HOW TO WRITE A WESTERN BY TERRY HARKNETT PART TWO

I would like to correct an error (mine of course) from the first part of this article. I stated that A.S. Burack edited the piece when in fact Mr Burack passed away in 1978 after editing The Writer magazine for a great many years. Terry's original piece was edited by Sylvia K. Burack. Thanks to Keith Chapman for the correction.

And now back into the time capsule and over to Terry:


Writing Westerns by Terry Harknett part two


Why this success with Edge? And why have not Adam Steele, Jubal Cade and Apache (three more westerns series I created?) achieved the same bestseller status?

Because Edge was an original. He had to be, since as I've said, I had never read a western in my life before I wrote the first two Edge books. The sole influence I had was the movies and TV series - preconceptions from another medium unlike all those unsuccessful mysteries I had written previously (and which I continued to write for some time after Edge was a success). They had been very strongly influenced by my ceaseless reading of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Mickey Spillane, and all the other American hard-boiled school of writers that I tried to emulate. And then when I wrote my other western series I was subconsciously influenced by myself. Certainly I had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and to know the right people. That was part of having the forty nine% luck. After that I sat down and perspired my forty nine% working in a field that initially had no appeal to me, and set aside what I wanted to write in order to give the public what they wanted to read - or, in the first instance, what a publisher thought the public wanted to read.

I became a commercial writer, writing for money and, as it turned out, for more pleasure than I ever got from writing those unsuccessful mysteries. For I can ensure you sitting down at a typewriter with a virtually pre-sold project in mind is much more fin than working in limbo with only a hope and a prayer for company.

Now to the mechanics of how I, as a commercial writer, produce my books (a technique that is much the same as when I wrote those first two Edge books).

I start out with an outline of the projected story - a chapter by chapter breakdown, which may be as few as three or as many as eight pages long. (Nowadays I write eight such breakdowns each spring - four each for Edge and Steele, the two series I presently do. And the publisher gives me contracts for these eight books. Thus, my year's writing and publishing schedule is set). I then write the books at a rate of at least 15 pages a day, or about 3,000 words, come hell or high water, five days a week. And in three weeks I have a finished manuscript of from 225 to 260 pages.

At the end of the working day I read through the work I have done, and then at the end of the book I read the entire typescript. On books that do well, I need only to correct typing and spelling errors. On the books that go less easily, I may have to rewrite ten or a dozen pages before I am finished.


NEXT IN PART THREE - TERRY TALKS ABOUT RESEARCH AND THAT PERSPIRATION FACTOR.