How to Write At Pulp Speed
So, in the third (and for now final) part of this mini-series on pulp fiction, I’ll write about what I originally intended to. Pulp speed, coined by Dean Wesley Smith, is the extent to which you’re as prolific as a pulp writer. We want to be as prolific as pulp writers, because more words = more money.
DWS’s scale of pulp speed is as follows:
- Pulp Speed One: One Million Words A Year.
- Pulp Speed Two: 1.2 Million A Year
- Pulp Speed Three: 1.4 Million A Year
- Pulp Speed Four: 1.6 Million A Year
- Pulp Speed Five; 1.8 Million A Year
- Pulp Speed Six: 2 Million Words A Year
These figures range from around 3,000 words a day (Pulp speed one) to 6,000 words a day (pulp speed six.) This is based on fifty weeks a year… you can do the math.
Those figures are entirely arbitrary (though realistic – we’ll get to that,) and I use the figures as a form of gamification.
My point with these figures is that if you want to be a writer and you think, “Wow… one million words sounds impossible!” then it’s time to set your sights higher.
Building Pulp Speed: The Basics
Anyone can write one thousand words in an hour. Even my Dad who only ever learned to type with his two index figures could probably write a thousand words in an hour. Let’s use that as a baseline.
Three hours a day of writing gets you to a million words a year. The average author who releases a book through traditional publishing might write an 80,000 word novel a year. You are over ten times more productive than the average published author in terms of publishable word count.
That’s just pulp speed one. If you’re a full time writer, there’s no reason you can’t get higher than that. (I don’t tend to brag, but if I didn’t write another word all year I’d still be over a million words; I’ve written about 150,000 just for this little blog since January.)
You can break this process down into days as a form of game: in fact, you might need more pulp speed levels, because there’ll be days where you hit over 6,000 words. In fact, once you practice, you can go a lot faster.
Some writers will be picking their jaws up off the floor at that idea. Others will be thinking, “I’d like some of that.” Let’s get into the things that I use to go at pulp speed 7+.
Planning
If you sit down at your desk to write and you “don’t know what to write” then you’re doing something wrong. Sure, some writers like to write into the dark. That’s fine – but you need to be able to sit down and think, “I’m going to write a story about the time the tentacle monsters abducted my girlfriend” or whatever.
When most writers “don’t have time” what they really mean is that they lose a lot of time by not knowing what they’re doing. It’s better to sit down with a post-it note and a pen and give a twenty word description of the thing you’re going to write that guides you through the whole thing than spend hours getting stuck with writer’s block.
One Draft Writing
I won’t go over everything I’ve written about one draft writing again. One draft writing is essential for hitting pulp speed production, because when your goal is a hundred thousand words a month, you’ll find it very difficult to achieve if you’re busy editing your first thousand.
To summarise the article on one draft writing, there are some basic rules you should follow:
- Basic writing ability, including grammar and vocabulary.
- Basic Planning (I mentioned this above.) Also ready-to-go documents in template form.
- The ability to keep a constant train of thought.
- The ability to sit in a chair until your work is done.
- Trust in your own voice and ability.
Knowledge Of Production and the Industry You’re Working In
Like I mentioned in the planning section, lost time is lost time. Too much effort expended loses you time. Importantly, these things also demotivate you.
If you want to write like a pulp writer, remember that they weren’t leaping into the dark in terms of what they were writing. They knew the markets they were writing for, and you should too. They also wrote to market – and I agree. There’s no point in writing something that doesn’t sell.
If you’re writing fiction, then you need to think about master plots. A good place to start is Plotto, which might be the best investment you could make if you wanted to be a fiction writer. If you are planning on being a prolific fiction writer, then it’s a necessity.
Production also includes formatting, covers and the like. I personally have a particular set of fonts I always use, blank documents set up for articles, books and websites, and when it comes to book covers, I’d recommend having a “brand template” which you then either add stock photography to or you send out to your artist to work around. Remember, you don’t want to think about the production of your book to the extent of it getting in the way of your writing time.
That’s an extensive topic, so I’ll expand later. Needless to say, admin stuff also falls under this. Whether you’re checking your Amazon sales report or your new websites traffic stats, you’re wasting time. Instead, think of some process whereby you don’t have to check these things as much.
Plenty Of Projects
When I’ve told people I’m a writer, multiple times I’ve heard, “I’d love to write a book, but I don’t know what to write.”
If you want to be a pulp speed writer, then you can’t have this. Every time you have a slightest hint o an idea, then you need to write it down. Think you could write an e-book on hair care? It goes on a list. Want to write a novel about a vampire fighting terrorists? It goes on a list.
If you write at thousands of words a day, you’ll burn through projects quickly. You’ll soon get over the “finishing a book is an event” kind of feeling.
When you finish your first book, you’ll celebrate – quite rightly.
If you’re trying to finish a book a week, you can’t take a holiday every time you finish. You need to stop, breathe and jump right into the next project.
Writing in a series helps with this. Writing in a particular setting helps with this. For the non-fiction people, writing in a particular niche helps with this. Once you’ve used all your niche book ideas, move into a related niche or write the same information for a different market.
Final Thoughts
Being a professional writer can be tough. However, in terms of a sliding scale between cleaning sewage drains and being a neurosurgeon, writers are on the easy spectrum. We just have to sit and type.
There’s no reason you can’t get very good at doing that. Once you’re good at sitting and writing, then you can work on your writing speed and get well above one thousand words an hour like our original example had.
Once you’re well above one thousand words an hour, you can be very productive when compared with most writers.
One million words a year is attainable. It’s also more than ten novels a year. Imagine how you’d feel if I told you that one year from tomorrow you’d be the author of ten full-length books.