Gordon D. Shirreffs: An Interview with a Western Writer
Carole Shirreffs Cox
My
father is Gordon D. Shirreffs. He has written 79 novels of the West as well as
hundreds of short stories, pulps, and TV and movie scripts since he first began
to sell what he wrote in the 1940s. He visited me in Baton Rouge during the
summer of 1982 on his way to the Western Writers of America convention in Santa
Fe. Nominated for WWA's Golden Spur Award for the Best Historical Novel for his
book The Untamed Breed (Fawcett. 1981), the saga of a Scots-Canadian mountain man in the West,
he had also been nominated for WWA's Golden Saddleman Award made to “a living
individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the American West.” The
other nominees for the Spur were Louis L'Amour and a newcomer, Loren D.
Estleman, who won for his first novel Aces
and Eights (Doubleday, 1981).
It was
a time in my father’s life when he might be expected to sit back and enjoy such
things as the recognition of his peers and his royalties, not to mention his
first and only wife of 12 years and two grandsons named after him. He
cheerfully autographed books at a local bookstore and did a newspaper
interview. He repaired swords for a “Shakespeare for Kids" program I
direct and watched 12-year-old namesake Wyatt Gordon leap through the air as
Laertes in Hamlet and six- month-old namesake Gordon Stuart play a carry-on part in a
baby Renaissance costume he helped me make. He re-rigged a ship model he’d made
for me, posed for family pictures, and chatted with neighbors. But the whole
time I felt that all he really wanted to do was to get back to his typewriter.
As he
talked about future books in a Southwest Series which would continue the story
started in
The
Untamed Breed, I wondered what it was
that kept him hard at writing at seventy and planning to put five books in a
trilogy when everybody else does three. During a visit home between NCTE in
Seattle and IRA in Anaheim in 1983, I asked him lots of questions.
Why Do You Write? How Did You Get Started? And Why Are You Still
Writing?
I'm
basically a creative person. I was always making something and reading, studying,
and organizing activities along my interests. I never intended, especially, to
write. An English teacher at Austin High School in Chicago named Miss Maher—a
handsome woman—would give us a phrase and we’d write an essay. I still remember
one: “The cold grey sea washed against the black rocks." I don't remember
what I wrote, but I could see those rocks. Afterwards she told me "Gordon,
if you don’t write for a living you'll waste your life." That was in 1932.
The idea of writing for a living didn’t jell with me, however, until after
World War II. 1 can see these things in retrospect.
In
those days there was no money, no question of going to college. I wasn’t ready
anyway. I worked at a lot of two-bit jobs, but it was when I washed dishes for
$10.00 a week under Stale Street at the Candy Box Tea Room in downtown Chicago
that I began to think I needed to raise myself up in life. Later, I was working
at Union Tank Car Co. and taking night classes at Northwestern University when
my National Guard regiment was called up for the National Emergency in
September 1940. I went to Ft. Bliss near El Paso, Texas—a fabulous military
post a hundred years old. Your mother and I were married there in the Chapel of the 7th
Cavalry.
From the age of eight or nine I had an absorbing interest in military
history, especially the Civil War. I became fascinated with ruins of old abandoned
forts and battlefields and relics we found: pottery shards, old bottles, and
bullets 75 years old. Something about the Southwest appealed to me. I guess I’m
a born observer with a lot of imagination, and the influence of the Spanish,
Indian, and Anglo cultures there—the towering mountains, the pristine desert
with the sand blowing, coyotes howling at night—all this excited me. On top of
that I began to realize that the Civil War had been fought all through New
Mexico in 1861- 62. I wanted somebody else to know this, and I began to write
in my spare time— little vignettes of what I had seen with the idea of someday
writing a history of the Civil War in the Southwest. Some notes I took in Ft.
Bliss in 1941 I used in my most recent book in the Southwest Series, Glorietta Pass (Fawcett, 1981). I felt destined to bring this to life. At that time I
had no intention of writing fiction. I didn’t feel qualified. I’m not a
literary writer but a first-class commercial hack with a certain amount of
talent.
After the war started, I volunteered for overseas duty and was sent
first to Alaska and then the Aleutian Campaign. The weather was horrible. We
had no air support, and the Japanese bombed us from Kiska. All the time I was
there I was observing and absorbing what happened in combat, what a man felt
like in the field. I wrote two vignettes there which sold to the classic old
magazine Blue Book for $25.00 each. In those days it was the place to get published, and I think the only reason they sold was
because it was wartime and I was in the service overseas. I was also still
reading books and compiling notes on the Civil War in the Southwest.
In December 1945, I got out of the service as a Captain. I went back to
my old job at Union Tank Car Co., but I knew it was not for me. I signed up for
writing courses at the Medill School of Journalism at the Chicago campus of
Northwestern University at night, and this was the beginning of a
semi-professional approach to writing. One of my teachers was Frederick Nelson
Litten, a professional writer who had a certain talent for writing boy’s
adventure stories and was one helluva coach.
By this time I had made up my mind I would like to try writing. We were
living in a veteran's housing project—a chicken coop really—and I used to type
in the bedroom on an old table. Your mother didn't want me to type when you and
Brian were asleep, so I would go into the bathroom at night. It wasn’t heated
and there was no lid on the toilet, but I sat on it with the typewriter in
front of me on a clothes hamper. The water in the shower would drip all night.
It was so cold.
I got into young people’s magazines, Boy's Life and Young
Catholic Messenger. Then
I got into pulps, magazines like Dime Western (for
a quarter), Ace
High, Six-Gun Western, and others. I wrote stories about the Southwest, Indian fighting and
other ideas I got from the atmosphere around Ft. Bliss.
In 1952 we moved to California. I was still writing short stories but
didn’t know what else to work on. We stayed with an old friend from Chicago,
Adela Kay. She was writing comics and called Dell about me. They said they
could use Western comics—Roy Rogers. Johnny Mack Brown, and a lady rancher
called Auntie Duchess. I didn't know diddly shit, but they paid S8.50 a page.
Adela briefed me. It was entirely different. You had to get a whole thought on
one line. They bought all I wrote. I got a raise to $12.00 a page and did Rin
Tin Tin, too.
We
were living off the comics, but I started the pulps and boy’s stories again. By
1953 I had sold ninety-five pulp stories. They paid a penny a word, but you
were limited to length so you couldn’t pad. I’d start a short story at 7:00
a.m. and drive to San Fernando and mail it off at 4:00 and get $35.00 to
$50.00. I finally got a raise to three cents a word, and the bottom fell out of
the pulps. I became very disheartened with writing and thought I had made a
great mistake. With the old markets gone, I thought of writing a novel. I
didn’t know what else to do to make a living. All I had done before was the
army and selling. We opened a hobby shop but there was really no money except
what your mother made selling gadgets and toys on a party plan. One day I sat
in there from 8:00 to 6:00 and sold a five-cent glider. It was a bad time.
I
decided to write a novel and started blocking out a story of Indian fighting in
1879-80. I wrote in the mornings, went to the hobby shop from 12:00 to 6:00,
and wrote again in the evenings. I contacted Donald MacCampbell, a New York
agent who was coming to California. I trotted down to Pasadena with my
manuscript under one arm. He asked me if I could write love stories. He took
the manuscript and sold it to Fawcett for a Gold Medal Original book. Fawcett
was the acme of paperbacks then, and it was really something to sell a first
novel to them for the breathtaking sum of $2,000.00. It was called Rio Bravo
(Fawcett. 1956). a mythical river I developed in Arizona, after the Rio Grande
del Norte which is called Rio Bravo because it is a brawling, boisterous river.
We
lost the lease on the hobby shop, and I resented the owner of the building for
years until I realized that it had pushed me to write that first novel.
That
was the beginning of my present day professional novel writing. One of the
great blessings of the pulps, which have a derogatory name among the literati,
is that you had to learn to write fast. You couldn’t waste time or words, and I
developed a rapid-fire style of writing. Then I had to make the transition to
the entirely different world of novel writing. Where I previously wrote six to
ten-thousand words, counting each one and used a sentence for a paragraph and a
word for a sentence, I suddenly found myself with a plethora of words. I
couldn't pad because padding is always obvious. Fortunately, the background of
these books was more interesting to me than the plot, and I began to write more
about the Southwest itself: the terrain, the history, and the people who lived
there. And no matter how you cut it, history is people.
The
Southwest, with its fascinating Indian tribes and descendants of Spanish
Conquistadores, is a beautiful brooding country where people lived with
death—from hunger, storms, wild animals, and always violence. They had a
constant fear of Indian raids, from the Mescaleros and Comanches. During the 16
months I spent there during World War II, El Paso was a big sleepy railroad and
cowtown with old time ranches and even some of the old Indian scouts and lawmen
left. By sheer luck I ran into an old Texas Ranger who told me about
expressions they had like “A Texas Ranger would charge Hell with a bucket of
water to put the fire out," or a message like "Big riot in border
town. Five-hundred desperadoes. Wire Austin and send one Texas Ranger.” With
material like that, I could hardly lose. The people were bigger than life. I
think that’s a key to my writing. I didn’t have to manufacture these characters.
They really existed.
I was
also interested in the stories of treasure and mines like the Lost Padre around
Ft. Bliss in the Franklin Mountains. I panned for gold, kicking tarantulas and
rattlesnakes out of the way, and began to absorb the legends of the Southwest.
It was a kind of Camelot, peopled by tough Mexicans and fabulous Indian
warriors. I began to appreciate it and understand it, and this led me to writing
one novel after the other about the Southwest.
After Rio Bravo I
averaged the sale of six novels per year for ten years. I wrote one in three
weeks Hat. At first they were really polished up longer pulps with a better
touch. Then I began to write off-the-trail stories, a loose term meaning you
don’t follow the pattern of the standard adult Western. No one really knows
what that is anyway.
I
liked to base stories on historical events and the myths and the lore and
legends of the fabulous lost mines and the real characters of the Southwest.
This
is another reason I write. I can make a living using the historical research
that I love so well. I research in great detail because it fascinates me. I may
have a huge mass and only put down twenty percent. But it shows through in
writing, the feeling of the times [See his article "The Abyssinian Desert
Companion” in The Roundup, Western Writers of America, April 1981, p. 22-24]. I’m constantly
reading. You have to know the West. That should be paramount in your mind.
Other writers of the West have done this, Elmer Kelton, Lew Patten. Louis
L’Amour has a good collection. I have reams of notes, some of which I’ve
started to send to the University of Wyoming.
You
also asked me why I'm still writing. I think it's the creative urge. I’ve
always had it and not just in writing. I like to make things—ship models,
antique restorations. Anything broken or falling apart. It’s live same with all
the creative professions, actors, poets, composers. If you’ve got it, you’ve
got it, and you must get it out of your system and express it. I think that’s
why—when I’m almost seventy years old and have sold seventy- nine novels,
hundreds of short stories, movie scripts, and a whole bunch of other stuff—I’m
still at it. It’s part of a process and you never get away from it. There’s
also a point in your life with writing, when you’re nearing the end and you
think “I can still do it." Others, like athletes, must feel the same way.
It’s not egotistical but something you’re born with, a feeling you can still do
it.
When
you get good, it flows naturally. I don’t question where the stories come from.
Sometimes I think my room is haunted. Maybe it’s the ghost of an ancestor, old
Andrew Fletcher. Whenever I’m stuck for a story or an idea. I think he communicates
with me from over in the corner. I’ve never really seen him, but once, when I
moved my head suddenly, I saw something, a Scottish soldier in a pilgrim hat
and a dark cloak, carrying a sword.
I’ve
also found that no matter how much you write, how hard you try, you never actually
get the real feeling down on that piece of paper. You get close to it, but it’s
never quite the same. There’s always a gap. Very few writers achieve one-
hundred percent. Maybe Milton. The perfect novel, short story, poem, motion
picture, has never been done. Shakespeare’s plays maybe, for the language
alone. Whoever wrote them, the man was a genius.
Another
thing that has kept me writing is that if I didn’t write, I didn’t make any
money, and I’d have to go to work for somebody. I have a horrible dread of
that. I couldn’t do it anymore. I also think that if I'd had a reasonable
income, I would have written anyway. I wrote overseas in combat zones. If you
train yourself, you’re going to write no matter what. I had confidence I could
do it. Your mother went along and worked hard and made excellent money. It
would ve hard to go back to anything else.
Also,
when you write commercially you have to write what they want but put your own
impress on it. Frederick Nelson Litten told us that there are only so many
basic plots, or variations thereof, so what you have to do is follow the
pattern but vary the stitch. That’s where I’m good. I have my own impress.
Readers tell me they can always tell my books. In my case, style is paramount.
When
writing, I like to get inside a character and also bring in the environment. A
great master at this was J. Frank Dobie in books like Coronach's Children (Garden City Publishing Co.. 1930). He made the land a character—the
mountains, weather, wind, animals, flora and fauna. You must go beyond a person
who is jerked about on strings mouthing standard phrases. You know where I get
my characters? I’ve met them all my life: friends, my daughter, my wife, guys
in the Army. Whenever I’m at a loss, I think back. I knew a guy in the 210th in
Alaska who was so strong he could make a dent in the top of a steel helmet when
he got mad. There was another officer named Rothchild: “You know something.
Shirreffs? I'm an anachronism. Have you ever heard of a Jew who was a third
generation dairyman in Idaho?” He was the only one. Those are characters.
You
have to round characters out and thread background and history throughout the
story. Instead of “Here was a frontier street. . . galloping horses ... a
bar" say “Flint Coburn rode into Dirty Sundown. Wyoming, late on a January
afternoon. Dust rose front the wheels of a wagon." (This is rough draft
stuff.) "He saw the bat-wings of the Golden Cafe and his throat was dry.”
(Readers see the bar through the characters’ eyes.) "Hello Baldy. ..” You
don't tell them what’s there but show them through the eyes of the characters.
Have him experience and surround him with the environment. That’s
three-dimensional.
I have
a tendency to get off the trail, but I can’t help it. I am so fascinated by the
country and history it has to come out. Each place has its own
personality—animals, a feeling, the wind. The wind is a great character. You
can use the sounds of night to taper off. "He rode off into the darkness
and on the hill a wolf howled once." Always leave the reader with a
thought. Don’t just cut it off like a slice of bread.
You
can use odor to get into the picture. Sweating. The smell of feet. In Glorietta Pass, the book I just finished, Quint Kershaw and his great friend Luke Connors are
fleeing from the Mescaleros. They've been out scouting for Confederates. They
have no water and their horses are dead. They're worn out. Luke is trailing
behind and Quint asks what’s wrong. The moon is coming up and he sees black
footprints on the light dry clay ground. Nothing is said. You know what they
are. You don’t have to say "bloody footprints." Throw your reader
into the character.
What Problems Have You Had in Writing, Especially Writing Westerns?
It’s
not a problem to write them, except a rather irritating thing which is sort of
a stigma attached to the writer of Westerns because they are often
classified—and they’re often right—as just violence, a bang ’em up, shoot ’em
up, “magnified pulp." You have to overcome the opprobrium attached to the
term Western. It’s a lousy term.
A guy
once asked me with a sneer in his voice "Are you still writing them damned
dime novels?" It’s the general idea people have. Others ask, "Are you
still writing cowboy and Indian stories?" I never wrote a dime novel or a
cowboy and Indian story in my life. I never wrote one for the simple reason
that they never existed historically. Cowboys were too busy herding cattle and
repairing fences to be walking around town blowing hell out of anybody who
crossed their path. They never had enough money to buy cartridges to become
expert shots.
People
who believe Westerns are cowboy and Indian stories should read some of the fine
material that has been written and is still being written about the West:
Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ Paso
Por Aqui (University of Oklahoma Press, reprinted in 1973);
A. B. Guthrie, Jr.’s The
Big Sky (Time, reprinted in 1964); Ernest Haycox’s Bugles in the Afternoon (Little. Brown, 1944); Benjamin Capps’, a professor at the University
of Texas, The Trail to Ogallala (Duell Sloan & Pearce, 1961); Alan LeMay’s The Searchers (Ace Books, reprinted in 1982). Elmer Kelton wrote two classics, The Day the Cowboys Quit (Doubleday, 1971) and The
Time It Never Rained
(Texas Christian University Press, Texas A&M Press, I984), which show you
don’t need titles on Westerns like Flaming
Six-guns. And Henry W. Allen, who also wrote under the names
Will Henry and Clay Fisher, wrote an outstanding historical novel of the West
in From Where the Sun Now Stands (Random House, I960).
This
attitude toward Western material has bothered me many times. You have to get
thick- skinned if you’re making a living as a commercial writer, however, and
you have to overlook it.
Other
problems vary the longer you’re in the business or the more books you write. An
early problem was trying to decide what the publisher wanted. The concept of
the Western was restricted as to time and place. The thirty year Western period
was from 1865—1890s—from the end of the Civil War through the Trail Drives of
1867-1877 until the coming of the railroad in the 1890s. It was brief. The
buffalo hunts lasted ten years, the Pony Express one-and-a-half. You had to
build a story within limitations of history, background, set-up, and
environment.
So
many stories sounded alike. I call them the Great Western Fairy Tales, where
Ned Buntline and others romanticized the West and made folk heroes of Wyatt
Earp and others along the lines of Robin Hood. These men were really “townies"—town
marshalls or gamblers who knew how to use a gun and hung around saloons and
houses of prostitution. Some called them fighting pimps.
The
plots of these so-called standard Westerns were similar. In Hollywood they said
there were nine: the fight for the water hole; showdown on Main Street (e.g., High Noon): the
cowboys versus the Indians (which didn’t exist); the Army story (e.g., She Wore a Yellow Ribbon)—these became badly outdated; the search (e.g., The Searchers) the range war; making heroes out of gunmen (Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson,
Doc Holliday) and modern nineteenth century Robin Hoods (Billy the Kid):
cattlemen versus sheepherders, or homesteaders versus cattlemen (e.g., Shane); or
the area story, a town or range dominated by naughty boys.
My
major problem was that I was not a conformist, and I felt I had a story to tell
but didn’t want to tell it within those particular brackets. I didn't want to
follow the pattern of the Western because I couldn’t write the same story over
and over again. I prefer to write about a man who is part of the historical
scene, so I’m limited to the number of books I can write because he has to
follow a historical sequence and he's aging in the process. Some Western
"heroes" never age, never change. I can't do that. I have to make the
man grow old. In the West of the time of my third book in the Southwest Series,
(Marietta Pass, you could age but you couldn’t grow old. You wouldn’t survive in the
Southwest of those days, death was right at your shoulder by violence,
environment, or disease. Disease is always left out of the traditional Western.
But the covered wagon trails are dotted with the sad little graves of children
who died of disease: “Elizabeth. Age twelve months.”
I've
been told I’m a good writer but too far away, not enough shooting and violence.
It's rare when I wrote a shoot ’em up. You only need to resort to violence when
everything else fails. What I’ve tried to do is keep a strong historical sense.
If I can’t write in a historical sense, I won’t write at all.
At one
period, I had to conform to standards because there was no market for another
type of writer. In the Western commercial field, there have been periods where
certain styles of writing went out of favor. This has meant several transitions
for me. When the pulps died in the early fifties, some writers graduated to
soft covers and some did not. The pulpeteers were getting old. One was a suicide.
There was no market. And sixty-thousand words hung on a simple pulp plot was
not good enough anymore. Paperbacks had become big after World War II, and the
heyday of the Western paperbacks started in the late forties and lasted about
twenty years. Then they began to upgrade the stories. Men who were writing
polished-up pulp material for soft covers couldn’t make the second transition
into more polished and historically accurate material and failed. Some of us
were lucky enough to pass into that phase. You had to pay more attention to
character development, background, and plot. The market was getting tighter and
more competitive.
Television
also had a great influence in the 1950s and 1960s with innumerable series like
“Have Gun Will Travel,” "Rawhide," "The Rifleman," ad
infinitum. Then they went out of style, and so did this style in books. I
started out writing military stories, and then some publishers wouldn’t publish
them. Others wouldn't do Indian stories. Some liked the big strong silent hero
who takes care of a town a la Wyatt Earp.
The
average Western in those days was forty to fifty thousand words. Ace did Double
Novels, and if you were prolific enough, they'd publish two of yours at a time,
back-to-back. They weren't the greatest, but they were short and they sold. I
drifted from Army and Indian stories into the closest things I ever wrote to a
standard Western. They were also the worst things I ever wrote. I didn't have
my heart in it.
What
I’m trying to get at is that the problems of the 1959s were different from the
60s and even from the 70s. In the 80s, the problems are different again. There
have been periods, at least in my own life and writing, where I have been able
to make transitions according to moods and styles in this particular type of
writing, a kind of metamorphosis. This is not true of all writers in this
field. Some have been popular for thirty or forty years, still writing the same
stuff, formula type of writing, that follows the same set of characters,
environment, and problems. They change the area and the title, but it's the
same stuff. Myself and others like Louis L'Amour and Elmer Kelton don't do
that. Many use the same basic characters but don't use the same type of plot or
background.
I
gradually developed a lone hunter type of man who searched for treasures.
Hunting and searching is solid material. You can cover hundreds of pages with
the hunt going on. You add a big dollop of mystery, a little mysticism, put it
in a romantic Southwest setting, and bring in all kinds of exotic villains. I
moved into off-the-trail stories, semi-lawman, and then manhunter stories. I
developed the character of Lee Kershaw over a ten-year period in “The
Manhunter” series. These stories were loosely based on history during the
period of the 1870s to 80s, had a great deal of overlap, and were really the
result of forty earlier novels of the West.
Lee
Kershaw was the consummate manhunter and this character was always in the back
of my mind, from the days of early soft cover to more polished and more
historically accurate stories. I did seven books about Lee Kershaw in "The
Manhunter" Series (all. Fawcett/Gold Medal Originals) and I liked them: Showdown in Sonora (1969), The
Manhunter (1970), Bowman's
Kid (1973), Renegade's
trail (1974), The
Apache Hunter (1976), The Marauders (1976), and Legend
of the Damned (1977).
Then I
was told there was a "market trend” to shy away from Westerns. Many major
houses all but dropped them in the early 1970s, and only a few of us were still
writing them through the 70s. They finally told me not to send anymore Lee Kershaw
Manhunter stories.
A
major problem with many writers in any field is what to write, and what to
write next. My own solution has been to read about the real people of the West
and base a story on what really happened but put it in a historical form, an
amalgam of the historic, poetic, and popular concept of the West.
For
example, in Now He is Legend (Fawcett, 1965), the story construction developed from an idea based on
research, historical fact built into legend. It’s the story of two great
friends, one of whom feels great remorse when he kills the other. The setting
was a deserted Mexican village with the fantastic name of Puerto de Luna—Door
of the Moon, which came up between a notch in the mountains. I put this
together with two men who are both outlaws. They part; one goes straight, and
eventually the outlaw is put to death by his old friend. As he rides away, the
moon has come up, and even though there is no wind, the abandoned mission bell
tolls once. He turns, sees the grave, and says, "Now he is legend."
The West is full of stories of men who became legends. They say when Mexico
needs him, Zapata will ride again. I think it was one of the best I wrote. Not
great, but well-written. (Now He Is Legend was a runner-up for the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award
for best Novel in 1966.)
In
1979, I decided to develop the idea I had had since the 1950s of a Southwest
Series leading up to the period of the Civil War in New Mexico. I included some
real historical figures, such as Kit Carson and Ceran St. Vrain. I planned a
trilogy of the history of one man’s family. The best place to start seemed to
be with the coming of a mountain man to New Mexico in the late 1830s. I
used the Shirreffs’ time machine and went back to 1837-1839 and created the
character named Quint Kershaw, who would actually be Lee Kershaw's grandfather.
I knew this earlier period but not well enough. I did research on beaver trapping,
muzzle loading rifles, and the Shoshone and Snake Indians. It was the same with
the second book in the Series Bold
Legend (Fawcett. 1982). By the third book Glorietta Pass, I was
more into the phase of Western history I knew well.
A
problem, then, for anyone writing a historical novel is that you don’t write in
generalities. You are borrowing your plot from history and blending your
characters in with a few real people, but you mix them all together. The study
of history and historical characters gives you a framework within which to
write, and then your story sense comes in to make a novel.
What
Are Your Own Needs and Problems as a Writer, Not Particular to the Western Field?
A
problem I had was that at first I had been just writing as it came to me. Then
I began to realize to my horror that I was thinking so hard of the technical
end that I had no real freedom of thought. I worried about where to pul a
flashback, whether to use a single or multiple viewpoint, all the little rules
you find in writing books.
I'm
basically a stream-of-consciousness writer. I put thoughts down as they come.
If you’re a commercial writer and have to get a manuscript in to New York for
advances, you have to write fast, and what you write has to be good. Once I
felt I had mastered the so-called technical rules, I felt I could get back to
stream-of conscious writing.
As you
develop your own style, you can also start to break rules. You can speed up a
story by using single and multiple viewpoints together. It's fine to have each
alone, but it can lead to problems. You might want to put in a scene with a
multiple view, and then switch over to a single view with the protagonist,
sometimes even in the same chapter or paragraph, like the old Western movies.
The hero is in pursuit of the dirty guys. “Meanwhile, back at the ranch"
the scene shifts to the girl with the blue eyes and the heaving bosom.
Lucinda's in trouble! You couldn’t just have him come back and find Lucinda
tied up. This is not a set rule, about viewpoints. Many writers have broken it.
In Glorietta Pass, I wrote several chapters almost in a historical narrative form to show
what was happening historically from the time of The Untamed Breed and Bold Legend. I still experiment, but you need a story sense to know what will go and
what won't. It’s like a long distance chess game between you, the reader, and
the editor and publisher. Somewhere you have a meeting of minds.
Another
problem is that you can’t fall in love with your own writing. Often, in the
early days, you become enamored of everything you write. You think of it as
your creation, that your words are genius. You have to be your own toughest
critic and, again, use your story sense. You may have some nice stuff, but if
it is not essential to the story, it has to go. Use the old cutting edge to
shape the story, fit it into a pattern, but use your own touch. It’s hard, the
hairiest work there is. The problem is that you're dealing with the utmost of
intangibles.
You
asked me if I’d ever had writer’s block. Yes and no. Not very bad. After 41/2
million words, I don’t remember in detail. There were times when I had a
hiatus. You have gaps, stopping points. If the story is not moving well. I
don't force it. I shut the typewriter off and work outside, cut the grass or
dig a hole. I don't concentrate, but I’m always kicking ideas around in the
back of my mind. Some are preposterous. You let the story take its own course.
You can't turn writing off and on like a faucet. You must write all the time.
If
you're writing commercially, you also can't take five years while the public is
waiting for your next book. That takes a certain type of courage that I haven’t
got. I have to see it in print or at least sold. I was writing for a vastly
commercial market and writing for a living, so I couldn't sit and look out the
window. My advances were never that much. The big ones you hear about are an
infinitesimal few.
You
don't make money on advances. You're lucky if you get $5,000.00 for sixty or
seventy thousand words. It's the same money you got twenty years ago. It could
take six months to write a book, and you can’t live on that. There’s no money
without royalties. I've made $25,000.00 off some books, and some died right
there. You have to bank on foreign sales. Almost all my books are still
published in Europe. It’s hard when you're raising a family.
You
also asked me what kind of revision process I use. Up to the last ten or
fifteen novels, practically none at all. I brought to paperbacks the same style
I used in pulps. I am fortunate that I had the ability to put a piece of paper
in the typewriter and start a story on page one and keep going to page 125, in
those days the length of a manuscript. Very rarely did I ever go back and
change anything. My revision consisted of inserting words I might have left out
or spelled wrong, changing punctuation, etc. I have written full-length novels
and some juveniles in three to six weeks, one in ten days.
But
everybody has a different way of writing. Adela Kay wrote in bed on a legal pad
in pencil and threw the pages on the floor. Her husband gathered them up and
typed them in the morning. I could never do that. You hear of some writers who
write ten lines a day. I had to put down four to five thousand words a day,
eight to ten good pages. Fourteen to fifteen pages was pushing myself. But in
later years, when I got into 75-100,000 word books, I had to take more time to
do revision, to make the story hang together. 1 can write very fast and
consistently up to roughly 20-25,000 words, or a hundred pages. Then for some
reason or other. I stop there to correlate my thoughts and see how the story is
fitting in. If you say the horse is a bay on page ten, the same horse better be
a bay on page seventy-five. Speech tags on page twenty-five better be the same
on page three hundred. All this goes into your memory bank, like a computer.
You know automatically.
Another
problem is whether or not you’re writing under contract. Of seventy-nine
novels, I sold sixty-five on speculation. I prefer to think up an idea, write a
story, mail it in, and my agent finds the market. My last fourteen novels were
written on advance contracts, fifty percent on signing and fifty percent when
finished and accepted. Personally, I felt an obligation to people who had paid
advance money, and it almost became a hindrance to my free way of thinking. You
worry whether or not you’re coming up to their specifications. There was a
period where this bothered me, when I was writing much longer novels than
before.
I also
went through two operations, which took a great deal out of me physically and
psychologically. I didn’t have the hard-driving approach I had had. I thought
much more slowly and was a lot less sure of myself. It wasn't until these last
three novels that I finally began to overcome it. Now, almost at the end of my
writing career, it doesn’t bother me. It may come with age, when you really
don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of you anyway.
Where Are You Now in Your Writing, and Where Are You Going?
I’ve
just completed Glorietta Pass, the third book in the Southwest Series. It covers the period 1861- 62.
I went back in time to find Lee Kershaw’s (c. late 1870s—80s) grandfather Quint
Kershaw (c. 1830s-1860s) and trace the history of the Civil War in New Mexico,
through the lives of one man’s family.
The
first book was The Untamed Breed, the story of Scots-Canadian mountain man Quint Kershaw who comes to New
Mexico in 1839. The second was Bold
Legend, the story of the Mexican War in New Mexico and the
acquisition of the American Southwest during 1845—47. The third book begins in
the fall of 1861. Glorietta
Pass is the story of the attempt by the Confederacy to
capture New Mexico for a projected invasion west to California.
The
wheel turns and I’m right back where I was in 1941-42, planning a book about
the Civil War in New Mexico. After forty years and four- and-a-half million
words, this is the book I originally wanted to write. Of course, I had to
expand my original notes, and I found fabulous research. I just heard they
accepted it, liked it, but I need to do some rewriting. They think there is too
much background information. I was prepared for that, but I was experimenting.
I wanted to include a great deal of historical information, but I didn’t want
to ladle out dull information in dialogue. So I included two short chapters in
historical narrative form.
I had
originally planned this to be a trilogy, but now it’s open-ended. I'm waiting
to see what they want in New York, and then I’ll decide whether 1 will go ahead
with the series or not. Actually, I’d like to continue with a fourth novel
through die 1870s with one of Quint Kershaw’s sons. He would be the consummate
professional soldier in the likeness of Mackenzie, Forsyth, and Crook involved
with the Indian fighting problem of the 1870s and 80s in the Arizona Territory.
These men have fascinated me over the years.
Here
again the wheel has turned full cycle. I’ve written other books and have notes
on them, but now with thirty years experience in writing about the West. I
would like to do another book on the professional soldier. I’ve always also
been fascinated by the Apaches. My first juvenile. Son of the Thunder People (Westminister, 1957), was based on the training of a youth as an Apache
warrior. They are a remarkable people. My fifth Lee Kershaw book was Apache Hunter, based on the famous Apache army scouts like those that tracked Geronimo
when the army couldn’t find him. Can you imagine the psychological effect on
him of Apaches tracking him? He was never captured but surrendered. The
government promised him everything and gave him nothing. And that's another
story.
If the
publishers now say. “Do not send any more books,” that's fine with me. I’ll go
and work on other things, maybe an article on an ancestor of ours who was the
Master of the HMS Milbrook during the Napoleonic Wars. I have that and a lot of
other material I’d like to put into non-fiction form.
There
are other factors. My age. The fact that I’ve been there and come back. I’ve
been through all the different phases—pulps, children’s books, the Western
field, a few standard Westerns, a “Playhouse 90" TV script “The Galvanized
Yankee," a long extinct TV series, “Boots and Saddles,'’ motion
pictures—one based on a short story where I wrote the script, was technical
director and filled in as a professional archer.
Your
mother thinks I'm tired and wearing out. She looks on me as sitting back in my
room like Rumpelstiltskin. That’s a fallacy. Writing is hard work, but not a
chore. The fun is in the making, not the finishing.
Postscript
Gordon
D. Shirreffs’ fourth novel in his Southwest Series, The Ghost Dancers, is scheduled to be published by Fawcett in January 1986. He has also
been nominated again by the Western Writers of America for The Golden Saddleman
Award made to “a living individual who has made an outstanding contribution to
the American West.”
Carole Shirreffs Cox teaches at Louisiana State University in Baton
Rouge.
