Writers: You Need an (Older) Dictionary & Encyclopedia

If you are a writer— a person who makes books happen— you need to be a book person yourself. That means you need certain books in your home. After all, what if the power goes out before your writing time? You could write in a notebook by hand and transcribe it later— but not if you need the internet to look things up.

DICTIONARIES
Words are our tools. We need to look up words so we can spell and use them correctly— or just for the heck of it. As an elementary school child I looked up random words in the red dictionaries we all had at our desks.
You want older dictionaries. The most modern dictionaries have gone all woke and annoying. I have an e-dictionary on my Kindle, and I do look up random words while reading. I swear, it seems like the example sentences for every single word are designed to promote progressivism and defame conservatives. And they are more interested in telling you which words are now offensive than in being useful. Under the word ‘dwarf’ they say the word is offensive but also say there is no non-offensive word for a person with dwarfism. So we have to erase those people from fiction now? (Note to self: add person with dwarfism to current WIP.)
I have a number of older, saner dictionaries. If you don’t have any of your own yet, look in used book stores, thrift shops or even garage sales. Get a couple of dictionaries. A big dictionary is good. I am a language geek so I have dictionaries for a number of languages, such as German, Esperanto, Serbo-Croatian and ancient Egyptian. I also have a dictionary of 26 languages that gives 1000 common words in these languages. Great if you make up languages for science fiction or fantasy purposes.

ENCYCLOPEDIAS.
I have a number of old encyclopedias. Most American encyclopedias seem to be designed for grade school kids to use when doing their homework. The Encyclopedia Britannica I have is the most useful of my encyclopedias, it’s more designed to help the educated adult.
Mine is from sometime in the 1950s. So old that in the article on Adolf Hitler they are a little coy about saying Hitler was definitely dead lest he be caught in South America. I have looked up many topics in these books. In some cases I had to go online for more detailed information, or consult other reference books, but the encyclopedia gives me a good start.

We are book people, we writers. When we can, we should use books for our research, not Tik Tok videos of questionable accuracy. We should even own some of the books we need, so we can write in our own homes instead of libraries.
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My Books.
Banned Books, Banned Girl. https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745
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My Lycian World

How worldbuilding happens. It’s not always this thing where you delay starting your fiction in order to fill notebook after notebook with worldbuilding details, most of which won’t be used in the novel unless you LIKE boring your readers. In the pulp era writers often did their worldbuilding on the fly. In fact, if they forgot their details between one story and the next, there could be a lot of contradictions. But I think the reason readers weren’t as bothered by this is that pulp fiction was dynamic, on the move, and full of action.
In our era we are encouraged by bad writing advisors to spend a lot of time in contemplation, rewriting, reimagining our vision— great ways to avoid ever finishing. To get anything done, you need a fast-moving pulp writer in your head who has to finish that story now or he won’t eat next week.
This is how my story-country of Lycia came into being. In my home country, there was this election. Now, just before this election, I had to give up my television and internet service due to poverty. On election night, trying to get election results, I used up the whole internet quantity for the month trying to get information on the election results.
What I finally learned made me wonder— what would happen if a country that was used to being a democratic republic overnight became a one-party state like Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany? What would happen to a family who was not a member of the One Party?
Those speculations led to a story I called LYCIAN DESTINY. I decided to set the story in an imaginary country, Lycia, made up of 57 provinces, with names like Galatia, Thracia, and Carmania. Each province corresponds to a US state or region (except for bits I added to Lycia that aren’t part of the US, like Cuba) and I have kept city and town names. But using the term ‘Lycia’ for the nation helped me keep from turning it into a dull political tract.
LYCIAN DESTINY hit a dead end, but I used the same setting for BANNED BOOKS, BANNED GIRL, only that took place a little later in the history. I posted a version of that to Wattpad. A third story I called A LYCIAN PATRIOT, which is about a young man who must flee the safe, civilized part of Lycia controlled by the dystopian system, which by then is called The Harmony, and live in the Wildlands.
And then, my old Mac died and seems to have taken much of my work with it. I am currently writing this on a wonky, broken old computer I call Ace, which urgently needs to be replaced— but can’t be, because I am on SSI disability and urgently need money to buy luxuries like food and the plumbing services I need to fix some pipes that need to be replaced before winter. (I am thinking of holding an online fundraiser to buy a new computer, please discourage me.)
My writing seems to have come to a standstill. Seems silly to recreate my stories from memory on to a computer that will probably take all my stuff with it when it dies. I thought it was dead already a couple years ago.
But when I do finish something, like this blog post, I intend to post it as soon as I can. I can’t afford to wait and stockpile writing, either fictional or blog posts. Not with my one computer this unreliable. (I am trying to back up to a thumb drive, since this computer won’t let me back up to Dropbox most of the time.)
I have some big-picture things about my Lycian world— a short list of province names, the name of an overthrown and kidnapped president, some historical events and persons— and some small things, like people getting paid in food, rent and household supply credits, a Blue Market to buy and sell illicitly, party pins people had to wear to display that they were party members, which also indicated the person’s party status and social utility.
I think, after the loss of most of the writing and worldbuilding info, I want to start by recreating the first story of the three. I don’t currently know if it will be possible to publish it, even in ebook form, with the computer situation. I really don’t want to put it up on Wattpad, I don’t like the Wattpad alternatives, so I may go with some sort of blog fiction, either on WordPress, Blogger or Substack. I figure I will have to recruit readers whether I publish on Wattpad or elsewhere, so I might as well have more control over the story and avoid the woke mafia in places like Wattpad.

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My Books.
Banned Books, Banned Girl. https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745
Get More Blog Traffic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/BO86H4FQ4M

Never Give Up!

Writers & Bloggers— is it time for you to give up? Is it just too hard, with no hope of success? Or should we say ‘Never Give Up, Never Surrender,’ like that guy in Galaxy Quest?

Back about the time of the last US presidential election, I was cut off from my internet and my television service due to sheer poverty— I’m on SSI Disability due to an autism spectrum disorder— and that cut off my ability to keep up with my blog the way I wanted to, and to self-publish anything, even on the cheap as I have to do it.

I did then have a cell phone with limited internet access, but then I lost that, too, and was cut off from everything. I couldn’t even call my mother for a month. Since mom had been put in a home, that was tough.

My mom passed away earlier in the year, and a kind family member got me a cell phone with unlimited internet access and a limited wifi hotspot. So, now I’m back and connected.

And then, my Mac computer, which I got second-hand, finally seems to have bitten the big one. The PC computer I had before I got the Mac I had thought was broken down for good, but I still kept it on my desk. With the Mac not functioning, I plugged the old computer (”Ace”) in, and to my surprise I was able to use my Scrivener program and to sync with Dropbox for backup.

I still need a new or newer computer. ‘Ace’ only works when plugged in— it doesn’t think it has a battery. I was told to take it to a repair shop. The nearest computer repair shop is in a town I’ve been trying to get a ride to for a couple of years— I urgently need stuff from the stores there. The odds of me getting to a computer shop there are not good, and I’d have to pay the charge whether they make the computer more functional or not. And now, even if I was physically able to drive that far, the gas price would stop me.

I guess now would be a good time to give up, but I find I can’t. Even when I can’t handle urgent practical things, I feel the need to sit down and put words on a page. Or a screen. I decided to be a writer as a child— if I was a writer, those stories in my head weren’t proof of mental illness, but of creativity. I find I can’t stop— and I don’t want to. I am a lot better at some stuff now, and why throw away the improvement I worked hard for?

Even if you become homeless for a while, you can still write. I remember being in a homeless shelter— never mind why— and everyone seemed to have a smartphone to charge. People were allowed to keep their phones with them— they might be expecting a call about a job, after all— and they did use those phones. The US government supposedly gives out free cell phones with some internet access— though when I wrote a begging letter about getting one, telling them I had NO PHONE, they kindly gave me a phone number to call. On the phone I didn’t have.

Homeless people without a smartphone can use computers in a library if they can get to a library and are clean enough not to be chased out. Years ago I heard of some well-known blogs by homeless people, at least one of whom wrote a book and got out of being homeless.

So here’s the thing— you write, you blog? Keep it up. If you aren’t that good, you can improve. You can learn new skills. If no one reads your book or blog now, keep on slogging. Your blog can catch on. My little blog here got a comment the other day from LAWRENCE BLOCK. Since the post was mentioning an updated version of a writing book by Lawrence Block, I’d guess it was authentically the man or someone who works the internet for him.

COMMENTS are welcome, if you can avoid being uncivil or using foul language. If you have a blog or book to talk about, you are allowed ONE LINK in your comment, if you tell what the link is about.

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My Books.
Banned Books, Banned Girl. https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745
Get More Blog Traffic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/BO86H4FQ4M

Use Capital Letters, They’re Cheap.

In the sometimes dismal world of social media, I see a lot of people who seem to have never been taught some basic things in grade school about how the English language works. Recently, I’ve seen someone advocating for a point-of-view that most people disagree with. He couldn’t be bothered to begin his sentences with a capital letter.

We writers must use correct English at all times. We can still be colloquial and use slang, but we have to use capital letters correctly, use punctuation correctly, and for goodness sake, use the spell check! One wrong usage in a Tweet, and there may be people out there who will never buy your books because they will assume you cannot write readable English sentences.

Imagine you were an avant-garde, artsy-fartsy type. Imagine you wrote a novel in the attempted literary fiction genre. But, for some incomprehensible artistic reason, you refused to use any capital letters at all. your sentences looked like this. even mary and joe, your most loyal readers, would probably not find it comfortable to read your book.

I personally, if anything, overuse capital letters. That’s because I learned German— in childhood from my mother, in Junior High and High School in the classroom— and in German, all nouns are capitalized. (Nouns? ‘A noun is the name of a person, place or thing.)

Capital letters are like punctuation— they are the ‘traffic signals’ of the written language. People who read regularly are used to mostly correct usage. Texting and social media, especially as they distract poorly educated young persons away from reading books, reinforce wrong usage. 

Here is the reality: if you are a writer, you are different, and different rules apply. You are expected to know how the English language works (or whatever language you write in.) Other people can use ‘u’ for ‘you,’ but if you do it, people will presume you are an ignorant so-and-so and not a real writer at all.

The same rule goes for bloggers and would-be influencers. If the tool you work with is language, use it correctly. WITH capital letters to begin every sentence, every proper name of a person or place, as the rules of our language dictate. Yeah, if you are younger than a certain age the dim bulbs you went to school with may mock you for your correct usage. But those dim bulbs are not going to financially support you if you ruin your writing persona with the dim bulb’s version of ‘cool.’

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My books:

Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H4FQ4M

Banned Books, Banned Girl (Lycian series.): A girl with an autism spectrum disorder escapes government confinement and works a ghost job removing banned books from bookshelves.: https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745

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 Dent Series post #1: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/

Dent Series post #2: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/reviving-pulp-era-writing-wisdom-dentseries/

Two Kinds of How-To-Write Books.

I have collected how-to-write books ever since I bought a copy of Lawrence Block’s Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print. I since have accumulated a bookshelf full of them, which doesn’t include the books on my Kindle. They range from good to bad to worse-than-bad, published by respectable major publishers, self-published by known writers, and a few self-published by ignorant schemers.

I have come to see two major divisions in the better group of how-to-write books. One group is more academic books, that might well be textbooks in a college creative writing course. The other group is by writers who have been out in the trenches, writing for a living. Some of the older books were written by authors who got started writing and selling to the pulps. 

The first division has the flaws of academic writing advice. First, they tend to assume that if you were really serious about your writing, you would be writing attempted literary fiction, even though attempted literary fiction does not sell. Second, they often accommodate the wishes of classroom teachers of creative writing. The classroom teacher does not want her students batting out several short stories each week to be evaluated. He would rather have the students write ONE short story, and rewrite it many times until it is polished and all the unique and interesting elements removed. Much less work. And little to no risk that the students will send it out into the world, get accepted, and outshine the teacher’s own writing.

Some of my books of the second type do not use standard jargon for parts of a story at all. Lester Dent in his Master Fiction Plot tells the writer to swat his hero with a fistful of trouble. There is no sanitized academic-writing name for swatting a character with a fistful of trouble, but I think most of us can figure out what that means, unlike Inciting Incident or Mirror Moment. 

Many of the writers of the pulp era were self-taught. They didn’t know the proper academic names for parts of the story, because they were too busy writing stories. I have read accounts of young men who went off to New York City with a suitcase and a typewriter, set to work writing for the pulps, and soon could pay their rent off the story sales. Such writers didn’t have time to learn all the official terms for the parts of their stories— they were busy making a living.

And though I have read all my writing books at least once, it is the second type of writing book that I come back to, that inspires me. I’m not inspired by something that holds up as a model books of attempted literary fiction that I don’t read. I’ve noticed that the older books by writers regarded as great writers sold well enough— that’s why those writers were remembered in time for the academics to decide they were great writers. 

I have always wanted to write something similar to the kind of books I am willing to read. I think most writers do. I have heard in the days of the pulps there were New York City writers who hated the Western genre, but wrote exclusively for the Western pulps. I wonder, though, if such writers made the list of any Western fan’s favorite writers.

COMMENTS: Civil comments (polite, no swearing) always welcome, even if you don’t agree with me. But if you are a troll commenters who swears at people, bullies people, insults people for not agreeing with you 100%, don’t expect your comment to see the light of day. This is MY blog, after all.

I’m concluding this post with a short list of  recommended reading. I hope it is helpful to you— I hope I’ve sifted out a few of the things I shouldn’t have spend my money on. 

Recommended Reading.

Lawrence Block. Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print. 1979.

Bryce Beattie (editor) Pulp Era Writing Tips. 2018. (Old articles on writing.)

Dean Wesley Smith. Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing. 2016.

Robert Turner. Pulp Fiction. 1948.

James Scott Bell. How to Write Pulp Fiction. 2017.

Lester Dent. Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot.  http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html

JD Cowan. The Pulp Mindset. 

Kit Sun Cheah and Misha Burnett. Pulp on Pulp: Tips and Tricks for Writing Pulp Fiction. 2021.

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 Dent Series post #1: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/

Dent Series post #2: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/reviving-pulp-era-writing-wisdom-dentseries/

Reviving Pulp Era Writing Wisdom #DentSeries

#DentSeries #LesterDent #PulpRev .

Lester Dent’s Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot was written for the pulp era, when men and women made a living writing stories for dozens of different pulp story magazines. The first pulp-type magazine took all sorts of stories, but later specialized pulps came out for adventure stories, love stories, Westerns, detective stories, war-air stories…. There were even romantic Western pulps as well as the standard Western ones.

Lester Dent describes his formula like this:

“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.”

The original pulp era, is, alas, over. There are very few anthologies or periodicals to which to submit shorter works of fiction, which most of us need to do before we can write longer works, and even if we sold everything we wrote, we wouldn’t be able to make any sort of living at it. 

A limited anthology series I liked was the Planetary Anthology, each one named after a planet of the Solar System. I have Mars and Luna of that series, since I know some of the writers involved. But the anthology series got ‘unpublished’ and is no longer available, due to poor sales. Compared to the pulp era, when there were pulp magazines for a nickel or dime at every newsstand (there were newsstands back then, too,) not enough people learn about any anthology or e-published zine in time to make reading these things a habit.

But the pulp-era’s habit of pushing reader-friendly stories that the ordinary guy could use as a form of entertainment is a good one to continue. People these days are more accustomed to television or movie entertainment. But as the moviemakers and television industry go ‘woke,’ the consumers are left behind. We don’t want a lady Captain Marvel who is unlikeable, and then when we complain we get called sexist for not supporting the movie industry blindly. 

In the pulp era, writers knew better. If they wrote a story that most readers thought was a stinker, you couldn’t complain that the readers were not ‘good enough’ for the story. The pulp editor paid you for stories that readers would like. If your stories were unlikeable, they would not buy. The pulp writer had to work out for himself how to make his stories reader-friendly, or he wouldn’t get paid and his typewriter might get repossessed.

This is post 2 in the #DentSeries – read Dent Series post #1 here.:https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/

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Recommended Reading:

Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing. Dean Wesley Smith. 2016.

Pulp Era Writing Tips. Edited by Bryce Beattie. 2018.

How to Write Pulp Fiction. James Scott Bell. 2017.

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Dent Series post #1: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/

The Thrill of Heroes Behaving Badly.

I would hope that most writers are aware that a compelling story should have a hero, not a mere protagonist. By ‘hero’ we don’t mean ‘sinless savior,’ but simply a normal person with a moral compass. In today’s world a hero might never have memorized the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments, or read the Sermon on the Mount, but even if your hero does not have any faith-based values (yet,) he acts like he has. He doesn’t go around killing, stealing, lying or committing adultery on a daily basis. 

Recently I watched the old movie ‘The Great Escape’ on Pluto TV. I’ve always loved that movie and watched it many times with my late mother. 

In ‘The Great Escape,’ a group of British and American men are prisoners of the Germans during WW2. These men are fellows with a highly functional moral compass. They are prisoners because they chose to put their lives at risk for their fellow man— they were doing the right thing (unless, like the modern neofascist/antifa movement, you think that freedom’s not a good thing.)

But in the prison camp, they are under the control of the Luftwaffe— the German air force. Their camp has rules that their captors expect them to obey. But their duty as officers means that they are to try to escape, and to make life difficult for the Germans.

So, these honorable men break the rules to dig tunnels, steal things, lie to their guards, take wood from the rafters and their bunk beds to shore up the escape tunnels, forge papers, and do all sorts of naughty things normally done only by criminals.

Why is that interesting to us? We don’t watch movies about purse snatchers, second-story men, or vandals, do we? But this is different— it is honorable men, men dedicating their lives to taking up a duty to defend others, who are doing these things in an a noble cause— getting the Nazi boot off the face of mankind.

We all have an urge to do not-right things— Christians would call it having a sinful nature due to the fall of Man into sin. I remember as a little girl going to a store with my tiny bit of pocket money to buy toys. Every time, I found many more toys to want than my pocket money would buy. I might have fantasized about stealing toys— but my parents didn’t raise me to steal— they took me to Sunday School, after all. Plus, if the store man had caught me stealing, I would have the deep disgrace of having my father informed. My father was a store manager himself. He talked about shoplifters sometimes— and never in a flattering way. I felt if I was caught stealing, I would be diminished forever in my father’s eyes. And the best way not to get caught stealing was not to steal.

But that didn’t stop me from wanting things I couldn’t afford. And so I could get caught up in the idea that in some strange special circumstance I too might steal, forge, do many other bad things— in a good cause of course.

In ‘The Great Escape,’ which was based on real events, many of the escaping prisoners paid with their lives. The two American characters, Steve McQueen and James Garner, lived, but each lost a close friend. Garner and McQueen ended up right back in the camp they escaped from. So even though they were doing the right thing, they paid the price for the normally illicit things they did as part of the escape plan. 

In your own fiction, sometimes your heroes will be in extreme circumstances. Since their goal will be a morally good one, they may be justified in doing some normally not-good things. They may kill an attacker, steal unattended food or clothing to aid people they are rescuing, lie their tongues off to a Nazi-like oppressor seeking escaped victims, and otherwise do ‘naughty’ things in a good cause. 

Placing your heroes in such situations makes your story more exciting. And letting them do things that aren’t normally allowed in these situations make them seem less ‘priggish’ and hypocritical— the standard accusation against anyone who chooses to have and follow a moral compass.

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Recommended Reading:

The Pulp Mindset – JD Cowan.

Pulp Fiction – Robert Turner.

How to Write Pulp Fiction – James Scott Bell.

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Coming Soon!

My new online novella, A Lycian Patriot. Since something in my hero’s past is toxic to the Wattpad crowd, and I don’t have time or energy to post on Wattpad and then move it, I will be posting much of it  on this WordPress blog. An expanded version will be available in ebook format through Smashwords and maybe KDP. 

[An earlier story in the Lycian series, available free on Wattpad: Banned Books, Banned Girl : A girl with an autism spectrum disorder escapes government confinement and works a ghost job removing banned books from bookshelves.: https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745 ]

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Why the #LGBT Movement Betrays Us. #SSA

I am a person with Same-Sex Attraction (homosexual or ‘gay’ or ‘Lesbian’ orientation,) and before I became Catholic & embraced the chastity lifestyle, I felt I had to trust the LGBT movement. People like me were in danger, I had heard, and only the LGBT movement could protect people like me from being gay-bashed, arrested, or thrown into insane asylums. I worried about asylums, in part because I had undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome which my schools ‘diagnosed’ as ‘unhappiness,’ evidently in their eyes a mental illness. I wasn’t aware that the nations’ asylums were being closed down due to antipsychotic drugs and the fact that it was cheaper to keep psychotics as homeless street people than put them in even the worst-run asylums.

I believed in the LGBT movement— I even voted for the ‘wrong’ people because that’s what the LGBT movement wanted. The LGBT ideology was that all LGBT people were ‘born that way,’ They embraced famed Hollywood icons that never ‘came out’ but had gay friends and so were presumably ‘that way.’ The LGBT movement would protect everyone ‘born’ to be LGBT, right?

Then I heard about the discrimination against ex-gays. Was the LGBT movement fight that? No, it seemed to be INSTIGATING it. 

There was the case of a Christian musician invited to perform for then-president Obama. And then un-invited when the word got out that the man was ex-gay. The poor stupid Christian was just telling his perspective of his own life without worrying about conforming to the LGBT narrative, and so he was a non-person who DESERVED to be ‘cancelled.’

This is the truth. The LGBT movement is run for the benefit of progressive politics. It uses fear to get all people with Same-Sex Attraction or trans feelings on board, giving money to LGBT approved pressure groups and voting in the LGBT approved way. When people disrupt the narrative by telling ex-gay or ex-trans stories, they arouse another kind of fear— they bully or ‘cancel’ the person until he shuts up.

I have not got a lot of that kind of bullying so far. I had one attempted bully making what were meant to be personal attacks on me, who even called me a b~tch. The b~tch commenter did not realize I am a cat person, not a dog person. A female dog may be a b~tch, but a female cat is a queen. Yes, troll commenter, you may address me as ‘Your Majesty.’

If you have Same-Sex Attraction and don’t care to conform to the LGBT movement and its bullying ways, don’t despair. You are not alone. Try to hook up with Courage International ministries— they have a F~B page and a group. Even if you don’t want help from a Catholic ministry or any Christian one, you can meet other people who won’t give up their decision-making process to the bullies. [501 words.]

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COMMENTS are welcome on this post. Troll comments, bullying comments and vulgar language are not. Comments are moderated, which means if you are angry and try to bully me or another commenter, you are commenting to yourself. Your comments are not going to be approved. And if you should bully another commenter— I am going to PRAY for you. To Saint Anthony. Prepare to become Catholic.

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If you are interested in the topic of this post, you might like my F~B page and my MeWe group on this topic.

You might also like to follow me on MeWe or Gab. (I’m locked out of my F~B at the moment, but a friend, Niko Emery Armstrong, is keeping up the page for me.)

We Defend Traditional Marriage (FascistBook page): https://www.facebook.com/defendtradmarriage/

Defend Trad Marriage group: https://mewe.com/group/5bca1f9c73a3f14e7c8572e5

*MeWe: https://mewe.com/i/nissaannakindt

Gab (free speech alternative):  https://gab.com/nissalovescats

My books:

Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H4FQ4M

Banned Books, Banned Girl (Lycian series.): A girl with an autism spectrum disorder escapes government confinement and works a ghost job removing banned books from bookshelves.: https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745

How Does a Newbie Writer Get Started? #DentSeries

A lot of folks these days think of the pulp era of fiction as a golden age when writers actually wrote things that entertained their readers, instead of appalling them by grimdark despair that’s supposed to be ‘good for you,’ especially if that one attractive character turns out to be transsexual. A popular guide to writing pulp-style fiction is ‘The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot: http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html

The Dent is specifically about writing a 6000 word story for one of the pulp magazines of the day. Neopulp writers today use it as a way of outlining longer yarns, even novellas and novels. Lester Dent said that his master plot worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air stories, and that Dent’s yarns written to the formula never failed to sell. 

In the pulp era, writers made a living from writing short stories— often short-shorts to break into the writing business, since more experienced writers wrote longer yarns to get more money, and editors needed the short stuff as well and didn’t get as much of that submitted. They got paid enough if they kept writing and kept submitting to support themselves as they honed their writing skill. The pulp magazines, alas, have died out, and so at least since 1979 when Lawrence Block wrote Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print neophyte writers have been urged to start out with writing novels.

Since Block’s book was my very first how-to-write book, I was taken in. I wrote so many novel-beginnings I joked about cramming them all together and selling them as an avant-garde novel. 

That wasn’t even the way Block learned to write— he started with short stories, which sold. To me, as a person with Asperger Syndrome, which can mean organizational difficulties, it’s a little like being an infant who has just been advised to avoid those useless first baby steps and jump right in to running a marathon. 

So, my advice is this— go visit the website link to the Lester Dent formula and PRINT IT OUT and put it in a file folder. I keep mine in a red file folder. Also, if you can, get some books of short stories, or e-reprints of pulp magazines, so you can read some good examples. I got the whole Conan the Barbarian series for 99 cents. 

Write some yarns to the formula. Don’t worry, you don’t need a market for your first efforts. I once would have suggested posting your completed yarns to Wattpad, but Wattpad gets more and more toxic, encouraging the teenage ‘smutwriters’ to post their raunchy material, evidently unworried that these teenage writers may be attracting sexual predators who may be interested in molesting these young authors in real life.

I still do recommend online ‘publishing’ especially for beginning writers to get reactions. If all the Wattpad-type services are too ‘woke’ or toxic for you, consider using a WordPress or Blogger blog. Please think ahead— if you are going to be generating a lot of short stories, short-shorts and flash fiction, don’t start a blog for each one— start a general fiction blog, using tags and categories to sort your stories so the reader can find the first chapter of each one.

ASSIGNMENT: Find and print out the Lester Dent formula. Use it to write out the plot for a 6000 word or so ‘yarn.’ Write that yarn. Finish it. Celebrate your success! (If you write a story as part of this assignment and post it online somewhere, mention it in a comment and share a link to your story.)

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Recommended Reading:

The Pulp Mindset – JD Cowan.

Pulp Fiction – Robert Turner.

How to Write Pulp Fiction – James Scott Bell.

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Coming Soon to this Blog!

My new online novella, A Lycian Patriot. Story of a young man escaping the dystopian Harmony government to the scary Wildlands, where criminal patriots live.

[An earlier story in the Lycian series, available free on Wattpad: Banned Books, Banned Girl : A girl with an autism spectrum disorder escapes government confinement and works a ghost job removing banned books from bookshelves.: https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745 ]

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Let Dystopia Reign!

Dystopia in fiction isn’t new— many books such as Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the anti-Christian hate novel The Handmaid’s Tale are all dystopian.

What is dystopia? The ‘dys’ element comes from the Greek, meaning ‘painful.’ So dystopia is about a painful place. In dystopian fiction, the pain comes in part from a totalitarian government. There can also be pain caused by nature— in the hate novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ there is an infertility plague. Other possible natural problems your characters might confront are things like meteor strikes, global cooling/warming, a volcano sprouting in a bad location, and other natural disasters.

‘Dystopian’ as a genre/subgenre name is a more recent thing. Usually these ‘dystopians’ are YA books, meaning books for teenage children. I suppose dystopian sells better than ‘science fiction,’ which would be a common genre for such books since they are usually set in the future.

Dystopia is usually considered the opposite of Utopia. Utopia was a book by Thomas More about an ideal government. The government in More’s day was King Henry VIII of England. Henry was Thomas More’s friend, he made More Chancellor— and then had More beheaded for dissenting from Henry’s plan to rebel against the Church in order to divorce his wife and marry a mistress. Well, Thomas More did get a sainthood out of it.

Since a utopia-type scheme usually has a top-down big government, just to simplify things, one might say any utopia has dystopian elements, at least if you are not the king. It’s good to be the king.

The lead character in a dystopian novel is never the king. Usually it is a common subject, who experiences the dystopia as an ordinary subject without power. For purposes of having a novel, your protagonist will experience the dark side of the dystopia. Katniss in the Hunger Games had to volunteer for the Games to protect a younger sister. She didn’t just watch the Games on television. She was right in the thick of the blood and violence.

Dystopias are often an exaggeration of the negative things in our society— perhaps a warning of the ‘if this goes on’ nature. For example, take the overreach by government schools (public schools) in the United States. Some schools demand children buy the school lunches and not bring lunches from home— even if the family wants their kids on a healthy Paleo eating plan, or a vegan diet. Some schools have ‘transgender closets’ so that kids can use breast binders and opposite-sex clothes without letting parents know. Other schools have allowed teachers to demand students write the word ‘Jesus’ on a piece of paper, and throw the paper on the floor and stomp on it.

A dystopia based on this could have schools that could override parents on anything— perhaps pick random kids to be denied the chance to learn to read, and just trained to work the most menial of jobs. Perhaps schools could train the kids to memorize the talking points of the dystopian government, and report on parents that expressed dissent so the parents could be properly jailed. Or perhaps the government schools could routinely grab teenage children off to work in factories in distant cities part time, to diminish family connections and get cheap labor.

Or you could have a dystopia based on the idea that the eliminate-police radicals got their way, and just going down the street to the grocery store meant having to fight off criminals.

But you can’t let your dystopia get too preachy. There has to be a good story in there. The flaw of The Handmaid’s Tale, besides the absurdly ignorant straw-man version of Christianity, was that the author was so busy preaching her pro-abortion feminism message she didn’t once think of how that message would seem to those threatened by an infertility plague. More abortion doesn’t exactly help that situation! (Now, I’m not saying The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t well written or that I didn’t once enjoy reading it repeatedly— but it does have its flaws and its hate.)

If you are writing dystopia, remember that the dystopia is just the setting. The villains/antagonists are likely agents of the dystopia in some way, but the story is about the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist(s.) What does your protagonist want? What is his goal? That’s your story. Many aspects of your dystopia are just a bit of local color along the journey through the story.

What is your favorite dystopian novel, or novel with dystopian elements? What did you like about it? Have you ever written a dystopian story yourself?

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