Writing popular fiction

torture the good cavalry men. At one time, indeed until quite recently, this was permissible. Today, the average reader has read
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
by Dee Brown (by far the best research work on the horrible war against the American Indian) or its equivalent and is aware of the true relationship between the cavalry and the Indian. More often than not, the cavalry was the persecutor, the Indian the innocent victim. Before attempting to write a Cavalry and Indian story, you must do intense research in order to understand the true situation of the American Indian in the Old West.
    No matter which Western plot you employ, you must research customs, slang,
dress, and day-to-day chores before putting Word One down on paper. A Western is
an historical novel, and it must be true to its period of genesis. (Besides adult and juvenile books on American history and Western history, one excellent reference is
Western Words: A Dictionary of the American West
by Ramon F. Adams. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, it is a rich source of cowboy vernacular.)
    We have already mentioned a few of the taboos a modern Western writer must be aware of, but let's list them in more orderly style:
    The hero who cleans up a town because he believes in "justice," and for no other reason, is taboo
. He must be a sympathetic man with his own problems, fears, hopes, and dreams and with a sound personal reason for everything he does.
    Racial Westerns in which the Indians or the Mexicans are portrayed as mindless savages are taboo
. The modern reader demands authenticity and honest treatment of
all
your characters.
    No
modern Western author can succeed when writing stories based on sloppy research or on no research at all
.
    The story of the lone cowpoke who rides onto a new ranch beset by troubles, reveals that the foreman is a crook, and wins the rancher's daughter, is taboo
. This is such a
cliché that the regular Western reader would flinch the moment he recognized it.
    The story of the shoot-out on Main Street, in which the opponents are out to prove who's the best man, or in which one of them is determined to prove his manhood in a sort of rite of passage, is taboo
. It is
cliché unless you can give the plot a very original twist.
    Misinformation about handguns of the
1865-1899
period is taboo
. Regular Western readers will know how many shots were carried in a gun you just described, and they'll know what its capabilities were. If they catch you in a fundamental error, they'll not believe anything in the rest of the book and will, justifiably, put it down without finishing it.
    A
sympathetic outlaw who loses in the end to prove that "crime doesn't pay" is taboo
.
    The hero who stands in the way of progress—railroad, telegraph,
stagecoach line—merely to preserve the untainted West, comes off as an idiot and is taboo
. There was no ecological crisis back then; no industry was contributing to an unnecessary and dangerous pollution of the land.
    Just a final note to assure the potential Western writer who is a woman that not all Westerns are written by men, though most publishers insist that women who write Westerns assume a male pen name or at least use only the initials of their first and middle names. Western by-lines you have seen, which are covers for women, include Lee Hoffman, B. M. Bower, Eli Colter, and Stewart Toland. Women often have a talent for research and a feel for historical periods that make them outstanding Western novelists.
CHAPTER SEVEN    Erotica
    Generally speaking, there are two kinds of erotic novels: the Big Sexy Novel and the Rough Sexy Novel. You can make a fortune on the first and little more than pocket money on the last. Big Sexy Novels are written by Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann, Henry Sutton, Morton Cooper, Rona Jaffe, and many others. Six figure incomes are a starting place in the Big Sexy Novel field, with million dollar rewards if you achieve the position of a Robbins or a Susann. Rough Sexy Novels are written by, among hundreds of others, Marcus Van Heller, Ann Griffin, Tor Kung, Peggy Swenson, Marco Vassi, and Jesse Taylor. Their financial rewards average between $1,000 and $3,000 a book, and they do not even receive the fringe benefits of national fame accorded the BigSN writer—to say nothing of the subsidiary rights a RoughSN novelist rarely ever profits from.
    What, you may well ask, differentiates between a Big Sexy Novel and a Rough Sexy Novel? Most importantly,