In this week’s episode, we take a look at why it is good for writers to read outside their genre, and consider how writers develop with experience.
This week’s coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Veils, Book #2 in the Ghost Armor Series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store:
VEILS50
The coupon code is valid through January 31, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for the January weather, we’ve got you covered!
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 234 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 10th, 2025. I have just finished shoveling some snow and today we are going to discuss how writers develop. Before we get to our main topic, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update my current writing projects, and then Question of the Week.
So let’s start off with Coupon of the Week. This week’s coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Veils, book number two in the Ghost Armor series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), on my Payhip store. That coupon code is VEILS50 and that is VEILS50. The coupon code and the link will be in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2025, so if you need a new audiobook for the chilly January weather, we have got you covered.
Now let’s take a look at where I’m at with my current ebook writing and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am 82,000 words into Shield of Deception, which puts me on chapter 19 of 31. As I’ve said before, this is going to be a long one. I think the rough draft is going to end up around 110 to 115,000 words long. We’ll see when I get there. I was hoping to have it out in January, but now I am definitely planning that it’s going to slip until February just because it’s so long. My secondary project is Ghost in the Tombs and I am now 10,000 words into that, I’m pleased to say, and that should be out in March. I’m also 37,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: Reactant, but that won’t be out until this summer.
In audiobook news, recording and proofing is done for Cloak of Masks, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. If all goes well, that should be out on all the audiobook stories before too much longer. And in fact, I think it’s already shown up on Chirp and Kobo and few of the other ones, but it’s not up on Audible or Apple yet. Hollis has now started work on Cloak of Dragonfire, so that will be the next audiobook out once Cloak of Masks comes out. Leanne Woodward is working on Orc-Hoard, which would be the fourth book in the Rivah Half-Elven series and hopefully that should be out sometime in February, if all goes well. So that’s where I’m at with my current writing projects.
00:02:19 Question of the Week
Now let’s move on to Question of the Week. It’s time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week’s question: what game are you playing in 2025 so far? No wrong answers obviously, including not playing games at all. The inspiration for this question was of course the fact that 2025 is a new year.
Surabhi says: I’ve never been much of a gamer myself. The farthest I got was playing Subway surfers on my phone, but apart from that, I don’t really get an appeal to play. Some video games are more complex and thoughtful and they can even prompt new writing ideas. It’s something that’s been on my mind for a while as an aspiring author and I think I give some games a try just in case they give me plot or vibe ideas. Wondering what you think about that.
That is in fact an interesting thought and one I’ve thought about before, and I will probably go into that in future blog posts and podcast episodes, just not on Question of the Week.
Michael says: I have been continuing my long play through Horizon Forbidden West (which is epic), also dipped into Path of Exile 2, which makes my brain hurt with all the character build options.
Ioana says: Does Words of Wonders on my phone count?
Yes. Yes, it does.
A different Michael says: I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 14 for the last 11 years. It’s a great game, but I am taking a break. At the moment, I am playing the newest version of 7 Days to Die on PlayStation 5. Now that it has been upgraded to the latest version available on PC, it’s an awesome game. It has its glitches, but that’s okay. I enjoy it.
Juana says: PlayStation 5 Diablo 2 Reforged.
Adeline says: Still playing Overwatch on the PC but also branched into a virtual jigsaw puzzle. On the phone, it’s mostly word/puzzle games, Word Collect, Blockudoku, Sudoku, Traffic Escape, and Cryptogram.
Scott says: I’m playing my second play through of the new Dragon Age. Indiana Jones is next or another run of Dragon Age.
Becca says: Right now, the yearly replay of the Mass Effect series.
Cole says: I’ve been playing Civilization 6 and New World: Aeternum. Both I’ve played in the past and just got back into them again.
A different Scott says: I got hooked on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. I also play some second edition and fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons games that have been going on for years now.
JKM says: Path of Exile 2 and Discovering the Galaxy and Elite Dangerous.
Ann-Marie says: PC -Minecraft and World of Warcraft. On phone/tablet, Fallout Shelter and Mob Control.
For myself, I have been playing Iratus: Lord of the Dead and enjoying it. It’s a roguelike and it’s basically reverse darkest dungeon. In darkest dungeon, you need to send your adventurers deeper and deeper into the dungeon until you get to the final dungeon (the darkest dungeon) and fight the evil boss. Iratus is the opposite. You play as the sinister necromancer at the bottom of the dungeon and you send your minions higher and higher into the dungeon fighting heroes and harvesting the remains to build your undead minions. I enjoy it partly because it’s easy to play it in bite-sized pieces, which works well with my schedule. Darkest Dungeon was a great game, but honestly the save structure wasn’t all that great, and if you were doing a large dungeon and you had to save and quit, you could lose a lot of progress on the run. By contrast, you can do one battle in Iratus, save your game, and then get on with your day.
On my phone, I mostly play chess.com. In fact, the other day I was just waiting in my car to pick someone up, had nothing else to do, so I pulled up my phone and did chess puzzles on chess.com until the person I was there to pick up arrived. So that is what I’ve been playing so far as we are 10 days into 2025.
00:05:51 Main Topic: Development as a Writer
Now let’s move on to our main topic, which was inspired by a question Michael (in fact, the first Michael from Question of the Week), who wrote in to say, “in a post or podcast months ago when talking on a similar theme, he gave some advice that authors should read outside of their genre and said something like, “you can tell when a sci-fi author has only ever read sci-fi.” I was pondering this to work out what you meant. Have you ever elaborated on that in another podcast somewhere?”
I have not elaborated on that on the podcast, but let’s do so now. Having read only inside one genre is a problem that tends to be faced by newer or younger writers who haven’t read very much outside of their favorite genre and haven’t really developed their own voice yet. There are generally two signs of this problem, one heavy over-reliance on the cliches of a specific genre and two, real world things that intrude on the book tend to be outlandish and not developed very well. Now, what do I mean by this?
#1: Over-reliance on genre cliches. What do I mean by that? Think of a science fiction novel that’s very obviously a pastiche of Star Trek and Star Wars or a fantasy novel that’s clearly The Lord of Rings with a lot more romance or in the romance genre, you have a heroine who’s adorable, clumsy, and describes herself as average, yet draws the attention of the brooding troubled billionaire with stormy eyes and tragic backstory, who somehow has time to maintain six pack abs while running the largest corporate conglomerate in the history of the world. In mystery, you have the divorced alcoholic detective whose superiors want him off the case, and it turns out the case goes all the way to the top.
In Young Adult, the main character is the chosen one who will overthrow the dystopia or is the most special student ever at an incompetently run wizard school. (I’m just imagining the education accreditation inspectors I’ve met in previous careers reacting with horror to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.) In literary fiction, the protagonist is a middle aged alcoholic creative writing professor who is having an affair with a graduate student or students.
The characters themselves will be exaggerated. The villains will be really villainous and the protagonists really heroic. Now, this can actually work because a significant number of readers love genre cliches and don’t like to read outside them. Very famously, there have been successful romance novels that started off as either Twilight fan fiction or Kylo Ren/Rey Star Wars romance fan fiction, and then the writers changed all the character names and removed the trademark material and were able to sell them.
However, these writers often tend to struggle to write more books after that because it becomes sort of locked within their genre and therefore have a hard time writing outside those genre cliches.
#2: Real world things that intrude on the book tend to be outlandish, not developed very well, or hand waved away causing a lack of verisimilitude.
This I think tends to be simply a function of insufficient life experience, which usually resolves itself over time or failing to recognize that a little research is necessary at times. Like I once read a book where a protagonist’s elderly relative had to pay her property taxes to the city government in two weeks (despite never having missed a payment before) or she would be immediately kicked out of her house and become homeless. Now, that’s a good setup that makes for a dramatic tension in the plot, but it’s not at all how property taxes usually work in the United States.
First, in the US, property taxes are usually paid at the county level, not the municipal. Though, to be fair to the writers, there are exceptions and the United States has this variance in local governments that you can’t always 100% generalize. Second, you have to be behind on payments for several years, normally two, and then the local county issues a notice of foreclosure and then the county will sell the house and you get evicted. This, however, tends to be a long process with a lot of lawyers and court summons and a lot of potential off-ramps and compromises before an actual seizure and eviction happens. Additionally, returning to our theme of variation in localisms, some states and local areas may have laws that specifically govern or restrict home evictions. It’s usually easier to foreclose on a commercial or industrial property than a residence where someone is actually living. (As is often the case throughout history, in foreclosures the poor and those unable to navigate bureaucracy are more likely to get the short end of the stick than the wealthy and those who understand which forms to file and who to talk to.)
But the writer in question overlooked all those facts and set up the situation where the sheriff was waiting to shove the elderly relative on the street within two weeks. It was clear from the text that the writer didn’t actually know how property taxes worked and more to the point, didn’t actually know she could have done research to find out. I’ve written before how you need verisimilitude in fiction, just enough details that it feels real, and a small rewrite could have improved the situation quite a bit. The protagonist could have realized that her elderly relative had been behind on property taxes for years and had been lying about it out of embarrassment and been hiding the notices from the county on the topic. This would have added quite a bit verisimilitude to the situation. Another possibility would’ve been that the local sheriff was corrupt in taking kickbacks from a bank that wanted to buy the house (sadly, there have been cases similar to this in real life), but that wasn’t what was happening in the book.
The problem with the lack of verisimilitude is that you can shatter the reader’s suspension of disbelief. It’s not possible to maintain suspension of disbelief for all the readers all the time, but you do want it as much as possible. There are some readers who would not have their suspension of disbelief broken by the example we’ve just discussed, but quite a few would. So I think those are the two tells for writers who are just starting out and haven’t read very much outside their favorite genre, an over-reliance on genre cliches and real life situations that don’t make sense or not very well researched, but all that is fine. It’s just part of the development process of a writer or another creative person, in my opinion, anyway.
I suspect that writers and other creatives go through a five-step process in their development.
#1: They’re inspired to create you or read something amazing, the Lord, the Rings, Star Wars, Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, The Bourne Identity, whatever, and have the urge to create your own version of the thing that you thought was amazing.
#2: You practice and fail. You try to create something amazing and similar to the thing you like, but it doesn’t go very well, like you can never quite finish or you realize you’re only writing fan fiction of the thing you like. Many people get stuck at phase two and give up. Those who keep trying will eventually improve and jump to the next step, which is step three, realizing that you can do better than something you’ve read.
#3: A major milestone in the development of any creative person is when they read a book, see a painting or watch a TV show that is successful and yet think to themselves, this is no good and I can do better than that. This is a necessary step in building confidence.
#4: Struggle to assimilate influences. Any writer or artist is going to have influences, and it’s often a struggle to integrate them. Like you can tell when a beginning fantasy writer is heavily influenced by Tolkien or Martin or Robert Jordan or whoever. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this, and it is a necessary step. Eventually, you can be inspired by something without having it dominate your style.
#5: You settle on your own style. Finally, if you persist long enough, you settle on your own style and voice. That’s where you have your own voice but are confident enough to assimilate influences without being dominated by them. The only way to reach this final step, I’m afraid, is through time and practice.
Now, where does reading outside your genre help with this? It allows you to draw in other influences that will strengthen your writing within your chosen genre.
For example, I don’t usually write mystery novels, but I’ve read a lot of them. I think that has strengthened both the Ghosts and Cloak Games/Cloak Mage series quite a bit since every other book seems to be Caina or Nadia have to solve a mystery for somebody. Ghosts is epic fantasy/ sword and sorcery and Cloak Mage is primarily urban fantasy, but by adding mystery elements into the series, I think the books are strengthened for it.
If you read widely enough, you could also approach genre cliches from a fresh direction or with a twist, like the brooding billionaire is an actor hired by the actual billionaire to provide a public front while the actual billionaire gets on with the business of making money, or a Star Wars pastiche with space wizards who are less illogical than the Jedi, or a brooding alcoholic genius detective who suddenly becomes a lot better at his job once he gives up alcohol and cigarettes. So these five steps of writer evolution are only a theory of mine, but I do think this is something that has some truth to it and is my current theory of development for writers.
So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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