“No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell.”
That’s the promise Lester Dent makes, second sentence of his Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot.
Dent’s little essay packs a surprisingly limber, versatile formula for storytelling – a bit like a slim Swiss Army knife. It doesn’t apply to everything (you can’t very well write a “two people sit at a table and talk” type of sci-fi story with it – at least, I can’t) but what it does apply to, it does the job very well, and you have a great deal of fun writing it.
If writing free is the path of inspiration and surprise, the Master Pulp Formula – writing staccato – is the path of fun.
Example Story: Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)
On the face of it, it just sounds like some other guy’s Save the Cat model. Start in media res. Introduce all the characters. Show, don’t tell. In a 6,000-word story, you have to hit an action scene and a plot twist at every 1,500 words.
But, there in the descriptions of the “different things” that would be “swell” to have the villain doing for this story, there’s
“IS THERE A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER THE HERO?”
Lester dent
I defy you not to hear that in Howard Cassell’s voice. Walter Winchell’s at a stretch.
I got to admit, that’s what first hooked me. The lingo. The jive. That breezy thirties style.
But, underneath that, there’s a powerful engine of storytelling in here, or, rather, of yarning. Because this is a method of building the kind of story where characters act, things happen, and by the end, something large or small has changed in the world. Stories of any length, depth, or complexity. Stories like solarpulp.
To begin with, it is not limited to 6,000 words. Indeed, I’ve only rarely managed it in 6,000 words, most of the stories I write in this métier average 14,000 words. It’s the proportions that matter:
- A quarter of the way in, the hero has an action-packed confrontation (suitably scaled up or down to the size of the story at hand) and a twist and setback that keeps them from finishing it then and there.
- The hero gets more grief, mainly not their own fault, and gets into another conflict halfway through. And it should be a different kind – if Doña Ana Lucía drew her sword and dueled at the first quarter, let her give chase or get pinned to a firefight now.
- In the third quarter, the menace grows thicker and darker, and a mirror of the first quarter twist leaves the hero with almost no hope of success. The action may retreat for most of the last quarter, but the menace and tension mount until the hero is “almost buried in his troubles,” then, and here Dent emphasizes, “the hero extricates himself with HIS OWN SKILL, training or brawn.”
- After the climax, the hero clears up any mysteries and we close on a final line, “the snapper” that leaves the reader with the intended takeaway feeling.
These outlines or master formulas are only something to make you certain of inserting some physical conflict, and some genuine plot twists, with a little suspense and menace thrown in. Without them, there is no pulp story.
Lester dent
This structure applies to novelettes, too. It applies to movies – let me take Raiders of the Lost Ark:
“First line, or as near thereto, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble.”
Indy is betrayed before we even see his face, and then repeatedly by his remaining colleagues, infiltrating the temple of the Hovitos. Then, of course, Belloq shows up and chases him out. All this in the first ten minutes.
“Hero’s endeavours land him in actual physical conflict near the end of the first [quarter]…there is a complete surprise twist development.”
The destruction of the Raven Bar (and Marion’s triumphant, angry “I’m your goddamned partner!”) comes at almost precisely the one-quarter mark of Raiders. And with Sallah and “the boss German, Dietrich” introduced less than a minute later, all the players are on stage.
“Another physical conflict […] a surprising plot twist to end the [second quarter] […] Does the second part have SUSPENSE? […] Is the second part logical?”
Sallah captured, Indy and Marion trapped in the Well of Souls by Belloq and his Nazi friends, who now have the Ark. This kicks off one of the greatest chains of action scenes in all of American cinema, the escape from the Well of Souls, the Airplane Fight, and the Truck Chase. Although the action-packing is heavy (and lesser creators than Lucas, Ford, and Spielberg at the height of their powers would have made it drag), the timing is still there – the twist that they’ve been discovered comes just before the halfway mark, the snakes just after.
“A physical conflict […] a surprising plot twist, in which the hero preferably gets it in the neck bad […] The hero finds himself in a hell of a fix.”
After the extended action sequence ending with the Ark, Indy, and Marion aboard the Bantu Wind, the conflict at the end of the third quarter is understated – it’s a suspense scene, rather than an action scene. Dietrich and his men storm the ship, take the Ark, re-capture Marion, and Indy is barely hanging on by a strap to a Nazi sub. He has to hide, skulk, and disguise himself, and meanwhile we find out they’re not going to Berlin – why not? What is Belloq planning?
“Get the hero almost buried in his troubles […] The hero extricates himself by HIS OWN SKILL.”
Indy challenged Belloq, holding the Ark ransom for Marion, but he relents, and is captured to witness Belloq’s moment of triumph. Does Indy wriggle out of the ropes and take on an entire division of armed Nazis? Well. No. He escapes the fate of those who look into the Ark by his own skill – heeding all the warnings he’s got since the pointer scene that the Ark is not for human eyes or hands and shutting his own eyes and, critically, passing this on to Marion, too. He didn’t get out of the ropes with his own skill, but he got out from the wrath of God that way, and that’s a damn sight bigger.
“The snapper, the punch line to end it.”
I don’t really have to say it, do I? The government warehouse. The Ark was lost, then found, and now, symmetrically, is lost again. Cue John Williams.And it applies to novels.
Take Dune, for example.
The first quarter conflict is Yueh’s betrayal, the fall of House Atreides, with the twist being that the Fremen are far more than anyone (even the Duke) anticipated. In the middle, we have the knife-fight with Jamis, and the revelations of the source of the spice and the Waters of Life. The third quarter, the action is Paul riding the worm and the twist that now is the time for his strike against the Emperor and the Harkonnens. The final confrontation is the knife-fight with Feyd-Rautha, the twist being that Paul has given himself to the coming Jihad. The final line is a bit weak, but the rest of the book’s strengths more than make up for it.
But in a novel, you need something more.
This wasn’t the case for Dent. Each Doc Savage novel ended with Doc much the same as he was before – the globe-trotting do-gooder, Trouble Buster, Inc., the Man of Bronze. He is unchanged for all his adventures, a bronze statue, and even when Monk quits smoking, or Ham acquires a pet monkey, or Doc acquires a cousin, it doesn’t change them. They learn nothing, for they already know all.
That doesn’t satisfy. Not anymore.
The folks over at Rampant Games, in their exhaustive How to Write Pulp for Fun and Profit, explore the pulp character arc. Building on Dent’s model, they introduce the standard pulp hero character development – the hero initially starts out seeking a false goal, start incorporating a better/truer goal, plan to go back, and ultimately commit to the truer goal in the end. This opens up possibilities. Consider Temple of Doom: Indy lights out after the Shankara Stone (for fortune and glory), discovers what’s happened to the missing children, frees them (while still collecting the Shankara stones), and uses two of them to defeat the villain who enslaved the children and returns the last to its home village – giving up the fortune and glory that would have come with it.
Now back to Dune. Paul seeks vengeance for his father’s death and his rightful place as ruler of Arrakis. He glimpses a vision of the jihad to come and the Golden Path, and works to avoid it while continuing to pursue his vengeance. But, here, Paul fails the character arc – when his son is killed, he pursues his vengeance to the hilt, rejecting the “truer goal” of avoiding all the havoc, chaos, and bloodshed it entails.
Indy’s is a triumphant pulp arc. Paul’s is a tragic one.
In any story of action, you can have the protagonist choose to embrace or forsake the higher calling that comes along in the course of pursuing their base goal. The idol, or the friends we made along the way? And many a villain putting a hero in that perilous position had a journey like that once of their own, one that, like Paul, they failed. Every sinner has a future and every saint a past, isn’t that so?
Finally, it’s not limited to just action. Romances often work to the same tempo as Dent’s most testosterone-poisoned pulps. Consider Pride and Prejudice…
…the second ball (where Elizabeth verbally fences with Darcy before he lights off for London with Bingley) and the sudden departure leaving Jane in the lurch are the end of the first quarter, Darcy’s first proposal (and the contents of his letter) and Elizabeth’s rejection are the confrontation at the end of the second, Lydia’s surprise marriage to Wickham caps off the third, and Elizabeth’s confrontation with Lady Catherine and reconciliation with Darcy round the book out. The action, here, is relational – conflicts between people and between people and their own hearts, where the “surprise per page” is in the repartee and the conflict is handled with words (or subtle gestures) and not fists.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider how to apply action, twists, and climaxes to erotica.
Next time, we’ll wind it up with the last of my three tools: Orson Scott Card and his magnificent mice.
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