Another "The End" for the Wild West

I’ve got the greatest job in the world. Not just because I’m a writer and can sit around the house all day eating bonbons and listening to counter-retro jazz fusion while everybody else is slaving away for cruel taskmasters. No. Because I spend all my working hours with the most fascinating people who never lived.

The kind of people who populate my thrillers, Westerns and love stories and do fabulous and exciting things, often in exotic places or in an even more exotic past century. The kind of people who make parties fun and brawls unspeakable. The folks you’re happy to have a beer with but don’t want in the house next door. Because some of the things they do – well, a lot of the things they do – are anti-social or howling nuts.

Let me give a for-instance. I just finished the first draft of my latest historical Western – Dead Hand – and, as usual after a novel’s finish, I’m feeling blue. I had such fun for so long with the people who live in the story – driving cattle, facing down outlaws, cranking Gatling guns, beating back a flood in the desert – that now, the draft finished and them gone away, I miss ‘em.

Well, some I don’t miss – the villains. They were especially villainous this time around. In fact, the two main evildoers invaded Dead Hand from another Western novel called The Bountyhunter. And I wished they’d stayed there. Ah, so did the hero, Easy Holloway, who was a minor character in that other book, but that’s a story for another post.

I can’t say I liked these two villains – Pecos Finn and Six Finger Dutch – but they proved so aggressively awful and committed such savage crimes that I took a lot of pleasure in letting my broken-armed gunfighter hero do unto them as they deserved to be done unto. Or nearly so.

That’s another joy of the writing life – you can take revenge on everyone who deserves it and get away with it. Shoot this one, stab that one, shove this one off the boat into the Arctic Ocean with the snapping polar bears. No worries about cops knocking on your door. Or friends of villains pot-shooting you in a parking lot.

On the other hand, when you stumble across a hero or heroine, like Easy Holloway, standing battered but determined in the face of misery and outrage, you can feel that you too are standing there alongside, ready to fight for the right and the decent. Ready to help civilize the Wild West or bring down the mafia or comfort the lost and forlorn victims of war.

It’s a great feeling when you see those things happening on the page you’re writing. You forget you’re a bum sitting on your bum in front of a computer screen tossing back bonbons. You remember the whole point of a writer’s life – to say as best you can what you have to say about being a decent human being in a world where decency too often is in short supply.

We live in a real world of sprawling tyrants, sneering bullies and gutless liars no different than the villains in my fiction. But ours also is a world of decent folk who deserve a break in life and sometimes, but only sometimes, get it.

So it’s as much a surprise to me as I bet it is for my readers when the good guy wins in my novels. Because I never know what’s going to happen in a story until I write it. I don’t write to outline, you see, I write by the seat of my pants. Flying blind through the story pretty much the way you read it, not knowing what’s going to turn up on the next page. I do that because if I plot a story in advance then I’ve told the story and it’s dead to me and I can’t write it.

Usually, I get within 30 or 40 pages of “The End” before I can see where a novel is going and how the hero is going to squeeze out of his fix. Sometimes I can’t see clearly how it will wrap up and I write many pages past The End and must go back and cut text to reach the end point.

With Dead Hand, however, I had no idea how the novel would end until a day or two before it happened. Then – bingo! – those two magic words popped up. Ending all my jittery worries that this story, unlike any other I’d written, might go on forever and ever and never find The End.

But I was shocked to see how many good and decent characters had to be sacrificed to the villains to reach a powerful The End. I liked all of them and hated to see them go. I’d hoped that one or two could become hero/heroines in their own spin-off novels. But that didn’t happen, and I really didn’t have much to do with it. All I could do was watch it all happen, stunned and wondering what was happening with all these people.

I suppose it would be cliché to say that the process of writing, like the process of living, is a mystery too full of “Whys?” and too empty of Answers.

So, too, writing, like life, is too full of villains and too short on heroes. And it feels great when a tough story like Dead Hand wraps itself up as it did, with a hero who has come to know himself. Making him a hero worth your knowing. Not just to share a beer in the tavern down the road but to welcome into the neighborhood.

That’s why, the manuscript done, I miss ‘em all.