Writing popular fiction

will be generated by the anticipation of a violent event: for example, the death of the heroine, which never comes to pass.
    Stories containing explicit or even implied sexual contact are especially taboo
. A Gothic must contain no bedroom scenes, no petting, and not even any necking. When you describe your heroine, you will always indicate that she is pretty, but you must never discuss her figure or her sexuality. When she meets a man in the course of the story, she may evaluate him in the way any normal woman would evaluate a brother or a father figure, and she may even wonder what kind of husband he would make, though in a romantic and not a sexual sense. When she and her potential mate exchange gestures of affection during the story, these will be limited to gentle embraces, chaste kisses, and delicate words of endearment. Rare are the soul kisses and rarer still the fierce clinches. Not even the villain can have lustful thoughts. As one Gothic editor once told me, "The villain can want to beat her, torture her, and even kill her. But he mustn't contemplate rape!"
CHAPTER SIX    Westerns
    As long as the American public looks upon the history of the Old West as a romantic and nostalgic era, there will be a market for the Western novel, and this means the marketplace should be open for a good many decades to come. Few hardback houses besides Doubleday publish a large yearly list of Westerns, because there simply is not a large high-price audience for the form. On the other hand, Dell, Bantam, Fawcett, Avon, Lancer, Signet, Ballantine, and most other paperback houses release monthly Western lists. One of the canniest paperback editors working today once told me that his company occasionally lost money on some titles in every category—except the Western. No Western has ever lost them a dime. No enormous profits, you understand. Just modest but steady sales.
    Advances on Westerns often average below what is paid for other kinds of category novels, unless you have an agent forceful enough to demand standard advances. Subsidiary rights are not particularly hot, though it is possible to pick up a motion picture sale and, more often, a motion picture option to buy. (See Chapter Ten, question 10, for a discussion of movie sales.) The top-flight Western writer can build a reputation that can escalate his income into pleasant tax brackets. Louis L'Amour, a continually best-selling Western author, has had several books purchased for and made into successful films and is perennially reprinted with great success. It would be impossible to estimate how much money the many westerns by Max Brand (originally the pseudonym of Frederick Faust [1892-19441) have produced for their publishers, though we could safely say the figure runs into the millions.
    If your concept of the Western is highly unfavorable, and if you look upon it as an unimaginative form full of mostly bad writing, you likely have read little or nothing of what has been written in the genre in the last fifteen years. More than any other category, the Western is condemned out of hand by people who make judgments without experience and, often, by writers in other genres who would scream foul if anyone criticized
their
form without first having read extensively in it. Modern Western writers can and do turn out high-quality novels. Louis L'Amour is a good fast-action writer who knows how to establish his characters in short order and plunge the reader into a no-holds-barred plot progression that insures their attention to the final page. Lee Hoffman's work ranges from solid adventure novels laced with social comment, as in
Wild Riders
, to Western satire like
The Legend of Blackjack Sam
, a genuinely funny story. Brian Garfield's work has always opened new frontiers for the Western novel, exploring characters more deeply than once was the tradition of the field and using sexual encounter with the same honesty and detail found in any other genre but the Gothic. One of his best novels,
Gun Down
, should be proof enough to any skeptic that the Western novel is as vital as any other form. Unfortunately for the Western field, Garfield has written his last oater and is now a successful suspense and mainstream author.
    Westerns, like war stories, usually paint good and evil in fairly distinct blacks and whites, at least to begin with. But one technique of characterization, used by most Western writers and visible in the vast majority of Western novels, saves the genre from