Write Compelling Fiction - Article Eight

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....

THE PROCESS! A novel is a fictional story with a beginning, middle, and end. It has characters, plot, time and place. The trick is to bring those elements together in a compelling read.

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, is the story of a cattle drive. It begins in Texas and ends in Montana and takes months. Simple. Straight forward. A Pulitzer Prize winner. No complicated flashbacks to deal with. Your western, or almost any novel, can be a journey. Or it can be another kind of quest-the sheriff goes after the killer or vise versa, in old Tombstone or contemporary New York City. High Noon takes place in one town, in one afternoon. By the way, the movie was based on a great short story, The Tin Star, by John M. Cunningham.

Both plots are filled with drama. Drama in every scene. Conflict in every scene. Conflict in every scene, for drama is conflict, and a scene is not a scene without conflict of some sort. I'm going to repeat that, because its a critical part of writing compelling novels-there is no scene without conflict. More about that:

CONFLICT: Conflict can be man against man, man against the elements, man against animal, man against woman, or man against himself. Your story is about your hero overcoming one or all of them. No one wants to read about a pleasant cattle drive across grass-filled plains dotted with water holes in wonderful weather where everyone gets along famously. Or, to be more succinct, where nothing happens! Boring! However, a lot of so called literary novels seem to be very successful where the conflict is no more than an argument over how many lumps of sugar one should use in one's tea...but they're not my cup of tea.

Conflict and its resolution make compelling reading.

Every scene must have conflict of some kind or it shouldn't be in your story. If there's no conflict, then it's only a transition, getting your story from one place or another or from one time to another, and a transition deserves no more than a paragraph, usually at the beginning or ending of a scene.

PLOTTING: There are thousands of variations on plot. Plot, by the way, is defined by my trusty Random House in the second definition as:

....Also called storyline, the plan,

scheme, or main story of a literary or

dramatic work, as a play, novel, or

short story.

There's that word drama again. And remember the definition of drama included the words character and conflict.

So your plot, whether it be journey or quest, has character and conflict. Your job is to fill two hundred pages of two hundred and fifty words each, with compelling characters and hard-hitting conflict if you're writing a western, and five hundred twenty pages if you're writing a historical.

Drama! That's what you're after.

How? By telling a story.

A story of conflict.

Some writers sit down with pencil and paper, or at the typewriter, or in front of a word processor, and begin writing. Others plan carefully. Either way, in order to begin, it helps to have your basic story in mind. Think it though first, at least the main plot points.

I'm a character driven writer. I like to create interesting characters and let them run with the story. Kat, my wife, is plot driven. She knows exactly where her story is going when she sits down and types "Chapter One." Neither is right nor wrong. What works for you is right.

Thankfully, most westerns have simple plots. One hero or protagonist; one or more villains or antagonists. A journey or quest. Seldom does a western have an intricate plot or subplot. Seldom are flashbacks used. The drama moves forward in a straight time line.

A historical, on the other hand, can be much more complicated.

Like all rules, both of these are often broken.

Because plotting and point of view are so entwined, I'll continue the plotting discussion as we talk about P.O.V.

POINT OF VIEW: I've got a point of view about most subjects, so do you, so does your mother-in-law, but that's not the kind of point of view we're talking about.

After an editor establishes that you've written a novel with good sentence structure and your characters come alive for him, then the next thing the good ones turn their attention to is point of view. More basically good novels are trashed by editors because of inconsistent point of view for any other technical reason. Then again, I've met many editors and even more writers who've asked, "What's point of view?"

Point of view-from whose eyes the story is told-is a determinate of plot. For the sake of simplicity, we'll begin with the first person.

You can't wander away from the direct line-of-sight view or hearing of the story-teller if you write your novel in the first person. That is the "I" point of view.

I made sure my Walker rode free and easy in the holster as the cackler rose from his ladder-back chair

That's first person.

Ethan hoisted his Walker, making sure it rode free and easy, as the cackler rose from the ladder-back chair

That's third person.

If the point of view then shifts to the cackler, then to the barmaid across the room, its third person omniscient. The all-seeing eye. It's the third person omniscient P.O.V. that I choose to use in most of my writing.

Since I chose omniscient, I could have gone on to begin the next paragraph, or next chapter:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch....

You can't do that in first person, you can't go to the ranch in your writing unless you take your first person observer to the ranch. Simple? No, it's not simple for me. I still fight proper P.O.V. every time I write, but at least now when an editor or another writer asks me "What's your point of view?" I don't launch into a political observation or my opinion about the last news story on the tube.

In many novels written today, and some of mine, I change P.O.V. from chapter to chapter or even sometimes from scene to scene, and change from first person to omniscient. It gives you lots of flexibility, and is acceptable.

Point of view, as it applies to the craft of writing, is through whose eyes the action is seen.

Before you plot your novel, you must determine in which point of view it is to be written. A first person P.O.V. cannot have flashbacks unless the protagonist (99% of all first person novels are written from the hero's P.O.V.) is the one thinking about the flashback. A first person P.O.V. cannot see or hear something that's happening in the next room, next building, or next town. It limits your plot...or at least your approach to your plot. For that reason, most novels and certainly most westerns and historicals are written in third person omniscient.

Now that you've decided to write in a given P.O.V., you can plot your novel.

DESCRIPTION: I can't think of a faster way to get me to lay a novel down than to layer in too much laborious description. Many writers, and many editors, love a novel dripping...no, gushing...description. Many writers are great at purple prose, but give me a lean one every time.

A few years ago I read The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. A small hardback which had a modest first printing-but a book that got legs, as they say in the trade. The novel was number 1 on both the Publisher's Weekly hardback best seller list and the NYT list, and was then to become the best selling novel of all time. It's been eclipsed now, but then.... And the reason was that it said a great deal in its 171 pages, with a simple turn of a number of great similes and metaphors. When you're writing about unrequited love, and your character is aging with "dust on his heart," as Mr. Waller's protagonist did, you don't have to say a lot more.

Remember brevity, read The Bridges of Madison County and find it at its best.

DESCRIPTION THOUGH POINT OF VIEW: Do you remember earlier I mentioned I keep a sign over my desk that says "filter all description though point of view." Why? Because by not doing so, you're engaging in author intrusion, which I'll tell you more about later, and by doing so, it gives your reader a great insight into the character of your characters. We'll also talk more about characterization later. Let me show you what I mean.

Miss Mary Jane Petersen crossed the board walk and paused in front of the batwing doors. Taking a tentative breath, then a deep one, she smoothed her linen skirt. Finally, boldly, back stiff and chin held high, she entered.

The room, filled with bawdy men, reeking of tobacco smoke and sweat, stopped her short. The clamor silenced as all eyes turned to her-but she was careful not to meet them. She strode on, moving to the plank bar and finding the gaze of the curious barkeep.

"Your proprietor. Mr. Oscar Tidwell, please," she said, carefully keeping her voice from cracking.

or:

Miss Mary Jane Petersen crossed the board walk and paused in front of the batwing doors. Tucking her loose fitting blouse in tightly-purposefully straining it against her ample bosom, which she had long known was her best feature-she pushed boldly into the saloon. The smell of working men always made her pocket book itch, and now was no different.

Bawdy men paused and surveyed her as she strode across the room to the plank bar, then went back to their faro and poker and whiskey.

The barkeep shined a mug as she approached. He, too, let his eyes drift to the straining fabric. It was all she could do not to openly smile. Men were so simply manipulated..

"The boss man, please. Tidwell."

Do you get two different opinions about Miss Mary Jane?...even though the bar scene is basically the same?

Lots more in the following articles....

L. J. Martin is the author of 20 fiction works and 2 non-fiction works from major publishers. His political blog http://fromthepeapatch.com/ is followed by many thousands. His wife, Kat Martin, is internationally published in over a dozen languages and in over two dozen countries and has over ten million books in print.

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Write Compelling Fiction - Article Seven

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....

The writer, even the fiction writer, is imbued with a trust. That trust should be to write accurately when dealing with factual characters. Not to say that you can't let your muse run wild in any other situation, with any fictional characters, but when you've worked hard to develop a relationship with a reader-and he's in your imposed trance-don't take advantage of him by filling him with inaccuracies that confuse and mislead. There's a line between fiction and fact that shouldn't be crossed. Orson Welles discovered that when he first broadcast a fictional alien invasion, and found himself faced with a panicked country and a few suicides.

Use discretion when your fiction might be mistaken for fact.

There is no tool more readily adopted to "writing from history," than the newspapers of the time. Obviously, if you're writing about the Roman Empire, you'll have a little trouble getting a copy of the local scandal sheet. However, if your writing about the late 18th or the 19th century, great papers are available either to purchase from sources mentioned elsewhere in this novel or from your local library.

Newspapers tell you what was being used as medicines, what a meal cost at the local boarding house or hotel; what boarding houses and hotels were in the town; what the schedules of stages, steamships, and railroads were, and where they were bound from or headed; what real estate was selling and renting for; what was happening with local politics, etc., etc., etc.

They give you the flavor of the time and place.

I never begin writing a piece set in the time frame from mid 1800's to late 1800's without picking up my set of Alfred Doten's journals (University of Nevada Press), covering his life in Virginia City, Nevada, from 1849 to 1903. Doten was a newspaper journalist, and kept a prolific diary. Like the newspapers of the time, you can learn a lot about the day to day life of one who lived it from reading journals.

Not only do newspapers and journals give you insight about time and place, but they give you plot material, maybe even whole plots. You can fictionalize from what you read as fact, but if you're not writing a biographical novel, change everything-the town, the participants, etc. That way you won't have to worry about distorting a piece of actual history.

To give you an example of writing from history and how closely I practice what I preach, here is a copy of a portion (there are, in fact, ten pages) of the author's Historical Notes and Acknowledgments which follow Rush to Destiny.

The author makes no claim to being a biographer, but has attempted to utilize history accurately in his writing, incorporating actual dispatches, letters, and newspaper accounts. Hopefully, this novelistic style offers accurate history, dates, and events in an entertaining form.

The author would like to express his admiration and appreciation to the following, whose wonderful nonfiction books were of immeasurable help:

Stephen Bonsal, Edward Fitzgerald Beale: A Pioneer in the Path of Empire.

Carl Briggs and Clyde Francis Trudell, Quarterdeck and Saddlehorn: The Story of Edward F. Beale.

Gerald Thompson, Edward F. Beale & the American West.

William A. DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents.

And others too numerous to mention.

Almost all of Rush to Destiny is founded in fact, either gleaned from the biographies noted above, from the Beale Papers in the Beale Branch of the Kern County Library (named after Edward Fitzgerald Beale and located on Truxtun Avenue, which was named after his son),...

And this goes on for 30 pages, with an attempt to explain the historical relevance of the novel...which I call a "biographical novel."

I subject you to this "out of context" material for a purpose. As you read it, you can begin to see the amount of actual historical data, or writing from history, I do (or did at least in this novel) when writing about a factual character or about a factual incident. Admittedly, Rush to Destiny is different from the norm. My westerns are not based (at least not the primary protagonist) upon a factual character, although many of them are laced with them, and with factual incidents.

I hope you'll pick up a copy of Rush to Destiny, and read it and the notes that follow. Only then can you appreciate the amount of influence history had on that novel. You can also appreciate how little plotting I had to do, for Beale's early life was the plot. You can also appreciate how little characterization I had to do, for his life was peppered with the greatest and most fascinating characters of the time.

In many ways, Rush to Destiny was the most simple novel I've written, and in many ways it was the most difficult.

We'll go on to the nuts and bolts of writing in even more detail in the following articles.

L. J. Martin is the author of 20 fiction works and 2 non-fiction works from major publishers. His political blog http://fromthepeapatch.com/ is followed by many thousands. His wife, Kat Martin, is internationally published in over a dozen languages and in over two dozen countries and has over ten million books in print.

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Write Compelling Fiction - Article Two

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.

Most of my early life was spent as a real estate broker, selling farms and ranches, subdivision land and lots. But I had the urge to write. I tried a novel at the ripe old age of twenty-four, and after four chapters found I had little to say. Later in life, I found myself unmarried and living on a boat-and with time on my hands so I decided if I was ever going to fulfill this smoldering ambition to write, now was the time.

After completing a 500 page historical, I submitted it a few times, and got a few form rejections. It dawned on me that I had (as I have a tendency to do) plunged in-charged in where angels fear to tread. To illustrate the impact writers have on a society, that line, the E. M. Forster novel, and the song following, were based on a line in Alexander Pope 's An Essay on Criticism: "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Be careful what you write, for it may be quoted for centuries. I don't worry much about that possibility, but I don't mind quoting great writers of the past.

Only following lots of rejection did I decide to study the craft. I was lucky enough to marry a lady who approached things a little differently. She's a great study and had the background. A good grounding in English in college. And she, too, had the urge to write. Together, we went to writer's conferences, and separately, we wrote. By the way, that first novel eventually made some money as an audio and eBook. Never, never file your work in the circular file. Save it.

And after paying our dues with many conferences, and many, many more hours in front of the word processor, it began to pay off.

One of my novels, Rush to Destiny, was nominated as a finalist as the best biographical novel of 1992 by a group of New York reviewers and the magazine Romantic Times/Rave Reviews. Another, The Benicia Belle, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award for best original paperback of 1992. I've had a screenplay optioned by a major Hollywood production company, and all are in audio and offered as eBooks, or soon will be. My political blog has many thousands of followers.

Kat, my wife, has had her later books repeatedly on the New York Times best seller lists, and many, many others; and she has won many, many awards.

Throughout the manual, I've used the masculine gender, but I have a great respect for all the wonderful, talented women who write novels-even westerns, commonly considered "men's fiction"-or want to write them, and for the women who read them. The romance genre is responsible for 49% (now more I think) of all mass market paperback sales in this country.

No matter who you are or what your age, if you can read and understand this manual, you can write a novel. Some of you may take a long time to do so, some of you may whip out a masterpiece in a few months.

Like most any specialty, writers have their organizations. And professional organizations can make your education come more quickly, and can make your endeavors more enjoyable. It's hard to be alone in any venture, and knowing you have peers who have the same concerns and problems you have, and with whom you can share your successes, helps.

Western Writers of America is a great organization which enjoys an annual conference, which supports western and historical writers (both fiction and non-fiction), which gives awards annually to those they judge superior in their field, and which publishes a monthly magazine called The Roundup.

The organization is divided between academics and good ol' boys (and girls). It's a great organization and one every western or historical writer of either non-fiction or fiction, of any length should aspire to join. There are requirements for membership including publication. It's one of the great perks of being a western or historical writer and I recommend it highly.

Romance Writers of America do the same for that genre, have many more members, and offer excellent support. Those interested in romance writing should join. There are no "published" requirements. RWA has a number of local chapters with meetings and support groups that are excellent for beginning writers.

And there are groups for other genres as well. Kat and I are members of Mystery Writers of America and Thriller Writers of America as well.

Writers of westerns, romance, and historicals don't enjoy a lot of respect among so called "literati." It's difficult to get your work, particularly fiction, reviewed or taken seriously by any other than readers-but that's okay, for readers are by far your most important critics.

Publisher's Weekly, the primary industry rag in publishing reviews a few romances (75% of which are panned) and hardly ever reviews a western if it's not disguised as a historical or novel of the West and not written by John Jakes or Larry McMurtry. I find it rather self destructive on the magazines part in that romance is responsible for 49% (more) of all mass market paperback sales in this country, and without it many publishers would be in dire trouble. Westerns and historicals and other genres enjoy a much smaller share of the market, but still are important to much of the country.

At one time, Zane Grey outsold all of them, and the western genre still enjoys a strong, faithful following.

Thank God the elitists who display an indifferent attitude or worse to the writing which in my opinion is the backbone of the nation, are not nearly so influential as they would like to believe.

To illustrate what I say, I'll quote my good friend Richard S. Wheeler (a great western writer) who pointed out in a recent The Roundup article that the New Columbia Encyclopedia has admiring entries on several mystery writers (over 40) yet only one patronizing entry on Zane Grey and one on Owen Wister-no mention of Pulitzer prize winner A. B. Guthrie, Jr., or of Dorothy Johnson, Frederick Faust, Ernest Haycox, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, William MacLeod Raine, Henry Allen, Jack Schaefer, or a dozen others worthy of note.

What's important is if you write fiction, write compelling fiction. Write something that will glean that most valuable of writers' compliments..."I couldn't put it down."

This series of articles will show you how to do just that. Look for Write Compelling Fiction - Article Three.

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Write Compelling Fiction - Article One

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.

This manual (series of articles) is written for those of you, like myself, who are not English majors or grammarians-not that those of you who are can't glean some good common sense and some novelist's tricks out of it.

I'm a guy who loves to hunt and fish. I'll get outdoors for any excuse. Like most of you, I've worked hard all my life. I love the West and its history and think I'd have done just fine had I lived a hundred and fifty years ago. As the song says, a country boy will survive. But to be published-my area of specialty has been the West-you need more than a love of westerns, history and historical characters. Like all specialties-be it driving an eighteen wheeler, driving a nail, or doing nails-there are tricks that make writing a novel easier; one of those is writing from history, but there are stories and plots everywhere, in every newspaper, every magazine, every observation you make at Starbucks or at work. There are also pitfalls, but most of them easily avoided.

I wanted to write and sell a novel. I learned how the hard way. By studying other's mistakes (including mine) you can learn the easy way. Even today, after selling twenty novels, I fight obvious errors and poor grammar, clumsy sentence structure and worse-much worse-boring text. I can't begin to teach you all there is to know about writing novels or even writing a good letter to your mother. I can tell you where and how to learn a good deal of it. I'm still studying but if I can make it a little easier for you, then I've accomplished my purpose in writing this manual.

And I got published. So can you.

Most of the rules for writing novels are valid for writing in general. A few are specific to genre. If you don't know the definition of genre, then you're exactly the person this manual is written for. But even those of you who do know what it means will find some gems in here-most of them cat-burgled or openly filched from other much better writers than myself.

A great deal of this manual refers to westerns and historicals, and to romance, because these (and screenplays) are what my wife and I write and how we make our living-altough I've now been published in mystery, thriller, and non-fiction. This is not to say that the same rules don't apply to other genres of writing as well. It is certainly not to say that you can't pick up some gems of writing wisdom from this manual-not necessarily originated by me, but passed on from other good and great writers-or that much of what is included here is not applicable to what you intend to write if it's something other than westerns or historicals.

Good luck with your novel.

REMINDERS: Over the top of my computer, along the edges of bookshelves just over eye-high, I have taped the following reminders:

Filter all description though point of view!

Problem, Purpose, Conflict, Goal-Active Voice!

Hear, See, Taste, Touch, and Smell!

There is no scene without conflict!

Check for As, That, Was!

Each of these has been taped there at various times throughout my writing career. And I still glance at them on occasion, and they are still crucial to good writing.

The rest of this manual will, among other things, tell you why I think the above reminders are so important and why, if you're a reader (and you shouldn't try being a writer if you're not), you'll never be stuck for plot or characters.

CAN YOU DO IT? First you must want to.

Anyone who has a basic understanding of the structure of written English or is willing to learn-and has a story to tell-can write and sell a novel.

I sold my first paperback western, Tenkiller, to Zebra Books, twenty five years ago. My second, Mojave Showdown, was picked up by the same company. Together, my wife and I wrote and sold Tin Angel, a western romance, to Avon. To Bantam Books, I've sold the westerns El Lazo, Against the 7th Flag, The Devils Bounty, and The Benicia Belle. In addition, Bantam brought out my historical, Rush to Destiny. My next was a Double D hardback, a novel of the West, Shadow of the Grizzly. The ones following, were westerns, mysteries, thrillers, and a couple of non-fiction works including the work from which most of this article was gleaned: Write Compelling Fiction. All of my books are available in audio, most from Books in Motion, a great company located in Spokane, WA. Most are now on Amazon in both print and eBook format.

By sold, I mean I have contracted and received an advance for the novel, and we'll talk a little more about contracts later.

In addition my wife, Kat, is published in a dozen or more foreign languages and over two dozen countries. She's now sold over 50 romantic suspense and historical romance novels to several major publishers-many of her novels have appeared on the best seller lists.

We did it. You can do it.

I am not a college graduate. Family pressures took me away from college in my junior year. In English I would probably test in the middle (my loving wife would say lower) of a group of college freshmen and be stuck in the bone-head class. But I'm willing to look up what I don't know, and I'm willing to take the time necessary to make sure my work is neatly presented to the reader-the first of whom will be an agent or editor who will say yes or no to buying the work.

And every day I enjoy writing more than the day before. It continues to come easier-and it's more financially rewarding. It'll never be perfect.

I keep learning every day. Who knows? If I do it long enough, maybe I can enter college and not have to take bone-head English! Writers learn by doing, every time they sit down and face the blank page.

You've got a great story. We all do. You have to be willing to take the time to get it on paper in a clear and legible manner and with reasonably good English so the editors read past the first two pages. Even the best of stories-most compelling or exciting or touching-may go unread, and unsold, due to misspellings and typographical errors in the first couple of pages. Many editors, most in fact, feel that if you are sloppy in your technical skills and presentation, odds are you're sloppy in all other aspects of your writing.

But more about that later.

When I first picked up a pencil and yellow pad, I had little knowledge of spelling or sentence structure-all I really had was a love of great fiction. I found a little time, a dictionary, and some harsh critics, and all contributed to the eventual sale of my first western novel.

The chief excuse for non-achievers in all areas of endeavor is, "I just don't have the time." Horse hocky! We all waste time. We watch T.V. We ride in the car and dream non-productive thoughts. You can write in your mind (and most writers do) long before putting it on paper. You can record on a hand-held tape recorder and transcribe later. Time is no excuse.

Write in the car, at the beach, standing on the stream bank casting for trout.

There's only one way to be a writer, and that's to write. Write two pages-two lousy pages-per day, and in six months you have a novel.

Like most things we set out to do in this life, luck played a part in my selling. But don't be discouraged if you think of yourself as unlucky. Luck, I've found, is nothing more than the inevitable result of hard work.

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

Now I want to help you get lucky.

It took eight years for lady luck to seek me out. By then, I'd had almost forty years to harden my head. I'd read a thousand westerns and more novels of other genres, and I thought I knew how it was done. But I didn't even know the questions yet much less the answers. And for the first six years of the eight years I wrote before I sold, I didn't bother to ask. Form rejection slips told me I wasn't doing it right. I decided it must be a craft, kind of like painting a picture or building a fine saddle, and I decided to learn it. Two years later, I sold my first novel. Six wasted years!

I wish I'd had this manual (this series of articles, in this case) thirty years ago.

The self-satisfaction of seeing your name on the cover of your paperback (or now on your ebook) at the local market or drug store, on the jacket of a hardback in the book store, or on the box of an audio, is well worth the effort-not to speak of the multi-thousand dollar advances and, if you are diligent and keep after your new trade, the continuing royalties.

The important thing is you're doing the right thing, reading about the ins and outs, the mechanics, and the business of writing and selling. Watch for the next eZine article, the continuation of Write Compelling Fiction.

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Write Compelling Fiction - Article Five

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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Write Compelling Fiction - Article Four

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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