sijopunk
Ilpa Kisaeng
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2026
- Posts
- 61
Last year's "Hammered" event by @ChloeTzang and this year's Borrowed Plumes event by @StillStunned both got me thinking about pulp writing. Chloe had described Mickey Spillane's writing as "set the scene and then dive into dialogue and action," which unlocked that writing style for a few of us that worked together on our entries last year.
That led me back to one of my personal inspirations: Robert E Howard, who is most famous for his Conan the barbarian stories.
Pulp fiction was usually printed in magazines at the time, and Howard's was often printed in "Weird Tales." There were multiple magazines available, and multiple stories within a magazine, so an author that didn't hook a reader in the first few sentences or paragraphs didn't get read. And they had to fight to keep the reader turning pages. We're all in the same situation but a million times more competitive.
I wanted to look at Howard's writing and see how he did it. His writing is now all apparently in the public domain (there are copyright holders, but they haven't tested those rights so this is an odd gray area). I'm going to reference one of his more famous stories (the Conan The Barbarian movie with Schwarzenegger drew heavily from this story, most specifically the crucifixion scene) called A Witch Shall Be Born (linked, the magazine cover may be NSFW).
Description
Howard's descriptions were very vivid and visceral. He used a few techniques that I could pick out:
Animal Imagery - he loves this one. Salome is “tigerish” and “pantherish,” spits with “the spite of a she-cobra’s hiss,” and stretches “like a great supple cat.” Conan strikes “quick as the stroke of a great cat,” and glares like a wolf. His enemies are “blue-bearded beasts” and the Zuagirs “desert wolves.” People are sorted into predators and prey, and there's a very jungle-like ethos to Howard's stories. The strong rule the weak.
Compound words - He uses these to evoke a sense of brooding, ancient awe, mystery. “dream-haunted,” “blood-fouled,” “vine-festooned,” “dagger-edged with hate,” “purple-towering Paikang"
He also intermixes almost archaic, romantic words into his stories, which give an interesting juxtaposition against the savage actions that characters take: visage, countenance, effrontery, mummery
Action and Verbs
A ton to say here. Howard likes verbs that imply a sudden transfer of force: jerked, flung, slashed, struck, lunged, crushed, wrenched, spat.
He uses verbs that make things active: Muscles knot, jaws clamp, fingers clench, rage “sweeps” through a character, helplessness “shakes” him, thirst “assails” him. What this feels like it does is to render physical sensations in the language of violence and motion. There's motion everywhere in Howard's verb choices.
Objects, especially weapons, get the kinetic energy of living things. A blade “licked through flesh and bone,” a sword point “sprang out” between shoulder blades, a severed fist “jumped from its wrist,” the sun “slashed down.”
Adjectives
Howard goes for lush, ripe adjectives: lurid, scintillant, sombre, gilded, vindictive, aquiline
Consider the language surrounding Salome: lurid, hellish, vindictive, diabolical, sardonic, cruel, inhuman
And around Conan: mighty, savage, ferocious, abysmal, tortured, massive, iron-hard
He's picking adjectives that give a sense of extremes. Salome isn't just a witch, she's hellish and diabolical. Conan's not just a barbarian, he's tortured and savage (my personal favorite of Howard's go-to adjectives). The upside is that they're very visceral. The downside is that overusing them wears them out, and he does that sometimes. If you're shotgunning his stories one after another, this can get tiring.
Dialogue
A few things jump out here, besides the heavy use of adverbs.
He rarely uses "said". This is another area of his that I don't like. He uses more active dialogue tags: gritted, rasped, yowled, shrieked, spat, quoth, muttered, and his most cringeworthy ... "ejaculated"
Speech is theatrical and archaic: “Aye!”, “By Crom,” “By Ishtar,” “lass,” “dog,” “fool!” Villains make monologues and explain their plans, while Salome’s expository confession in chapter one is pulp melodrama. Endearments become insults (“sweet sister”). Characters speak in declarations, giving his stories a stage-play like theatrical quality.
Sentence Structure
IMO, this is one of his more valuable lessons. He uses long, sometimes winding, sentences for description when there's spectacle, and he lets the details emerge one at a time in layers. Howard then switches to the short, punchy sentences he's known for when it comes time for action, judgement, or finality. This lets him control the pace of the reader experience.
Sensory Detail
Howard makes us experience the consequences of things through vivid sensory details. The crucifixion scene is a great example of this.
In the second chapter, Conan has to endure:
Personally, I've adopted this as a cornerstone of my own writing, and it meshes well with lessons from Chuck Palahniuk's writing. Howard was writing predominantly in third person past tense, but this technique is essential for first person writers.
Overall
I could go on. I already spent three hours on this post plus who knows how many hundreds of hours spent reading & rereading Howard's stories. I listed a few techniques of his that really jump out at me. Other authors do them, too, but Howard combined them nonstop with a lot of confidence. He draws from the same toolbox and he does it in every paragraph. To me, that's what separates Howard from other writers ... he was totally unafraid to saturate his work with his writing style.
Caveats to Howard's writing
He was writing during the 1930s, so some of his imagery and themes don't map well onto today's sensibilities. There's a subtle racism to some of his works (black characters tend to be subservient to white characters, such as Bêlit who was Shemish but ran a pirate fleet of mostly black sailors). It's not as blatant as his contemporary HP Lovecraft, who would even make modern racists blush.
Howard's female characters were, IMO, fairly decent especially for the time. He had several notable female characters with a ton of agency and who were also active, both as companions and opponents of Conan. He did rely on the "damsel in distress" quite a bit, but his female characters usually had arcs. I attribute part of this mildly misogynistic characterization to the fact that Howard realized that if he included vivid imagery of scantily clad hot girls, he got featured on the cover. Overall, though, I have to say that he did an above-average job with his female characters, and I don't think fantasy really hit his level of female agency again until probably the Dragonlance books (that's just my own speculation ... someone who read more fantasy than me might note other authors who understood women as more than plot devices).
That led me back to one of my personal inspirations: Robert E Howard, who is most famous for his Conan the barbarian stories.
Pulp fiction was usually printed in magazines at the time, and Howard's was often printed in "Weird Tales." There were multiple magazines available, and multiple stories within a magazine, so an author that didn't hook a reader in the first few sentences or paragraphs didn't get read. And they had to fight to keep the reader turning pages. We're all in the same situation but a million times more competitive.
I wanted to look at Howard's writing and see how he did it. His writing is now all apparently in the public domain (there are copyright holders, but they haven't tested those rights so this is an odd gray area). I'm going to reference one of his more famous stories (the Conan The Barbarian movie with Schwarzenegger drew heavily from this story, most specifically the crucifixion scene) called A Witch Shall Be Born (linked, the magazine cover may be NSFW).
Description
Howard's descriptions were very vivid and visceral. He used a few techniques that I could pick out:
Animal Imagery - he loves this one. Salome is “tigerish” and “pantherish,” spits with “the spite of a she-cobra’s hiss,” and stretches “like a great supple cat.” Conan strikes “quick as the stroke of a great cat,” and glares like a wolf. His enemies are “blue-bearded beasts” and the Zuagirs “desert wolves.” People are sorted into predators and prey, and there's a very jungle-like ethos to Howard's stories. The strong rule the weak.
Compound words - He uses these to evoke a sense of brooding, ancient awe, mystery. “dream-haunted,” “blood-fouled,” “vine-festooned,” “dagger-edged with hate,” “purple-towering Paikang"
He also intermixes almost archaic, romantic words into his stories, which give an interesting juxtaposition against the savage actions that characters take: visage, countenance, effrontery, mummery
Action and Verbs
A ton to say here. Howard likes verbs that imply a sudden transfer of force: jerked, flung, slashed, struck, lunged, crushed, wrenched, spat.
He uses verbs that make things active: Muscles knot, jaws clamp, fingers clench, rage “sweeps” through a character, helplessness “shakes” him, thirst “assails” him. What this feels like it does is to render physical sensations in the language of violence and motion. There's motion everywhere in Howard's verb choices.
Objects, especially weapons, get the kinetic energy of living things. A blade “licked through flesh and bone,” a sword point “sprang out” between shoulder blades, a severed fist “jumped from its wrist,” the sun “slashed down.”
Adjectives
Howard goes for lush, ripe adjectives: lurid, scintillant, sombre, gilded, vindictive, aquiline
Consider the language surrounding Salome: lurid, hellish, vindictive, diabolical, sardonic, cruel, inhuman
And around Conan: mighty, savage, ferocious, abysmal, tortured, massive, iron-hard
He's picking adjectives that give a sense of extremes. Salome isn't just a witch, she's hellish and diabolical. Conan's not just a barbarian, he's tortured and savage (my personal favorite of Howard's go-to adjectives). The upside is that they're very visceral. The downside is that overusing them wears them out, and he does that sometimes. If you're shotgunning his stories one after another, this can get tiring.
Dialogue
A few things jump out here, besides the heavy use of adverbs.
He rarely uses "said". This is another area of his that I don't like. He uses more active dialogue tags: gritted, rasped, yowled, shrieked, spat, quoth, muttered, and his most cringeworthy ... "ejaculated"
Speech is theatrical and archaic: “Aye!”, “By Crom,” “By Ishtar,” “lass,” “dog,” “fool!” Villains make monologues and explain their plans, while Salome’s expository confession in chapter one is pulp melodrama. Endearments become insults (“sweet sister”). Characters speak in declarations, giving his stories a stage-play like theatrical quality.
Sentence Structure
IMO, this is one of his more valuable lessons. He uses long, sometimes winding, sentences for description when there's spectacle, and he lets the details emerge one at a time in layers. Howard then switches to the short, punchy sentences he's known for when it comes time for action, judgement, or finality. This lets him control the pace of the reader experience.
Sensory Detail
Howard makes us experience the consequences of things through vivid sensory details. The crucifixion scene is a great example of this.
In the second chapter, Conan has to endure:
- The pressure and tearing of the spikes in his hands and feet
- Sweat and blood running across his skin
- The heat of the desert sun
- The vultures circling and attacking
- The growing agony of thirst
- The pain of being forced to move his injured body
Personally, I've adopted this as a cornerstone of my own writing, and it meshes well with lessons from Chuck Palahniuk's writing. Howard was writing predominantly in third person past tense, but this technique is essential for first person writers.
Overall
I could go on. I already spent three hours on this post plus who knows how many hundreds of hours spent reading & rereading Howard's stories. I listed a few techniques of his that really jump out at me. Other authors do them, too, but Howard combined them nonstop with a lot of confidence. He draws from the same toolbox and he does it in every paragraph. To me, that's what separates Howard from other writers ... he was totally unafraid to saturate his work with his writing style.
Caveats to Howard's writing
He was writing during the 1930s, so some of his imagery and themes don't map well onto today's sensibilities. There's a subtle racism to some of his works (black characters tend to be subservient to white characters, such as Bêlit who was Shemish but ran a pirate fleet of mostly black sailors). It's not as blatant as his contemporary HP Lovecraft, who would even make modern racists blush.
Howard's female characters were, IMO, fairly decent especially for the time. He had several notable female characters with a ton of agency and who were also active, both as companions and opponents of Conan. He did rely on the "damsel in distress" quite a bit, but his female characters usually had arcs. I attribute part of this mildly misogynistic characterization to the fact that Howard realized that if he included vivid imagery of scantily clad hot girls, he got featured on the cover. Overall, though, I have to say that he did an above-average job with his female characters, and I don't think fantasy really hit his level of female agency again until probably the Dragonlance books (that's just my own speculation ... someone who read more fantasy than me might note other authors who understood women as more than plot devices).
.
