Why am I writing?

I asked myself this question a few weeks ago. I was dealing with a complete writer’s block, compounded by the mental fog that my bout with coronavirus left me with. I found a number of answers, but it took a while to decide which one mattered the most.

I started writing in 2016. How that happened is a story best shared over whiskey and cigars. But I found that I could write fiction. I hadn’t done any creative writing since high school English classes. Since then it was term papers in college, then reports and technical writing in my career in software development. So I was surprised when I found that I could sit down in front of a blank screen and create stories.

I was even more surprised when people liked what I was writing. Okay, they were my friends, so I was taking their compliments with several grains of salt. But then they started asking, “Have you written anything new?” and “Where’s the next chapter?”

So I started writing more. I wrote a lot. Over the past five years I’ve “finished” two novels, written a lot of short stories, and even penned a few poems. But I keep getting distracted. My muse has lots of ideas, and she’s very insistent that I work on all of them at once. (I call her Janet, so that when she gives me a story idea while I’m driving or watching TV I can say, “Dammit, Janet!”)

I’ve got a lot of “works in progress”. They span the range of genre fiction: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, steampunk, thrillers. And I’ve published nothing. So why was I writing?

One reason is the sheer joy of creation. Bringing a character to life, setting them up for a challenge, watching them deal with it and grow in the process. And of course the compliments from my readers and their encouragement to keep writing is rewarding.

But when it comes down to it, one of the primary motivations is the prospect of making money from my writing. My “second career”—moving from software development to e-commerce—isn’t rewarding or challenging for me any more. 

I see authors who must be making money at writing because they keep turning out lots of books. And many of them aren’t very good! So I know that I need to focus. I need to settle on one concept and work on it to the end. I need to write lots of books. And I need to publish them!

But then I wondered if I would be selling out somehow, sacrificing the ideal of The Art of Writing to make a few bucks. So grabbed my e-book reader and pulled up James Scott Bell’s How to Write Pulp Fiction. This passage eased my mind.

The philosophy of the pulp writer is to make money by writing fiction. He is not ashamed of this, for it is nothing to be ashamed of. Writing is a commercial transaction under the free enterprise system. The pulp writer provides a product and wants as many people to buy the product as possible.
. . .

The pulp writer can coexist with the literary writer, but often the latter picks a fight.

Like this one (who shall remain nameless) who wrote the following:

“All writers wish for commercial success. But at what price? If you sell your soul to the devil of profitability, you have to be able to look in the mirror every day and say, without flinching, that you’re a commercial writer.”

The pulp writer responds, “I look at myself in the mirror every morning, and I like what I see. Selling my soul to the devil? Excuse me? Is a plumber who prides himself on a job well done and who gets paid selling himself to the devil? Or the writer who wants to provide what so many readers want—a dream, a distraction, some joy? Gimme a break!”

So I have accepted that I want to be a commercial writer. I’ve set my plans for vast, sweeping fantasy epics aside. I decided to follow the example of the pulp writers of the first half of the 20th century. They cranked out story after story for monthly magazines, some of them writing under multiple pen names in two or three magazines in a month! I’m pretty sure that I can turn out a novella-length story in a month. Twenty to thirty thousand words isn’t as intimidating as the fifty thousand word target for NaNoWriMo.

My favorite stories from the pulp era are the Doc Savage adventures. So I looked at some of them to see how long they were. I was stunned. The average word count was fifty thousand words. Most of the Doc Savage novels were written by Lester Dent under the pen name Kenneth Robeson. He was writing a Doc Savage story every month, and he was one of the writers who worked for multiple magazines each month! I imagined him sitting down at his typewriter each morning with a gallon of coffee, three packs of cigarettes, and a bottle of whiskey and pounding the keys like a maniac for twelve hours.

Okay, that’s inspiring! But I have to be realistic. I know I can’t do what Lester Dent did each month. Starting in January my goal is to write and edit a novella every month. I’ve got an idea inspired by some things I’ve been reading in the past couple of months. I’ve got a character. And Janet has come out of hibernation and is giving me ideas. If I can do this, when I’ve got enough stories stacked up I’ll start publishing. Wish me luck!

Bu the way, Lester Dent had a “master plot” that he used to write thousands of pulp stories, and he said that no story he wrote with his system ever failed to sell. It’s available online, just do a search for “lester dent master plot formula”.