Jeremy L. C. Jones: What sort of Westerns do you write, and what are they key elements?

Larry D. Sweazy: I write traditional westerns.   The term conjures a whole list of clichés, I think.  Bad Sheriff terrorizes an isolated town, power hungry ranchers battle weak, defenseless farmers, the gunfight in the street, etc.   My current series, Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger, of course, is set in the state of Texas in 1874.  There are a lot of westerns out there that feature Rangers during this time period, so I had to embrace the clichés, and try to be fresh at the same time.  While my novels mostly play within the rules of the genre, I try very hard to put a human face (and heart) to all of my characters.  If there's a bad sheriff, I want to know why he's bad, I don't just want use him as a plot device, and I also want to see the consequences for his actions.  I want to see and feel an emotional reaction from a character.  If someone dies, or is injured physically, or emotionally, it should mean something to someone somewhere.   I like fast moving action, and I like to balance it with emotion, or an emotional reaction, and offer the reader something they weren't expecting from a PBO (paperback original), traditional western: A well-rounded story that delivers on multiple levels. 

 

Research is important to me, too, a key element, for sure, but I'm not writing historical fiction, and I make that clear in every book.  I chose to start the Josiah Wolfe series at the very beginning of the Frontier Battalion, so there are historical events and historical characters peppered throughout my novels.  But, Josiah Wolfe is a fictional character, interacting with these real events and characters, and that allows me to tell a story, to bend the rules a bit as I need to.  Of course, I want to get as much right as I can, guns, clothes, etc. so my readers aren't jolted out of the experience, but in the end, I hope I write westerns that are entertaining, informative, and surprising.

 

Jones: What, ultimately, do you write about?

Sweazy: I think any good story, regardless of genre, focuses on the human condition.  I learned a long time ago that you're never alone if you have a good book to read.   You can visit other countries, other worlds, other minds, and come away feeling like you're not the only person in the world experiencing a rough patch.  I write about overcoming adversity.   I'm interested in good people making bad decisions, and suffering the consequences.   Or bad people making good decisions, and being rewarded in ways they didn't expect.   Or accidents happening, and they how affect a character.  Does an act of God break a man or make him stronger?

 

The adversity people faced in 1874 was much different than what we face today.  Disease, war, lawlessness.  But at the end of the day, those people wanted the same thing that we want: to live a good life, to be loved, to achieve something, etc.  So, I also write about striving for something, too, even if it is the most simple of things, like wanting to being home.  It worked for Homer.

 

Jones: What do you enjoy about writing in general? What do you enjoy about writing the West in particular?

Sweazy: I am very lucky that I can walk into my office every morning, and sit down to write.   Having the ability to write in the same place, at the same time, every day, is something I worked toward for a very long time.  So, first off,  the physical act of writing is pure joy for me.  But that doesn't make the words come out any easier day after day.  There is still a struggle to meet my word count every day, to craft a good story, to balance all of the business demands, but I never lose sight of how lucky I am.  I don't  derive all of my income from writing fiction, I'm a freelance indexer, as well (I write back of the book indexes for technical and scholarly books), so there is always a time challenge to face.  I get energy from that, from managing my days, and I like the freedom I have, and the variety of projects that come across my desk.  I hope that joy is reflected in the final versions of all of my work.  

 

The West is, and always has been, about possibilities.  A new start.  A chance to succeed greatly, or fail just as greatly-or worse.  Think of the Gold Rush and the broken dreams, of the men who left everything for a chance in California for something better, only to face uncertainty, poverty, and even death.  What's even worse, is some of the people they left behind never knew what happened to them.  Think of the mothers, the wives, the children, and the holes left in their lives, forever, not knowing the truth about what happened to their loved ones.  There are millions of stories set in the West that have yet to be told.  It was a defining moment in our nation's history, for good and for bad, and that offers a writer a vast amount of characters and stories to choose from.  

 

Jones: And what is the biggest challenge in writing the West?

Sweazy: For me, it has to be the distance.  I live in Indiana, so writing about Texas presents its challenges.  I strive to get the research right, but at times it can be difficult.  I have a vast array of guidebooks concerning the birds, trees, wildflowers, that I have collected over the years, as well as other research material focusing on Texas.  They help.  It also helps that I lived in the Dallas area for nearly five years, the longest I've ever lived in a place outside of Indiana.  I also try to get out West, and to Texas, every couple of years on research trips.  I have a trip coming up next spring that I'm looking forward to.  The distance, however, also gives me some perspective, that I think is invaluable to me and prevents me from getting bogged down in details that detract from the story.  There are several working western writers who live east of the Mississippi.  Loren Estleman, Cameron Judd, Robert J. Randisi, to name a few.  So, I don't think it's a deal breaker to live outside of Texas, and write about it.  

 

I have to be very aware of the flora and fauna, the history in a city like Austin, or the Hill Country.  I'm not convinced that my research would be any shallower if I actually lived in Texas.  But it would be nice to walk out into the country and smell the air and see the sights, at that very moment, when I needed to.

 

Jones: What comes first - character, setting, plot, image, sight, sound, or something else? And how does it grow from there? Is it the same for stories and novels?

Sweazy: It's always a character for me.  I have strived, over the years, to focus more on plot, but character is my thing, and no matter how much I try, it always come first.  I may catch a glimpse of something in my mind, a man standing over a grave, or woman staring out into the desert, and the stories comes along from there.   Most of my plots are quests, and I just following on as the writer and take down notes on the journey and pass them onto the reader.   Both aspects are important, but I think character comes more naturally to me.

 

It's the same for both short stories and novels for me.  Though some times with a short story the title comes along first.  When I first started writing seriously, I wrote a lot of short stories, and titles were really important for the start.   I don't write as many short stories as I used to, but I still keep a list of titles that pop into my mind. 

 

Jones: The prologue of The Rattlesnake Season is a real kick in the gut. In a few short pages Josiah Wolfe and the reader go through emotional hell together. Wolfe staggers, we stagger. This makes me wonder about characterization, character arcs, and sustaining a character over the course of the series. So... where'd Wolfe come from? What sort of development did you do before writing the novel and how does he grow over the course of the series?

 

 

Sweazy: Thanks, I'm glad you liked the prologue of The Rattlesnake Season.   I wanted the prologue to introduce Josiah Wolfe in a completely different way, and I also wanted the reader to know up front that my novels are an emotional journey, as well as a physical one.

 

The origin of Josiah Wolfe is a little interesting, I think.  I wrote a modern day short story, "The Promotion", that was published in an anthology in 2004 (Texas Rangers  -- Berkley).  That story featured a main character, Samuel "Red" Wolfe, who was a Texas Ranger, who had recently lost his young son in an accident, and wanted to solve one last case before taking a promotion and moving away from the town his son was buried in.  To my great surprise, the story won the WWA (Western Writers of America) Spur award, and that really gave me the confidence to continue to write about Texas Rangers.  But even before the award came along, I was already thinking of writing a family saga set in Texas with the main character being a Texas Ranger in each of their appropriate generations.  It was a big idea, and one that I'm still thinking about.  Anyway, I wrote another short story, "Rattlesnakes and Skunks," at the start of the Frontier Battalion, that featured Josiah Wolfe, Samuel "Red" Wolfe's great, great, grandfather.  I published that story, and decided to expand it into a novel, The Rattlesnake Season.  

 

I had the advantage of looking back in time from Red Wolfe's perspective and lineage, to find Josiah and his story.  I'm currently writing the fourth book in the Josiah Wolfe series, The Cougar's Prey, and I'm not sure where Josiah's story will end,  That's up to the readers, and my publisher, of course.  I still have ideas for other Wolfe generation stories, one set in the Depression in the Bonnie and Clyde days, and another in the fifties, when oil became king in Texas.  I think the historical backdrops of these periods of time offer a lot of opportunities to mine for the saga I'd like to write.

 

But back to Josiah Wolfe, and your question about development and growth over a series.  There's no question that Josiah starts the series a broken man, and ends up, after the first novel, with a little more hope and knowledge about life than he started with.  He has a young son to raise all by himself, while still trying to carve out a career for himself.  A very modern problem, with solutions, that, I hope that will ring true with today's readers.  So there are those challenges to for Josiah to continue to face in the upcoming books, and he still must prove himself as a Ranger.  He also has to face the historical events coming his way, which will affect how he reacts.  And then there's the question about Josiah's personal life.  Will he start another family?  Have a relationship with one of the continuing female characters, or not?  My readers seem very invested in Josiah's personal life, so there is plenty of room there to explore that, as well as the supporting cast I have created, most notably, Josiah's partner, Scrap Elliot.  Scrap is young, brash, mouthy, and nearly opposite of Josiah in most every way.  I wanted to explore their partnership from the very beginning, so as the books progress, so does their relationship.  I do look at a long arc interweaved with historical events that dictate a response from all of my characters, not just Josiah.    

Jones: What can a writer who doesn't usually read Westerns learn from reading within the genre?

Sweazy:  There are a lot of good writers working in the field today, and I think a writer or reader who snubs westerns as purely shoot ‘em, violent, one-sided depictions of the past are missing a lot of great storytelling.  Robert Conley, a Cherokee, is the first Native American to serve as president of WWA (Western Writers of America).  Robert has written over 80 books, fiction and non-fiction, and is not all that well-known outside of the western world.  His perspective of the West, understandably, is different than mine.  It's a shame, because Conley, like many others, such as Loren Estleman, Cameron Judd, James Reasoner, and Robert J. Randisi, should be household names.   Writers should read the best in all of the genres if he, or she, wants to be well-rounded.  I think a lot of writers, and readers, would be surprised to see the depth of emotion in a lot of Westerns being written today.  It wasn't that long ago that westerns were considered literary fiction, when there wasn't a genre that categorized novels in a place that some people find disparaging; think Owen Wister's The Virginian or Ernest Haycox's "Stage to Lordsburg" that went on to be made into the movie, Stagecoach.  Westerns today reflect the same amount of quality writing, if not more.  

 

Jones: Who are you reading these days? Whose work excites you?

Sweazy: At the moment, I'm reading Tana French's Into the Woods, a moody police procedural set in Ireland.  I like the writing a lot.  I have a few Richard Matheson Westerns on my TBR (to be read) stack to get to.  Matheson is a writer I admire who writes in multiple genre.  I already mentioned a few western writers, Estleman, Conley, etc. whose work I read as soon as they hit the bookshelves, but I like to read outside the genre, too.  Thomas H. Cook's Breakheart Hill is one of my favorite novels.  I'm a huge fan of the Hap and Leonard books by Joe R. Lansdale.  These are action-packed, laugh-out-loud books, that never fail to satisfy me as a reader.  The list is really long.  I'll forget someone, but I range from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game to John Stenbeck's East of Eden, and everything in between, go figure...

 

Jones: What's next for you?

 

Sweazy:  I'm finishing up Josiah Wolfe #4, The Cougar's Prey.  It's due at the end of November.  Beyond that, I'm not sure. We'll see where we stand after that, whether Berkley wants more Josiah Wolfe novels, or not.  I have a few things in the works outside of the Western genre, and a few in, so it's really hard to say.  Regardless of what happens, business-wise, one thing is for sure: I'll be sitting at my desk writing something.  I can't imagine doing anything else.