At the request of a number of friends and colleagues, I've broken my manual, WRITE COMPELLING FICTION into a number of 1,500 (plus or minus) word articles for EzineArticles, slightly upgrading them as I go. Hope you glean a little good from them, and hope I see your novels on the shelves and racks, along with my 20 novels and 2 non-fiction works, and my wife's over 50 romantic suspense and historical romance novels.
Remember as you read this, it's written looking at the western and historicals as examples, however the rules, unless otherwise specified, apply to all genres....
STORY: Story? What's a western about? Generally, it's a drama. If you want to write a book about the trials and tribulations of a comic watchmaker who happens to live in Sante Fe in eighteen hundred and seventy five, you better make him the toughest watch maker in several states, who defends his watches to the death with a Colt.44 and a bowie knife!
A drama is defined by Random House as:
A composition in prose or verse presenting in dialogue or pantomime a story involving conflict or contrast of character...any situation or series of events having vivid, emotional, conflicting, or striking interest or results.
A good western (or any genre novel), like any good drama, is about trial and tribulation, success and failure, and hopefully, riveting head to head conflict that makes a compelling read.
The finest compliment a novelist can get is, "I read your book in one sitting." Even if they hated it, it was compelling! A page turner. Let me qualify that compliment by reminding you that generally westerns are short. Other than an insomniac speed reader, no one could read War and Peace in one sitting. That your book is compelling is the greatest compliment a writer can get.
Conflict and its resolution creates compelling reading. Put your hero up a cliff, out of powder, wad, and shot, hostile Indians below, a rabid cougar on the cliff above, and a grizzly protecting her cubs in the cave behind and your hero developing a migraine.
Now that's compelling reading!
An obvious exaggeration, and we'll talk about credibility and pacing later, but you get the idea.
Set your historical anywhere you love to read about and study, for you'll have to know a lot about time and place to write a successful one. It helps to pick a location and time that has been written about by good historians.
SEX: Sex? The "S" word. In the last few years, the adult western, with explicit sock-it-to-'em, a-different-lady-in-each-chapter sex, has developed its own audience, and it's a fairly big one as genre writing goes. It's still not the norm. The rule is: The only one kissed by the hero in a western is his horse. Like the other rules, this one was made to be broken. Louis L'Amour had lots of romance in his many fine novels...not explicit romance, but romance.
Still, there is a romantic interest in most if not all of Louis L'Amour's novels. Romance, as Zane Grey so aptly put it, is idealism, and westerns, as Louis L'Amour so aptly wrote them, are about the dignity of western man. Ideals. Romance. Good triumphs over evil. The good guy wins.
Keep explicit sex (vivid description) to your mainstream or contemporary novel, or your romance novel, if you want to sell your western as a classic western. A historical offers greater leeway.
I try limit the sex in my books to the dropping of a boot or the closing of a bedroom door. Kat writes romance, so don't read hers unless you are ready to break out in a sweat.
The above does not mean there's not a market for an explicitly sexy western. However, I think it hurts the original genre to write and publish them. Not that I wouldn't fight to defend that right. But they should at least be presented so the reader knows what they are getting.
THE ENDING: I only include this subject in this section because some genres have definite ending requirements. For example, in the genre sense, a romance must end happily - boy gets girl. A mystery must end with a solution to the mystery. But a western or historical can end in any way.
High Noon ended happily. Shane rode off into the sunset, alone and without attachments again - happiness for the settler whose wife he was so attracted too, but not the generally accepted happy ending. There is no hard and fast rule. But generally a western ends like High Noon or Shane, or somewhere between the two.
The hard quiet stranger triumphant but alone rides off into the unknown, is usually the saddest of western endings. Why? Because most of us want to feel good. When the last trooper of the cavalry regiment and the last Indian from the village kill each other with their last bullets while standing on top of a pile of trooper and Indian bodies - characters a good writer has brought you to care about - you've got a sad ending. There's a market for it, but its not my cup of tea, or maybe sarsaparilla would be more appropriate.
Write a Shane or High Noon ending and you'll sell your first western novel.
A historical can end in any fashion. Again, it offers much more leeway.
So, what's a western?
An exciting, compelling drama that takes place between eighteen forty and eighteen eighty five about the West, with a hero who prevails and wins the lady's love, or at least respect and yearning, and saves the town, ranch, railroad, stage coach line, etc., etc...
But, hell's bells, if you get right down to it, your guess is as good as mine and most editors.
Write a novel they can't put down. A compelling conflict. The West, the East, the North, or South, or Kenya or Afghanistan, at its glorious best and evil worst.
In the following chapter (article) I'll try to give you some hints.
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