Writing popular fiction

money. If you can write a porn novel quickly (a week is not a bad schedule, for the professional in this field), then you can keep your work-reward ration at a reasonable level and you can enjoy other benefits of the field. For one thing, since virtually all Rough Sexy Novels are published under pen names, you can learn to polish your writing while getting paid for the pleasure, and have no fear of damaging your creative reputation. Also, because the RoughSN puts absolutely no restrictions on the writer besides the requirement of regular sex scenes, one after the other, you can experiment with style, try stream-of-consciousness, present tense narrative and other stylistic tricks, to learn if you can make them work. If they fail, you still get your RoughSN money; if they succeed, you can adapt them to serious work, later.
    The disadvantages of the RoughSN form are these: low advances; royalties are rarely reported correctly from exclusively RoughSN publishing houses, and often they are not reported at all; you are not building a useful reputation as a writer; you may write so many Rough Sexy Novels that you literally burn yourself out.
    Finally, both BigSN and RoughSN authors are subject to boredom with their work. Subconsciously if not consciously aware that their work is strictly formulized and repetitive, having written thousands of sex scenes in what few ways they can be written, they lose interest in producing anything more. And this, for the writer, is the worst fate of all.
CHAPTER EIGHT    The Most Important Chapter in this Book
    This is not only the most important chapter in this book, but the shortest as well. It consists of one piece of advice that no new writer can afford to ignore.
    I have given you the rules and requirements of each modern category of fiction. In the chapter that follows this one, I'll discuss some writing techniques that are applicable to all the categories. When you've read all this, you can go out to the bookstore and purchase a dozen novels which, in some minor or major way, break one or more of these rules, fail to meet these requirements, and ignore some of these Dos and Don'ts. Writers break rules and still get published all the time. But these are writers who have published, for the most part, numerous other books: people who have learned all the rules, have proved that they can use them successfully time and again, and have therefore earned the right to break a tradition or two. Just as the abstract painter must first learn how to draw in realistic detail, so must the rule-breaking writer first learn how to write saleable material within the restrictions I've talked about. Your road to success in any genre will be shorter if you walk the known trail and leave the exploration of new territory for later.
CHAPTER NINE    Other Questions
    Familiar with the five basic ingredients of category fiction—a strong plot, a real hero or heroine, believable character motivation, a great deal of action, and a colorful background—and having learned the fundamentals of each category, you will have other things to consider, things of a lesser magnitude than those already discussed but nevertheless also vital to the quality of the finished work. Most of these do not present problems unique to category fiction, though they are none the less important for their literary universality. We'll consider each in a general way, and, where necessary consider each as it applies in a special way to one or more of the genres.
    Plot wheels, plot cards, and story construction lists, all of those devices one time on sale to help writers get ideas, are utterly useless for the serious fiction craftsman. Writing, after all, is an art as well as a craft, requiring emotional involvement on the artist's part, a commitment you are clearly not ready to make if you think such a mechanical plotting system will be valuable to you.
    Likewise, if you attempt to build stories from newspaper clippings, you are fooling yourself if you believe you can establish a body of respectable work in this manner. Some writers have sold stories generated by human interest newspaper clippings; indeed, one writer I know of has sold more than two dozen stories that originated like this. Rarely, however, are these pieces
good
fiction: because the most engaging newspaper human interest stories revolve around a quirk of Fate or coincidence, the final plot of the fictionalized version is forced or outright incredible. You also run the