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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

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Dent1Lester Dent was a prolific pulp author, best remembered for creating the adventure hero, Doc Savage.

And speaking of Doc Savage, there is currently a Shane Black film project to star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as The Man of Bronze. Hopefully it will introduce Savage and Dent to a new generation.

The Doc Savage stories were published under the house name of Kenneth Robeson, which is a reason Dent’s name isn’t as well-remembered as it should be.

Dent cranked out 159 Doc Savage novels, but he also wrote hundreds of short stories for the pulps across several genres, including war, westerns and mysteries. The John D. MacDonald fan (which should be everyone!) might want to check out his two Oscar Sail stories for a little hint of Travis McGee. “Sail” is included in the massive (over a thousand pages!) anthology from Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.

Will Murray (whose name you’re going to be seeing again here at Black Mask very soon) compiled a thorough bibliography, and it includes a very nice intro about Dent.

Dent, who died in 1959, a few weeks after suffering a heart attack, left behind a master plot formula for generating 6,000 word short stories. I’m going to let you read it below, in full, then give you some comments related to it from one of the top fantasy authors of all time.

This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words. No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell. The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.

Here’s how it starts:

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Dark Lords Through History: Waller Newell’s Tyrants

Dark Lords Through History: Waller Newell’s Tyrants

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Tyrants
Dark Lords Through History (And Why They Did It)

Remember the Sword of Damocles?

Damocles flatters King Dionysus; “Lord! How fortunate and god-favored you are to be so powerful!”

The king — really a tyrant — says, “Sure. Let’s change places for a day.”

So, Damocles has a right old time feasting and carousing, right up until the moment Dionysus points out the sharp sword hung over his head, suspended by just one fraying thread…

Eek!

The take home is, WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO BE A TYRANT, YOU IDIOT? EVERYBODY WILL TRY TO KILL YOU.

And that’s one of the questions that Professor Waller R. Newell sets out to answer in his Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror (the which I talked his publisher into sending me as a nice follow up to Holland’s book on the Caesars.).

By “tyrant”, he means a ruler with personal power unconstrained by law or custom.

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How to Write a Dungeon Crawl (in Actual Fiction and Not a Tabletop Game!)

How to Write a Dungeon Crawl (in Actual Fiction and Not a Tabletop Game!)

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dungeon map 2
Extended dungeon crawls are rare in genre fiction.

It’s still a goto for roleplayers, you see the equivalent in movies, but extended dungeon crawls are rare in genre fiction.

Even when you go back to Dungeon and Dragons‘ literary roots, you don’t really find proper dungeon stories!

Conan generally offers up 1-2 room complexes, e.g. in Robert E. Howard’s classic tale “God in the Bowl.” Tolkien uses mega dungeons, but with narrative summary and — unless they are really just an underground battlefield — only limited denizens. Clark Ashton Smith’s Seven Geases  is close to a dungeon in setting, but in form is a quest story that happens to be underground.

Dungeonland
What makes a dungeon fun to play through doesn’t automatically make it fun to read about.

What makes a dungeon fun to play through — a series of puzzles and tactical or diplomatic challenges — just doesn’t automatically make it fun to read about, or easy to write. And the physical drama that works on screen — Indiana Jones stuff with narrow escapes and trundling rocks — doesn’t generate enough wordcount, and can only be visceral for so long.

Even so, it can be done, and modern writers do it and — of course — I’ve been pulling apart good examples to see how and why they work…

Several modern writers have pulled off extended dungeons crawls or similar. Just to name a few random examples: Paul S Kemp’s exquisite Egil and Nix stories are actually about professional dungeoneers in a Sword and Sorcery world. The climax to  Michael J Sullivan’s wonderful Riyria Chronicles entails an underground adventure.  And Kenneth Oppel’s wonderful Steampunk YA Skybreaker takes us exploring a drifting mega-zeppelin.

Taking them and others together, and without spoilers, here’s what makes a literary dungeon adventure work.

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Three Ways to Write a Cast of Supporting Characters Without Confusing the Reader

Three Ways to Write a Cast of Supporting Characters Without Confusing the Reader

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vikings
But what were their names?

Remember the 1950s The Vikings? Tony Curtis versus Kirk Douglas. But what were their characters called?

How about Gladiator? Russel Crowe as Maximus. Can you remember the names of the other characters?

Pirates of the Caribbean? Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. I bet you can name the other actors. What about their character names?

The nice thing about movies is that they have actors. Even if we don’t know their names, we do remember and then recognise them. So when Maximus’ right-hand man betrays him, we know who he is even if we can’t recall his name and didn’t realise how significant he was when we first saw him.

It’s harder with prose. Much, much, harder. As soon as you have more than a handful of characters, you’re faced with two problems: seeding and identifying.

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Reading Burroughs’ Biography as a Writer

Reading Burroughs’ Biography as a Writer

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PorgesAbout eight years ago, when I was struggling to get my short stories published, I picked up the two-volume biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Irwin Porges. I think I’d been looking for some communion with a writer I’d enjoyed as a teen; I got that and more, including a reassurance that I was on the right track.

Now, it’s difficult to discuss Burroughs in any setting without dropping some pretty big caveats. Burroughs was a product of his time, and it wasn’t a good time. By way of example, he wrote A Princess of Mars in 1911, a time when women and minorities could not vote in Canada, and a time when Jim Crow laws in the United states wouldn’t be repealed for another 50 years. His great white male hero appeared in most of his popular stories and his depiction of anybody who wasn’t white was rife with stereotypes and/or condescension.

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Deities and Demigods of the Word Count: or, How to Write 500 Novels and Still not be Considered Prolific

Deities and Demigods of the Word Count: or, How to Write 500 Novels and Still not be Considered Prolific

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Nice book, but where are the 800 others you lazy git?
Nice book, but where are the 800 others you lazy git?

Last week, M Harold Page posted an interesting article here on Black Gate about achieving a steady word count as a writer, giving some insights into his own practice. He said,

I manage 1,000 words a day at the start and an average of 3,000 words a day once I’m underway. Sprinting – 5,000 to 7,000 words a day; that’s for the last half.

Many newbie writers would screech in horror and say no one can write that fast, while most MFA snobs would turn up their noses and say it’s impossible to write anything of worth at that rate, that writing must be an agonizing process of constant revision and polishing. They’re both wrong, as Page’s own writing attests.

The fact is, however, Page’s speed is rather modest. Mine is about the same, so I’m not knocking him. I know how hard it is to keep up a good momentum while maintaining your responsibilities to family, not to mention the distractions of the Internet and local pub. I’m fortunate enough that writing is my day job, so at least I don’t have a separate career getting in the way of my productivity.

Page and I may both have a bunch of books to our name, but we are mere henchmen, mere spear carriers to the great Deities and Demigods of publishing — the truly prolific. Dean Wesley Smith, who has written well over 100 novels and about 500 short stories and only seems to be picking up speed, recently shared a link to an interesting blog post titled 17 Most Prolific Writers in History. I have a lot of quibbles with this list, as I’m sure you will too, but while it isn’t authoritative or entirely accurate, it’s certainly inspiring and daunting in equal measure.

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Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jantar_Mantar_-_Laghu_samrat_yantra.JPG
…when we sit down to write a book

OK I admit it, I put the Harry Potter reference in the title as link bait. Well almost. Take a look at the word counts for each of the Harry Potter books:

  • The Philosopher’s Stone – 76,944
  • The Chamber of Secrets – 85,141
  • The Prisoner of Azkaban – 107,253
  • The Goblet of Fire – 190,637
  • The Order of the Phoenix – 257,045
  • The Half-Blood Prince – 168,923
  • The Deathly Hallows – 198,227
    (source)

That’s a lot of words, and it illustrates the mountain an author contemplates when we sit down to write a book. Until recently, the length of The Prisoner of Azkaban was pretty much industry standard — 100K words is an economic sweetspot for printing and distribution. Lengths seem to be drifting down of late, because there’s no economy of scale for ebooks.

Who knows? Perhaps we’ll one day return to the sanity of the 35K-word 1970s pulp?

But thirty-five thousand words is still a lot of words!

So it’s natural to look at the project, divide target word count by available days and use that as a measure of progress.

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Using Feedback from Beta Readers and Editors: The Parable of Frankenstein’s Monster

Using Feedback from Beta Readers and Editors: The Parable of Frankenstein’s Monster

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frankenstein
A book, my friends, is like Frankenstein’s monster.

Beta readers — friends who read and comment on your work — and, if you are lucky or flush, professional editors, are great. They tell you things like:

“The characters seemed thin… I just lost interest.”

“The main character was such a #### that I couldn’t read on.”

“Too much technical detail. I got bored.”

“The fight scenes went on too long.”

And they are always right — because reading is a subjective experience — but they are usually wrong, because the issue is usually not the issue.

It’s like Frankenstein’s Monster.

No, really. Let me explain…

In fact, let me tell you a story.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Taught You: A Look at How Peter Straub Crafts His Opening Chapters

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Taught You: A Look at How Peter Straub Crafts His Opening Chapters

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Peter Straub smallTaking advantage of the fact that I’m not teaching this summer, I decided instead to take a course in the Fiction Program at Columbia College: Censorship and Writing. The course explores many kinds of censorship, not just the book-banning, burning, remove it from the library kinds. It includes self-censorship, social censorship, and censorship in the news, among others. Last week, one of our assignments was to write an essay about something we had learned about writing from reading another author. I chose to look at how Peter Straub crafts a rich and complex opening chapter, looking especially close at the beginning of his novel The Hellfire Club. With my blog deadline looming, I decided it would be equally appropriate to share it with you.

Lessons from Peter Straub’s Fiction

Peter Straub is an international best-seller of dark fantasy, horror, thriller, and mystery works. But he’s also a damned-fine writer, which is probably why he isn’t as big a household-known name as Stephen King, but also why his writing is more revered and studied.

From Straub I learned that commercial genre fiction can blend literary techniques, lyricism, and narrative grace with fantasy and horror tropes and mystery and thriller structure to produce work that is pleasing, popular, and thoughtful.

He is also a master of what I call the Story Promise, which is literally the promises made to the reader in the first few graphs, the first few pages, about what to expect from the story.

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Results of a Writing Retreat in Tangier, Morocco

Results of a Writing Retreat in Tangier, Morocco

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My local produce seller, a farmer from one of the villages in the Rif

 

When the writing gets tough, the tough writers go to Tangier…

One of the advantages of living in Europe is that you have North Africa right at your doorstep. Sadly that region, with all its diverse cultures and beautiful landscape and ancient sites, has largely become a no-go area. Algeria and Libya are war zones and Tunisia and Egypt are highly unstable as well. That leaves Morocco, a safe and stable country that’s drawn me back several times to use as a writing retreat.

As I mentioned in a previous post about Living in a Moroccan Medina, I regularly go to the northern port of Tangier to get away from email and editors and take some time to do some serious writing. Not only does the city resonate with literary giants of the past like Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, and Mohamed Chukri, it also provides inspiration in the form of a large traditional medina, fine views over the Strait of Gibraltar, and a growing arts scene.

So what does a Canadian writer living in Madrid work on when he’s in Morocco? Read on. . .

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