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Award Shortlist On Special Offer In Asda Stores 
And the winner is...
Looking to make a late break this July? 
Yeeaaahhh…
1 year ago
Monday, 6 July 2009
CRIME RUNS RIOT AT ASDA
Writing western fiction
Why write western fiction? By western we mean novels/stories set in the Old West - usually, but not exclusively between the years immediately following the civil war and upto 1890. Who would want to read western fiction in the world we live in today?
Many people clearly do - the western provides a form of escapism, a comfort zone that is becoming more and more important in the frantic world we live in today. There is an enduring quality in taking the imaginative leap to a time long gone and finding that the issues facing people were remarkably similar to those we face on a daily basis, it is inspiring to read about people facing up to life's trials and tribulations and standing resolute against anything thrown at them.
The western as a literary genre had its golden age sometime around the middle of the last century and indeed the writers of that period are still widely read today - L'amour, Zane Grey. But to find the roots of the genre you have to travel further back, much further - in fact to the Old West itself when hack writers were mythologising the West even as it was going on around them.
Perhaps the defining classic of the genre is Owen Wister's The Virginian, first published in 1901. The book sold 300,000 copies in its first year, led the American bestseller lists for most of 1902 and by 1968 had sold over 2 million copies. It is perhaps the most widely read book about that period we call, "the wild west" and shaped the conventions of the genre for generations of writers to follow. Anyone wanting to write a western simply must read this seminal work.
There was a time when everything was clear cut in the western - the hero always wore a white hat, the baddie a black one. Right and wrong were clearly defined and there was a code to be followed but these days practically anything goes in a western. Modern issues can be tackled and many writers cleverly disguise the concerns of the 21st century within their narrative. In short there is no kind of story the western can not tell - crime, romance, horror, comedy. The western is versatile enough to accommodate them all.
SO WHERE DO I START ? Research is very important in the westerns. You must get the details right, particularly with guns and location. I've often been enjoying a book and then I notice some mistake the writer has made and it drags me out of the story. Even minor mistakes can ruin a story. However the aspiring western writer should take heart in the fact that mostly everyone knows what the west would have looked like. This makes the writers' job that much easier and with the advent of the internet any required information is usually only a few key-strokes away.
THE ACTUAL WRITING. There is no one way to do this. Some writers like to rush through the first draft and then take care of structure, style and plot problems in the re-write. Others are more cautious and will plod along, revising as they go and when that first draft comes out it needs very little tweaking. I hop between both camps but I do like to keep the story moving along, to give it pace and I actually look forward to the revising once the first draft is complete. For me the first draft is a necessary evil and getting it out of the way is all important.
CHARACTERS. It is good characterisation that can turn a good story into a great one. Try and put yourself in your characters mindset and think what you would do in a given situation, however it is important to put modern inhibitions aside. You would have been a very different person had you been alive in the 1880's. Perhaps the single most helpful piece of advice for creating characters is READ, READ AND READ. Only by studying the work of writers you admire can you ever hope to understand the process involved in creating realistic people to populate what is after all an outlandish fictional landscape.
STOP PROCRASTINATING AND GET DOWN TO IT. The biggest thing is to stop talking about it and get on with it, as difficult as it can be to find time in our hectic lives it is important to be stubborn and get down to the actual writing. You must make time - no matter what- or your creation will always be a pipe dream. Remember it is no different writing a western to any other form of genre fiction and the tools used will always be the same. Behind every successful (define successful as professionally published)writer is a person who was pig headed enough to get on with writing no matter what was going on around them.
THE BEST ADVICE
. And here it is, the best advice anyone can give someone wanting to write for a living, anyone wanting to hone their craft and create readable prose. It's nothing mythical. no arcane knowledge belonging to a select few. It is this - READ. Read everything you can get your hands on, devour every western that comes your way. Pay attention to the accepted masters of the genre and read classic as well as modern westerns. Look at what contemporary authors are doing with the genre. Just because the lone gunfighter is becoming a cliché doesn't mean you should forsake him or even her as the case may be. There are certain conventions the western fan demands and only by being familiar to the genre can the writer hope to recognise what these are.
So get writing, you've an arduous trail ahead of you but with stamina and a self belief as wide as the prairies you can do it.
My novel, The Tarnished Star is available now.
Many people clearly do - the western provides a form of escapism, a comfort zone that is becoming more and more important in the frantic world we live in today. There is an enduring quality in taking the imaginative leap to a time long gone and finding that the issues facing people were remarkably similar to those we face on a daily basis, it is inspiring to read about people facing up to life's trials and tribulations and standing resolute against anything thrown at them.
The western as a literary genre had its golden age sometime around the middle of the last century and indeed the writers of that period are still widely read today - L'amour, Zane Grey. But to find the roots of the genre you have to travel further back, much further - in fact to the Old West itself when hack writers were mythologising the West even as it was going on around them.
Perhaps the defining classic of the genre is Owen Wister's The Virginian, first published in 1901. The book sold 300,000 copies in its first year, led the American bestseller lists for most of 1902 and by 1968 had sold over 2 million copies. It is perhaps the most widely read book about that period we call, "the wild west" and shaped the conventions of the genre for generations of writers to follow. Anyone wanting to write a western simply must read this seminal work.
There was a time when everything was clear cut in the western - the hero always wore a white hat, the baddie a black one. Right and wrong were clearly defined and there was a code to be followed but these days practically anything goes in a western. Modern issues can be tackled and many writers cleverly disguise the concerns of the 21st century within their narrative. In short there is no kind of story the western can not tell - crime, romance, horror, comedy. The western is versatile enough to accommodate them all.
SO WHERE DO I START ? Research is very important in the westerns. You must get the details right, particularly with guns and location. I've often been enjoying a book and then I notice some mistake the writer has made and it drags me out of the story. Even minor mistakes can ruin a story. However the aspiring western writer should take heart in the fact that mostly everyone knows what the west would have looked like. This makes the writers' job that much easier and with the advent of the internet any required information is usually only a few key-strokes away.
THE ACTUAL WRITING. There is no one way to do this. Some writers like to rush through the first draft and then take care of structure, style and plot problems in the re-write. Others are more cautious and will plod along, revising as they go and when that first draft comes out it needs very little tweaking. I hop between both camps but I do like to keep the story moving along, to give it pace and I actually look forward to the revising once the first draft is complete. For me the first draft is a necessary evil and getting it out of the way is all important.
CHARACTERS. It is good characterisation that can turn a good story into a great one. Try and put yourself in your characters mindset and think what you would do in a given situation, however it is important to put modern inhibitions aside. You would have been a very different person had you been alive in the 1880's. Perhaps the single most helpful piece of advice for creating characters is READ, READ AND READ. Only by studying the work of writers you admire can you ever hope to understand the process involved in creating realistic people to populate what is after all an outlandish fictional landscape.
STOP PROCRASTINATING AND GET DOWN TO IT. The biggest thing is to stop talking about it and get on with it, as difficult as it can be to find time in our hectic lives it is important to be stubborn and get down to the actual writing. You must make time - no matter what- or your creation will always be a pipe dream. Remember it is no different writing a western to any other form of genre fiction and the tools used will always be the same. Behind every successful (define successful as professionally published)writer is a person who was pig headed enough to get on with writing no matter what was going on around them.
THE BEST ADVICE
. And here it is, the best advice anyone can give someone wanting to write for a living, anyone wanting to hone their craft and create readable prose. It's nothing mythical. no arcane knowledge belonging to a select few. It is this - READ. Read everything you can get your hands on, devour every western that comes your way. Pay attention to the accepted masters of the genre and read classic as well as modern westerns. Look at what contemporary authors are doing with the genre. Just because the lone gunfighter is becoming a cliché doesn't mean you should forsake him or even her as the case may be. There are certain conventions the western fan demands and only by being familiar to the genre can the writer hope to recognise what these are.So get writing, you've an arduous trail ahead of you but with stamina and a self belief as wide as the prairies you can do it.
My novel, The Tarnished Star is available now.
THOSE ARCHIVE STATS
Weekly Stats Report: 29 Jun - 5 Jul 2009
Project: THE TAINTED ARCHIVE
URL: http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/
Project: THE TAINTED ARCHIVE
URL: http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/
| Mon | Tues | Wed | Thur | Fri | Sat | Sun | Total | Avg | |
| Pageloads | 224 | 222 | 180 | 204 | 177 | 177 | 242 | 1,426 | 204 |
| Unique Visitors | 160 | 137 | 104 | 116 | 100 | 118 | 121 | 856 | 122 |
| First Time Visitors | 131 | 108 | 78 | 90 | 78 | 84 | 91 | 660 | 94 |
| Returning Visitors | 29 | 29 | 26 | 26 | 22 | 34 | 30 | 196 | 28 |
Sunday, 5 July 2009
PECKINPAH'S OVERLOOKED CLASSIC
DEADLY COMPANIONS1961
When TV's highly rated show The Westerner was cancelled it's star Brian Keith was offered the starring role in the western, The Deadly Companions. It was the star who suggested Sam Peckinpah for director as they had worked so well together on the TV series.
Maureen O'hara has been cast as the female lead and she was horrified that the producers had indeed signed Peckinpah to direct, but she had no way of getting out of her contract, she was also executive producer, and so she had to grin and bare it. She would complain about the directors drinking and claimed he wasted most of the day in a stupor and then wanted to film a days shooting in a few frantic hours. The rest of the main cast were made up of the excellent Chill Willis as Turk and Steve Cochran as the gunfighter, Billy.
Deadly Companions is a tauht psychological western with a strange plot and a bizarre selection of characters - Yellowlegs (Brian Keith) has spent the last five years searching for the rebel deserter (Chill Willis) who attempted to scalp him while he lay wounded on a battlefield. When he does catch up with him he realises that the man doesn't remember him and so he decides to bide his time. However when Yellowlegs accidentally shoots a kid while returning fire to a gang of bank robbers he is distraught. Yellowlegs, Turk and a young gunslinger called Billy accompany the boys mother (Maureen O'hara) across hostile Apache country to bury the boy in a ghost town alongside his father.Yellowlegs is a complex character - he won't remove his hat because he carries the scars of his near scalping, his gun arm is ruined because he's carrying a slug around close to his shoulder bone and even though he is falling in love with O'hara he remains focused in killing Turk when the time is right. It's all about redemption at the end of the day and the understated climax is beautifully staged with solid performances from O'hara and Keith.
There are several DVD issues of the film (it is in the public domain because of a mistake when the renewal was passed over) but the Optimum Western Classics issue looks superb with crips clear colours and no blockiness at all in the many dark scenes.
Childhood diversions - M.A.C.H. 1
M.A.C.H. 1, real name John Probe appeared in the very first issue of 2000AD way back in the day. I loved this character so much as a kid that I remembered creating my own version of the character in rough twelve year old handwriting. Just as people these days write fan fic about Star Wars, James Bond or even Buffy then so too did I, as a kid, write my own M.A.C.H. 1 novels. I called my guy The Ultimate Spy and he was very much a rip off of M.A.C.H.1 but that was okay since M.A.C.H. 1 was very much a rip off of TV's The Six Millon Dollar Man - only much more gritty.M.A.C.H. 1 stands for man activated by compu-puncture hyperpower and John Probe was the first so he was M.A.C.H 1- however we would find out later that there was actually another man who went through the process of compu-puncture but it went wrong and turned that man into a hulking brute called M.A.C.H 0. later we would also learn that the Russians had also been experimenting with the process when they sent their super hero, a woman, to kill Probe.
The first episode saw British agent, John Probe (he was even drawn to look a bit like Lee Majors.) undergoing the final part of the experiment that would turn him into a super secret agent. The character was created by Pat Mills and the artist on these early episodes was Enio. The strip ran to 64 weekly episodes with the character becoming more and more anti-Establishment as time wore on. By then end of the stories run , after some 64 interrupted weeks, John Probe had turned against his creators in the British government. This was a time when the UK was in Socialist meltdown with three day weeks, flash strikes across the public sector, the electricity being turned off most evenings to save Britain's dwindling resources and Punk Rock had given the Establishment a good kick in the arse.
In this first episode we learn that Probe's boss is the sinister Sharpe and that Probe's compu-puncture has given him super strength and endurance. He can also talk with the computer inside his brain which was a useful device for the writers to advance the story. Before his training is complete Probe finds himself thrown into action when a group of terrorists attack a R.A.F base at Cottesdale. Suffice to say Probe saves the day but little hints are dropped that the compu- puncture whilst turning him into a superman also has a dark side.
Right from the start 2000ad was edgier than most British boys comics, which is perhaps the reason why it is still running today. And all the stories had grit to them - another early story saw John Probe sent to execute the president of Iranian and stop him from sending his armies in to invade Turkostan.
In the early days of the comic M.A.C.H. 1 was my second favourite character (my all time fave was Volgan basher, Bill Savage) and I was not alone - in Dec 2004 when 2000AD published a collection of the early strips it was announced that initially the character was more popular than Judge Dredd and Dan Dare combined.
Comic books were great in those days and each week I would rush to the newsagents clutching my 8p for the lastest issue of 2000AD (the current comic costs £1.90) and rush home for my weekly fix - usually with some Black Jacks and Fruit Salad sweets to chew on while I devoured the latest adventures and wallowed in the thrill power . That's what they called it - THRILL POWER - and the comic would often print warnings before stories, "WARNING THRILL POWER OVERLOAD"
Judge Dredd, Dan Dare (2000ad's cyberpunk rebranding of the character), Invasion 1999 (Bill Savage kicking Volgan arse), Flesh (future time travellers set up meat processing plants in prehistoric times to feed people of the future when all animals are extinct), Harlem Heroes (a sort of futuristic Harlem Globetrotters) and of course M.A.C.H. 1. Incidentally Flesh was a western set in the future - since the people at the meat plant were called rangers, dressed like cowboys and the first major series took place in a frontier town called Carver City - I'll write a post about Flesh one day.
Those were the days indeed!
THE TARNISHED STAR
The Tarnished Star - the western they're all talking about. Buy it now - Amazon, Book Depository, Borders and anywhere else books are sold.
"If you’re a Western fan, you want to get your hands on this one." James Reasoner
"Martin keeps the action high and the suspense notched up to eleven, but he also manages to show us some timeless truths about being young, being old, showing personal responsibility, achieving autonomy, and what it means to be a good guy…and what it means to be bad." Meridian Bridge
"Plenty of action, a fast pace and a hero in the mould of James Stewart." Ross Morton
"If you’re a Western fan, you want to get your hands on this one." James Reasoner
"Martin keeps the action high and the suspense notched up to eleven, but he also manages to show us some timeless truths about being young, being old, showing personal responsibility, achieving autonomy, and what it means to be a good guy…and what it means to be bad." Meridian Bridge
"Plenty of action, a fast pace and a hero in the mould of James Stewart." Ross Morton
RIDLEY SCOTT TO RETURN TO THE ALIEN FRANCHISE
Fox are expected to announce later this month the Ridley Scott is to return to the Alien franchise for a prequel to the sci-fi films. Fox would only green light the project if Scott returned the helm the ailing franchise. There has been no official announcement but those in the know, a source at Fox, has assured me that this is a done deal.
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