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 eZine, 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....
WHAT'S A WESTERN? WHAT'S A HISTORICAL?: As its eighth definition of the non-capitalized word, western, Random House says:
A story, movie, or radio or television play about the U.S.
West of the nineteenth century.
Of an of historical novel it says:
A narrative in novel form, characterized
chiefly by an imaginative reconstruction
of historical events and personages.
Let's look at those definitions as they apply to western/historical novels. And remember that a western romance may have far different guidelines than those for a straight western or straight historical.
As appears on the paperback racks in thousands of book stores, truck stops, supermarkets, and drug stores, a western is a fictional story of forty five to eighty five thousand words. This is a rule. Rules are made to be broken, and the word-limit rule, like all rules in publishing as well as most other businesses, is broken often. One of the finest western novels ever written (in my opinion, and the only Pulitzer Prize winning western novel ever written) is much longer. We'll talk more about Lonesome Dove a little later.
Again, so much for rules.
The point I'm trying to make is, nothing is hard and fast. But if you want to sell your novel, it's the accepted beginning, accepted length, accepted subject matter, accepted time frame, accepted style, and accepted ending that will sell quickest. Don't fight city hall.
Get one sold, get famous (or at least established), then you can break the rules.
Stephen King wrote a three word chapter in Misery. Thomas Wolfe wrote a four hundred word sentence in Bonfire of the Vanities. Cormac McCarthy writes novels with little or no punctuation. All were (silently or at least in low tones) chastised by New York editors for "grandstanding." But they can pull this kind of stuff because they are Stephen King and Thomas Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy.
Consistently put a few novels on the top of the NYT or the PW lists, and you can grandstand.
In the meantime, write fifty to sixty thousand words for your short genre or one hundred thirty thousand for your long one-or better yet, follow the guidelines of the publisher to whom you wish to sell.
Later, I'll tell you how to count words so you know how long your work is.
But any work of fifty thousand words does not a western make. What makes the western a western?
TIME FRAME: Westerns are generally set in the expansion of the West period. The year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty up to the turn of the century, with by far the majority set in the twenty years from the end of the Civil War to eighteen hundred and eighty five. Why? Because the reading public conceives that time frame as the "West." Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, cowhands, gunmen, cattle barons, Indians, Indian uprisings, the expansion of the railroads, etc., etc., these were the people and the events we've come to identify with the West.
The Bureau of Census, in 1890, compiled and published Population and Statistical Figure for The United States and in that document declared the America frontier closed. In 1893 the Indian Territory was organized as the Oklahoma Territory, and with that act every square inch in America was officially under some form of local government. The Wild West was over.
Stick with one set in that time frame-the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century-at least for the first novel.
A Historical? Any time in the past. Is the WW2 period, or any time subsequent (say Vietnam) considered a historical time frame? It depends upon the editor and publishing house. Is a pre-historic considered a historical, I think again it depends upon the editor, but most would probably consider them nearer the fantasy genre. Look at the John Jakes series of novels, The Bastard, etc., for my belief of what are true, easily identified, historicals.
WHAT'S A WESTERN OR HISTORICAL SUBJECT: Can a western be set in 1880's New York City, if it's about a cowhand? An eastern-western? Maybe, but I wouldn't want to try it (although it's being done in romance westerns). Talk about a hard sell! A sheriff goes after a killer in Arizona; a bad cattle baron rules the town that's grown up at the edge of his spread in New Mexico; a Union cavalry officer returns to Wyoming from the Civil War to find his sister kidnapped by the Crow. Cattle drives, gamblers and saloon girls, rustlers, robbers, Comancheros, cowboys, and Indians. These situations and characters are the meat of genre westerns.
But western romances, historicals, and contemporary novels with western settings can be written with much greater leeway-almost infinitesimal.
SETTING: Setting? Set your western or historical in the West, or if a historical, preferably in a place you know a lot about. If not your own home town, then a place you've visited and, hopefully, have learned something about its history. Not absolutely necessary, but helpful. It's hard enough to break into a new business. Make it as easy on yourself as possible.
My first book was about my hometown, Bakersfield, California. It was a hard sell. Even though the West's greatest stock drive originated in Kern County, and one of the last great shoot-outs took place in the Bakersfield Tenderloin, New York editors think of the West as Abilene, Tombstone, Fort Worth, Santa Fe, Rawlins, etc. The places they've read about in westerns for years. Except for the gold rush period, they think of California as the land of fruits and nuts. Mark Twain said California was "West of the West," and New York still believes it to a great extent.
If I were starting my first book again, it would set in an area deemed western by the folks who buy them-editors.
But again, this is a rule that has been successfully broken. What you need to know about a setting can be researched in the local library. Tom Clancy wrote his best-selling The Hunt For Red October, set almost entirely in a nuclear submarine and involving intricate detail, and never set foot in a nuclear sub.
It can be done; it's just tougher.
And here again, settings for western romances, historicals, and other genres utilizing western themes are much broader and much less limiting than genre westerns.
Which ever genre you decide to attack, know your market, read lots of books in that genre, don't try and write a thousand manuscript pages and expect an easy sell in this time of high publishing costs, and above all, write well...and your book will sell.
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