By Elizabeth van der Veer

Note: From the September, 1940 issue of "Writer's Digest". No copyright renewal was found.

I began to write for the love pulps about seven years ago, and during that first year, turned out some twenty-five stories in my spare time of eight to ten hours a week. All of these stories were written many times. I sold two.

Like ten thousand other beginners, I couldn't figure out why two stories sold and twenty-three didn't. To me, the rejected stories seemed as good as the two which sold. The editors thought differently and told me so with slips or letters, instead of checks.

So I quit trying to write love stories. I decided it was all a game of chance.

During the next six years, I dabbled with booklengths, and, while accomplishing nothing tangible, learned a lot about writing novels, especially mystery stories, which may be valuable to me some day.

Last fall I decided to fight another round with the love pulps. And, after seven months and seven stories submitted, I can render a better score than I did on my first series.

So far this year I've had three stories published, which is forty percent of production.

Mostly, I believe, the improvement lies in this one fact. I've learned that the love pulp story must have an emotional problem, not a business or minor problem, between girl and boy. For instance, in the stories recently sold, here were the opening situations :

1. A girl, through no fault of her own, has been named correspondent in a divorce scandal. Hero, at opening of story, calls to tell her that because of this notoriety, she must stop seeing his young brother, who is a doctor trying to build a practice in the town.

2. A girl, who has denied herself part of her own salary to help her boss and his business, finds him giving money to another girl for postage to promote that girl's advertising campaign.

3. A girl arrives at a country store to check up on a farm she owns and has been unable to get vacated. She has driven a thousand miles and wants to bring her sick mother to the farm to recuperate. In the store she happens upon the young lawyer with whom she's been corresponding about the farm. He tries to delay action even further, because he's got a date to go possum hunting.

All of these situations, you see, are serious, emotional problems, problems which must either be worked out or overcome. They cannot be explained away. The girl and man, in each case, see things entirely differently and, as the story progresses, the antagonism between them deepens until, either through developments in the story, or changes in the feelings of one or the other, sometimes both, the conflict is overcome.

In my first series of stories, I must have just happened to get hold of emotional problems in the two stories which sold. The others, as I can see now by looking over them, did not have these strong emotional situations. I've given up trying to work over any old stories. Each story I write now is from a new situation. Sometimes I may consider and discard twenty or thirty situations before I get one on which I think there's a strong enough emotional slant to build a story. Sometimes it takes me a week to get such a situation, but once I've got it, the story comes easily, because I've something to work with. I used to take any kind of opening situation, then try to build a strong story from it. I was working backwards.

When you write love pulp stories, you soon learn that each opening scene resolves itself into one of two approaches:

1. Prior to the story opening, the girl knows the man and out of that friendship some conflict arises, or has arisen.

2. The girl and man meet early in the story. Out of that meeting something happens to cause trouble between them. What?

This formula simplifies love story writing for me. Before I start a new plot, I ask myself which of the two approaches I want to work with this time. Either of the two approaches has its hazards. In the first type of approach, the writer must bring in a throwback or some retrospect without slowing up the action of the story. In the second type, the writer must get them acquainted quickly, then rush in some conflict as the result of that meeting.

~

Besides a strong emotional problem, I've also learned that: A good love story must march ahead. The scenes must move swiftly. Every paragraph must have emotion in it. Play up the scenes and conflict between hero and heroine and play down everything else, using only those brief bits and characters necessary to the development of the story.

The hero (if I'm telling the story from the girl's viewpoint, which I usually am) must be on the scene at least seventy-five percent of the story, more if possible.

After I'm selling every 4,500 to 5,000 word pulp love story I write, I'll feel qualified to try a novelette, because I will have learned, I hope, not to let loose writing get by.

I've learned that if you try to find out what the editors want and show any signs of giving it to them, they'll cooperate and encourage you. It isn't a game of chance!

~

Jane Littell, of Love Book, saw advance proofs on this article. She writes:

Sir:

I have always maintained that learning to write stories was like learning to ride a bicycle, or getting religion. All of a sudden, the light dawns. The light dawned for Miss van der Veer when she discovered that the love pulp story must have an emotional problem. And again when she discovered what an emotional problem was. Those are two distinctly different discoveries a writer must make, and there is usually a lapse of time between the first and the second.

The amazing thing is that most love story writers know this in principle, but they do not always test their story ideas to see if the core of the story they intend to write is an emotional problem. Then suddenly, after months or years of struggling, they do just what Miss van der Veer did-discover that the stories that sold had an emotional problem, and those that did not sell had a money problem or a mother-in-law problem or something else.

The next step is to make sure that the writer's idea of an emotional problem is the same as the editor's idea. Once that is settled, the writer ought to sell every story.

Jane Littell, Love Book, New York City.