Classic Writing Westerns

WRITING WESTERNS

This genre has been around since before 1850. It started off as frontier fiction and most consider James Fenimore Cooper’s five novels of the Leatherstocking Tales the real start.

From there in flourished in the Penny Dreadfuls and Dime Novels from the 1860s. Those were short novels (actually around 15,000 to 20,000 words) often based on real people like Billy the Kid, Jessie James and so on. It was in this period that the western novels became popular in Europe as well.

In the Pulp era, westerns as a genre took off, just as science fiction, mystery, and romance did. Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian published in 1902 set the stage and Zane Gray followed. Hopalong Cassidy first appeared in 1904. From there it was Max Brand and hundreds of other writers filling the pulp magazines into the 1950s.

Westerns are, and always have been, an umbrella genre, which means you can combine other genres with it. Science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, mystery, all can fit in westerns. In fact, the longest running pulp magazine of all time was Ranch Romances.

In traditional publishing today, the western died down to next to nothing outside of the bestsellers like Louis L’Amour, Larry McMurty, and Cormac McCarthy. But the growth of the freedom of the indie publishing world has brought the readers and writers back. And once again the western genre is growing.

This workshop is about writing westerns, some of the focuses and the many types and subgenres and how to use the tropes of westerns in your other genre fiction. It’s a lot to cover and a lot of fun.

Depth Workshop is required to take this course because if you can't do basic depth, you can't pull a reader along with you into the wild west.