Good morning to you all!
Today’s post is a little different than usual. The link below will take you to Saddlebag Dispatches Magazine and an article I co-wrote with Roan and Weatherford publisher, Casey Cowan. He called me one day several months ago and asked if I’d work with him on an article about westerns and their survival as viable genre. Of course I jumped at the chance.
We reached out to other authors such as Marc Cameron, Craig Johnson, and the creator of Rambo, David Morrell who are writing modern westerns today, bringing in different viewpoints about these books that once entertained, and eventually brought many authors into the writing world.
This is the result.
Enjoy!
https://issuu.com/oghmacreative/docs/saddlebag_dispatches-january_2026/s/152135644
P.S.
Here’s the link to the entire January issue of this fine magazine, where you can find an in-depth interview with David Morrell, fascinating articles on the new and old west, and my ongoing column, along and much, much more.
https://issuu.com/…/docs/saddlebag_dispatches-january_2026
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the timing of this post & subsequent article. As the western is my favorite genre, I found the article enlightening and full of good tips, but admittedly some statements also made me bristle a little.
The article seems to imply at times that traditional westerns don’t have “fully realized characters, immersive worlds and compelling moral conflict” or that setting isn’t also character. That, in my experience, IS the traditional western. Perhaps you could make that argument for some on-screen westerns, but that is not my experience with western fiction. And I can assure you that traditional westerns I read made good use of setting as character – it’s what kept this young kid sane while growing up in one of the most boring states imaginable until I became an adult and could move west myself.
I do hope that authors who opt to write ‘mixed genre’ westerns will write good copy for their books so the potential reader knows what they’re getting into. Nothing worse than buying a book and expecting one thing, reading it and finding out it was not what you were looking for.
The good news for me is I realized long ago that writing in the western genre was going to have less marketability than some other genres. And as I will independently publish, I don’t have to worry about marketing myself to a traditional publisher and their audience expectations. And as a western writer I’m trying to find my niche – some westerns seem to be written to dwell/elaborate on violence, and on the opposite spectrum some are written merely as a vehicle for romance. I’m somewhere in the middle of that. With regard to mixed genre, I’m developing a series that will be western mixed with political intrigue and this article is encouragement to keep pursuing that.
In the end, while I obviously need to be cognizant of market, if my stories don’t appeal to me, they won’t get written. So I don’t see myself venturing far off the western track, other than the obvious things mentioned here such as shorter/tighter prose than was written in the early 1900’s, for example. And I don’t want my westerns to be drastically different because, just as with reading historical fiction in general, I may not have experience in that time period, but I’m reading to escape the modern day.
I look forward to reading this article again to take some more notes. Now I’ve stayed up too late pondering this great topic. I’m going to pay for that in sleep deprivation this weekend. LOL!
Westerns were The Thing when I was growing up. That’s what we played outside, that’s what we watched on TV.