Learning from the Past...and the Pulps

How can you move forward when you don't know where you've been? How can you avoid the mistakes of the past when you don't even know what the mistakes were?

These are two fundamental questions one has to ask when you study history, a discipline in which I hold two degrees. For me, history, both past and present, is a living thing and it is something for which I have a lot of passion. Writing is something else for which I have a lot of passion and, you know what? The questions are relevant to writing as well.

This past summer, I read a lot of old adventure and pulp fiction, things most boys read when they're ten or twelve. I'm a boy of forty. Guess it ain't too late. I cataloged them in a week of themed reviews (Adventure Week) on my blog. You can read them if you want. Here's where I get to list a few things I learned from reading these old stories. Here's the list:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (1870)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1873)

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1875)

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)

The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1913)

Coincidences are like garlic: a little goes a long way

Coincidences. The things that make you go "No way!" could that happen...and they do. You'll roll your eyes and accuse the writer of taking a short cut. In modern stories, coincidences have almost no place. The "Back to the Future" movies are among my favorite example of "everything is explained." The writers may have started with a shortcut ("Hey, wouldn't it be cool if Marty dressed up like Clint Eastwood in "A Fistful of Dollars?") but they found a way to make it believable (I'll leave it up to you to remember the clue). Same with novels. For as fun as the Miss Marple stories are, seriously, how many murders can one old lady stumble upon?

In these adventure stories, there are a few eye-rollers and one big whopper. The Return of Tarzan is riff with them. Tarzan is thrown off a boat and swims to shore and lands *exactly* where he parents were marooned twentysomething years ago. Whatever! I could do that as a writer...and have a bunch of manuscript pages yellowing in a drawer. Now, in our hyper-keep-it-real-explain-everything world, there's no place for coincidences. The best thing about ERB , as more than one commenter wrote on my blog yesterday, is that the stories are so much fun, you can let the "serendipity" slide. Not so with King Solomon's Mines. Our brave European explorers have with them an African guide Who Just Happens To Be The Long Lost King of the Lost Tribe They Discover. Sure, the African could've guessed where Quatermain was headed and hitched a ride but it could've been better explained. It just landed with a solid thud in the story that had already lost its steam.

Exotica can only get your so far.

All of these stories involve some sort of exotic location. Verne has the Nautilus, Captain Nemo's ship, and all the ports Nemo chooses, like Atlantis or underwater graveyards. Treasure Island features the Caribbean and tropical environs while Haggard and ERB set their stories in Africa. You'd think that having an exotic setting would be enough to drive a story. You'd be wrong. The Verne and Haggard books both have one simple fault: they rely too heavily on the environment. Whether you're reading about Quatermain's trek across Africa or Nemo's journey's under water, the stories have to go somewhere. I think these authors were too content to just let the setting play too big a role in their respective books. I give Verne a bit of a pass since he invented a working submarine in his novel. Haggard just tried too hard to make an exciting story and failed.

Character Counts. Big Time.

This is not an earth-shattering revelation. There's a reason Agatha Christie wrote as many Miss Marple stores as she did: people liked the character. In their books, Stevenson and ERB use their respective exotic settings as a means to tell a better story with compelling characters. I was much more invested in the stories of young Lord Greystoke and young Jim Hawkins...and I couldn't care less where the story took place. Now, the setting helped but I liked the characters. Who hasn't dreamed of finding a pirate treasure map and set off to find it? I won't say who hasn't dreamed of growing up with apes in the jungle but the situation is compelling enough that you want to know what happens with Tarzan. It was fun watching him grow up in the jungle and Hawkins battle pirates in the Caribbean. In these books, the environment was gravy. The meat was in the story and the characters.

Fun is Important

We're now entering the fall season, the time when the Important Books and the Important Movies are released. It's awards season now. We must put away our paperbacks and pick up hard back books that challenge our intellect and make us think. When I started work on my second book, my modern crime novel, I wanted to make it real. I wanted it gritty and urban. I wanted no coincidences. Everything had to be explained. I got so fixated on Keeping It Real that it died in my laptop. It suffocated. I didn't keep it fun.

Fiction, by definition, isn't real. It can be realistic but you've still got to enjoy yourself. Right? HBO's "The Wire" is real and gritty and utterly engrossing but it's the characters that matter. The real-life cop procedures are nice but if we didn't care if McNulty screwed around or if Omar's lover got himself killed, we'd stop watching. We'd also stop reading, were it a book. That's the Keeping It Real part. But how hard did you laugh when various groups of characters got drunk and just mouthed off? Those moments of levity helped me love those characters, even the criminals. Have a little fun. That's probably the biggest lesson I learned.

Everyone who writes columns (like this one?) on writing tends to boil the entire process down to the couplet Stephen King captured best: Read a lot and write a lot. I wouldn't be a writer if I didn't enjoy reading. And I'm a better writer every time I sit down to compose because of the variety of books I read. Classic adventure tales and early pulp fiction continue to grab our imaginations and rarely let go. They also can show us writers how they used to do it back in the day and allow us to question their choices and learn from them. I learned a lot from the adventure tales I read this summer (including a modern descendant, Gabriel Hunt) and I can't wait to get back to Africa with Tarzan or solve crimes with The Shadow or travel the world with Gabriel Hunt. I want to learn some more. And be entertained.

The Dan Brown Code

By Steve Weddle

You might have heard about this already, but that Dan Brown guy has a new book coming out this week, Tuesday, September 15. My heartfelt condolences to anyone else with a book dropping this week.

The prologue and first couple of chapters of THE LOST SYMBOL have already appeared in print and the book will top the bestseller charts for a long damn time. That’s a given. Also a given is that plenty of ink will be spilled about how Brown isn’t a great writer and still sells zillions of books and how bad he is for the industry because it puts the focus on the blockbuster. Yeah, yeah. I’m not here to bury Caesar. I’m here to tell you how Caesar rules the kingdom.


I’ve read or listened to all of his books so far, and I’ll swing by the bookstore to get this one on Tuesday. Why? Well, I’ll be near the bookstore that day anyway, so I might as well be a part of the madness. Oh, why have I read all his books? Yeah, because the dude can write. I don’t mean he can sculpt a sentence or layer a paragraph. He’s no Richard Powers. He doesn’t create characters that instill daydreams and fantasies in generations of readers. Oh, Mr. Darcy. I'm not necessarily a Dan Brown fan, but I am a writer. I want to understand what this bestselling author and publishing phenomenon does. So what does he do? The dude writes one chapter that gets you to the next. He writes page-turners. And I’m gonna tell you how he does it.



A few years ago, in that whole HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL holy moley lawsuit, Brown filed a “Witness Statement to the High Court” in which he detailed exactly how he writes his books and what “themes” he works into them. “For me, the ‘must have’ themes include codes, puzzles and treasure hunts, secretive organizations, and academic lectures on obscure topics,” Brown said in the filing. THE DA VINCI CODE had plenty of this, as did the one with the icebergs and the one at the NSA and the other one about the Catholic church. Yeah, but the puzzles and secrets are only part what makes the books page-turners.

Early on in ANGEL & DEMONS, Robert Langdon is talking with some scientist who tells him, in passing, that one square foot of fabric can slow a falling object at such-and-such a rate. Langdon says something like, “Little did I know that half a world away 18 hours later that piece of information would save my life.” You’re not going to turn the page now? C’mon. Don’t be like that. You may call it gimmicky, but this sucker moves. And yeah, the plots in Dan Brown’s books have some similar elements, particularly the whole “oh, you mean that guy we’ve trusted for the past 300 pages is actually the bad guy?” kind of stuff. In that court filing, Brown himself lists these similarities between the two Langdon novels: “ the murder, the chase through a foreign location, the action taking place all in 24 hours, the codes, the ticking clock, the strong male and female characters, the love interest.” Take what works, add in some changes and people keep reading the books and can’t put them down. And there’s a simple reason why.

The books Dan Brown writes aren’t great literature; they’re page-turners. The key here is that when you get to the end of a chapter, you want to keep reading. Those old Saturday matinees your grandpa still talks about. That season-ending episode when Picard got taken by the Borg. You want to know what happens next. And the way Brown accomplishes this is piece by piece. In THE DA VINCI CODE, they’re not looking for the Holy Grail as much as they’re looking for the answers to the puzzle that will lead them to the next puzzle that will lead them on to the Holy Grail. Only, that just leads to another puzzle. But they’re closer to the Grail. And the bad guys are closer to them, too. And it’s all closing in on them. Then they’re about to solve the piece and the chapter ends. Heck, you have to keep going. Here's the end to Chapter Six in THE DAVINCI CODE:

"You saw the photograph," Fache said, "so this should be of no surprise."
Langdon felt a deep chill as they approached the body. Before him was one of the strangest images he had ever seen.


Dan Brown tends to end his chapter with the first lines of novels. No, he’s no Richard Stark opening a Parker novel, but that line at the end of the chapter makes you want to know what happens next. And then you’re sucked into the suspense. Yeah, they’re just about to solve that puzzle, so you turn the page. Oh, man. That puzzle was just a clue for the next puzzle. Well, they’ve almost got that one solved. But what could it be? Does it tie in to what that guy said a few chapters ago?

Dan Brown isn’t the only writer to end a chapter with a doohickey that gets you to the next. He’s not the only writer to put little puzzles throughout. He’s not the only writer to create characters solely to advance the plot. But he is the guy millions of people read.

The reason people read Dan Brown because they HAVE TO FIND OUT. His books are tons of fun because they’re not about the characters or sentence structure. His books are all about WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

And for Dan Brown, what happens next is selling another zillion books.