters laid out above, your story will be too rigid. No it won’t – it’ll be pulp! Just like science fiction needs particular props, and musicals need, well, music, the pulp story has a certain set of conventions too. You won’t be less of a writer for sticking to them.
And no deus ex machina!! Your hero can’t get out of trouble with a last minute intervention by someone else. He or she has to get themselves out of it. That’s why they’re the hero.
But the driving point of writing pulp fiction is including plenty of suspense, to keep the reader reading, and plenty of detail! The whole beauty of pulp is that readers can see the story unfolding. The minute you drop out of showing the action into telling them what’s happening is the minute they wander off.
5) Writing Pulp Fiction Is The Best Way to Learn How To Write Conflict
When I wrote The Guns of Retribution as a pulp Western, I followed Dent’s pulp plot, and I didn’t necessarily want to provide conflict for the sake of conflict. Rather I wanted to use it as a means for Grey to prove himself as a hero – not to himself, but to the reader. Grey will always be a hero to me – but he needs to be a hero to you, too, and the only way for him to do that is to act like one.
Conflict is the best way to keep someone reading. If your hero has nothing to do, then why should your reader care?
6) Remember That Pulp is Accessible
The stories focused on high adventure and escapism – exactly what you’d need in the years following the Depression and the Second World War. The magazines, and their stories, were intended as mass entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to entertain people!
When I wrote The Guns of Retribution, I wasn’t aiming for highbrow art or literary fiction – I just wanted people to read and enjoy the story, and to spend a few hours in Retribution and its surroundings. Pulp stories aren’t high literature but they get people reading, and using your imagination to picture the scene as a bounty hunter and his associates attempt to board a speeding train is far more productive than watching a Z-list celebrity act like a moron towards a bunch of other Z-list celebrities in a fake ‘house’.
Will you try your hand at writing pulp fiction, or will you consider reading it? Let me know below!
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I like reading whatever interests me, from sci-fi, to historical fiction, to pulp fiction. No genre should be denied a true lover of fiction.
As for writing pulp fiction, it’s the same as writing. If it interests me enough, I’ll try it. But in the end, I’ll write what I enjoy and let it fall into whatever genre it chooses.
Regardless of writing genre or style, it shouldn’t be about money. It should be about telling a story, having something to say, and having fun.
See, pulp isn’t really something that you can decide after the fact is pulp – you set out to write it, or you don’t, because of the reasons listed above. It has got a strict formula and people have adhered to it since it began. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
Also I disagree that writing shouldn’t be about money. Even the earliest wandering storytellers traded stories for room and board.
Well this is cool I’ve never heard of pulp. Actually that’s not true I have but I didn’t know what it was. Love learning something new
Some people can be quite disparaging towards it but it’s really fun to write!
I know I said this on Twitter, but I love your post. Pulp is so interesting and fun. You’ve given me a much-needed kick in the pants to get writing longer stories. (And a formula to do it!) So, yes, I’m going to try my hand at some pulp. Thanks! ❤️
Just finished my dime novel–albeit these little books were a precursor to pulp fiction as well as the modern day paperbacks. l write historical mysteries/thrillers (era 1880s in London & San Francisco) and I had an idea that needed to be a dime novel. It’s a “spin-off,” if you will, of a full size historical I wrote set in San Francisco: 1886Ties That Bind. I wasn’t sure if this little novella was going to fly, and a bit nervous that it would be tossed out with a laugh, but my editor just returned it to me, along with his notes. Braced for the worst, imagine my huge relief to get this comment from him:
“I thoroughly enjoyed 1883: Black Bart. I’d never read a dime novel before and I’m generally not a lover of Westerns, but you did a masterful job drawing me into not only that historical genre but also the story of Black Bart and James Hume.”
So I THANK YOU for your helpful advice. So grateful that there are folks like you willing to help the little writers like me.
Now…back to work, because, as usual, the same editor who says he enjoyed it, has a lot of edits for me to tend to. LOL!
Those kind of books can be a great way of hooking readers because they’re just so much fun! And glad you found the post useful 🙂
Hi Icy,
I actually had a mentor who writes pulp and started a fight card series of pulp boxing stories. I have written two in that genre and a third is on it’s way to publication. We have about 42 authors under the fight card series. It was a great introduction to pulp writing. I love to write action and pulpy romance. I do like the steps you have outlines and will make sure my stories incorporated them to sharpen them.
Do you ever do reviews on pulp-style books so I might tell if I’m on the right page?
I don’t do that many book reviews at the moment but I do post reviews on Amazon!
This is super easy outline to follow without having to wade through the offal trying to figure out the edible bits.
I found your page through Paperback Junky on YouTube, he was doing a review on Pulp writing books.
I already love reading pulp. I just might give writing it a try.
I’ve never understood the concept of the three act story anyway. The first and third act are each a quarter of the story and the second act is half the story, divided into two parts by the mid-point reversal. So why isn’t that a four act structure?
Lester Dent had the decency to admit what seems obvious to me.
I mostly write YA fantasy, which could be done as pulp if I like, but I do currently have a pulp fantasy project about a roving warrior with a vendetta against an organization of criminal orcs.
Kind of like Lamont Cranston in Hyborea. With a hinged spontoon that folds up in three sections, because a fantasy hero should have a really cool weapon.
Bonus points: the folding spear was a real weapon. Nobody knows what it was for, but it was really cool.
Honestly this helped me , I’ve been writing my own sort of pulpy hybrid . It’s really freeing.
I wish more people would write pulp!