R. Jean Mathieu's Innerspace

SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates every other Friday.

Month: February 2024

Lester Dent - the man for writing staccato

Three Tools of Writing: Writing Staccato

16 February, 2024 /
This is the guy that wrote all those luscious descriptions of Doc Savage’s physique.

“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…

Those of us who are into boys can contemplate Mr. Darcy aaaaaaall daaaaay…

…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.

Ray Bradbury

Three Tools of Writing: Writing Free

9 February, 2024 /

The two most influential non-fiction books on my writing career are Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I got introduced to both in those halcyon days of my homeschooling, when I launched my first magazine and sent in my first story and won 3rd place in the Ray Bradbury contest from seven states away. And, from that first magic hour between eleven and two in the morning, powered by Pepsis, cheese sarnies, and the Blade Runner soundtrack, they’ve always gone hand-in-hand in my mind.

Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg.
Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury.

Both books are collections of short essays, approaching writing from different angles in each, but often singing the same hymns in new variations. Both sing of the passion of writing, of the great giddy joy of watching the words unfold onto the page. “I wind them up and watch them go!” exclaims Bradbury in his perpetually ten-year-old voice. “Set your fingers on the keys, lay your head back, and just let it flow” says Natalie Goldberg in the weary voice of a Midwestern Zen master, before enthusing about how the computer will wrap around your words so you don’t have to reset the typewriter. Both are delighted to be startled, awed by sudden insight, adherents of a mystical (dare I say Zen) approach that comes at storytelling as the prophet comes to the Divine, and like the prophet must describe the indescribable, and put into words what transcends all words.

Example stories: Hull Down, The Short, Strange Life of Comrade Lin

Bradbury comes around again and again to his lists of words – free-association and psychological outpourings of nouns and phrases. I’ve come to calling them “Bradbury lists.” Here’s one I free-associated recently:

The glass miles. The glass acres. The electric chimneys. The chimneys of the sun. The snow gardens. The gardens of the north. The inheritance. The trust. The shrinking inheritance. The trust under glass. The oncoming storm. The glass inheritance. The wildfire. Fire on the snow. Hot, Wet Canadian Summer. The slush. The broken ice. Plants or power? Guns or butter? The chimney and the arpent. The plants and the plant.

But what to do with them?

Peer at them.

Bradbury looked deep into “The Ravine,” and saw there a memory, the tickle up his back as a young boy raced home in the darkness in Waukegan, Illinois in 1928. I let my own mind flitter over “the Diction-fairy” and wondered what such a creature could be. Other times, amidst “the corals” and “the fishery,” saw “the city sunk, the city risen,” and asked, what city had it been? How had it sunk amidst the corals (as clearly it had, based on where in the paragraph it was)? And how did it rise again?

Then, something …catches. I have no other word for it. Like the dust in a nebula converging, like a child quickening in the womb, like a spark in the kindling, something catches and lives. The idea takes on life and begins to spark all on its own. I look at “the Diction-fairy” and I can hear Mom describing her to the narrator, feel the rush of childlike hope in his heart, and then it’s off to the races. And a race it is, you have to be fast to catch an idea that’s taken off in your head, get down the bones of it, sketch out the size of it, even just gently touch on the magnificent thing you have just witnessed inside your own skull.

And that’s where Natalie Goldberg comes in.

As Ray returns to his lists, Natalie returns to her pages, the freewritten stuff every morning and whenever she needs it after. You can see it in the rhythms of her (never more than a few pages) essays, the sway of her hand when she wrote them longhand into those silly 99c Tweety Bird ringed notebooks. She doesn’t stop to correct her spelling or her grammar or her diction – indeed, it’s a sign that something has broken through, something come alive, if the rush of word-idea-flow-motion is too quick to be caught by mere English. Shocking phrases jump out, stark truths that are somehow comforting for being true and naked, insights into her life or her writing.

The poet’s credo is to “write drunk, revise sober.”

This is the drunkenness.

“Writers don’t drink because they’re writers. Writers drink because they’re writers who aren’t writing.” – Natalie Goldberg

I call it “writing free.” From sitting in stillness, like a good Quaker, allowing nouns to rise, recording them on a page or a document (anything, as long as it’s blank. It’s important that it was blank) to the contemplation of one or another as they call out to me – here a memory, there a nameless sensation, there the echo of a voice I almost heard once – and watch them play off each other, catch fire, burst into sun, quicken into life, and take off! And I’m racing off after them, across Natalie’s ever-forgiving blank pages, the new living thing turning phrases and turning ideas and turning up laughter until I arrive at the end of the story…

…when a soldier’s life meant something, when it never did the first time…

…when the Song of Seikilos sings out forever from the sun…

…when the Diction-fairy turned out to be real…

…when Eli Shipley abandons Tchang to his fate…

…when the dead Dyson sphere begins to knit, slowly, imperceptibly, back together…

And I am shocked. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I cry. But never did I expect how that one would turn out!

And the beauty of it is, neither did anyone else.

Back in 2022, coming out of a long, dry stretch, I wrote of “angels from the Id.” When writing free works purest, finest, that is what it is. It is something that really does touch transcendence, allows me to write something greater than myself, greater than the reader. And a handful of times, it comes out perfect on the first try.

But when it doesn’t, I go and make love to my wife, read Les Misérables to my daughter, do karate, read the latest Asimov’s. And the next day, sober, I sit down to edit. There is nothing sacred about words. They can be cleaned up, moved around, refitted, if it makes the story better.

It’s just that, sometimes, when you write free…the story is sacred, and it infuses the words with a power you never held alone.

It’s almost Zen.

Ringo Starr, 1964.

Three Tools of Writing: Introduction

2 February, 2024 /
Ringo Starr, personal hero, 1964. Seen here with Paul's grandfather. He's a very clean old man, inn'e?

REPORTER: “Are you a mod or a rocker?”

RINGO: “Er, no, I’m a mocker.”

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

A shower or a teller?

First-person or third-?

Are you a Shaker, a Quaker, a candlestick-maker?

The whole damn writing community defines ourselves by our strictures. You write fantasy, I write science fiction. She’s literary, he’s genre. Are you profic, antiship, a twit, a bookstagrammer?

Let’s us draw lines in the sand and pick a side, it’ll be great sport!

Except…

I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, and under other names, romance, Westerns, erotica, mysteries, thrillers, and men’s pulp. I take great pride in it. Each genre strengthens the others.

QUERY: Are you a plotter or a pantser?

ROSCOE: I’m all three.

Welcome to R. Jean Mathieu’s Three Tools of Writing.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to walk you through some of the ways I write stories. I say “some of the ways,” because no two stories are the same, and because the tools are always the same. I don’t scream on Twitter how all you need to fix a bed is a hammer, or how all cabinets should be built with screws only. (I scream about other things on Twitter, thank you very much.) Instead, I look at the job, pick the tool I think is right for the job, and try it. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try a different tool – and a different way of approaching the story.

I have three tools that I come back to again and again, well-worn and fitted, after twenty-five years of constant use, to my hand. They are:

  1. Bradbury’s lists (and Goldberg’s free hand)
  2. Dent’s Master Pulp Formula
  3. Card’s MICE Quotient

I’ll be going into each in detail over the following weeks, but here’s the short version.

Ray Bradbury’s free-association lists, in my mind, are bound forever to Natalie Goldberg’s free-writing notebooks. Ray conjured out of the air lists of nouns, nouns that became memories, or notions, and which burst forth into characters or conceits and finally into stories. Many of his classics still bear the stamps of their birth – “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Long Rain.” And Natalie Goldberg, a poet of my mother’s generation, believed in the truth of freewriting, of allowing the words to race across the page without censure from our conscious minds. Hell, I’m doing it right now. Both believed in the bones of stories, letting these hard, firm truths thrust upward and outward to startle and inspire us. And, taken together, they have written me stories that made me weep.

Lester Dent’s Master Pulp Formula is just that – a formula for writing a pulp yarn of six thousand words, applicable at sixteen thousand or sixty thousand, believe you me. It’s a formula for keeping everything in proportion – so your story doesn’t start dragging in the second quarter, or rushes unsatisfactory toward a crashing climax. And, with a sufficiently loose definition of ‘action,’ you can apply it to startling results to romance, erotica, or Westerns, too.

(And remember, per the Snowflake Method, it’s not really an interesting story until the third perspective enters the page.)

Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being – but, confoundingly, also a very good writer. He’s not the only one, not even the only one on your bookshelf. And, before I knew what a terrible human being he was, I read his book, and his method of writing – the MICE Quotient – is too good a way to write for me to thrust away. What, then, is your story? How do you frame it? Is it coming to a place? Or is it asking a question? Or fixing a rent in the world? Or struggling against your place in the world? The power here is that any one idea – a person, a place, a mere notion – can become different stories depending on which avenue you pursue, how you choose to frame it.

Here they are, three tools, three totally contradictory ideas about writing, about art, about storytelling. And I use them all.

Because each could be the right tool for the given job.

Join me, over the next four weeks, as I show you how to use my three tools for your writing job.

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