When I Can Hear Voices: Thomas Cobb on Writing the West

Raised in the Arizona desert, Thomas Cobb now lives “back East” where writes anti-romantic stories set in the West.  He is the author of the short story collection Acts of Contrition and the novels Crazy Heart and Shavetail

There is a twenty-plus year gap between his first and second novels.  The sharp edges of his prose reflect great care and precision. There’s also a certain stubbornness throughout his work – a stubbornness in his characters and in his desire to get the prose just right

The recent Shavetail tells the story of an under-aged teenager, Ned Thorne, who has lied his way into the army in order to escape his past and finds himself on a suicide mission of revenge, rescue, and misguided atonement. 

The novel’s title refers to Thorne.  A shavetail is the not entirely complimentary army slang for “a willful, untrained mule.”

The story of Bad Blake, the worn-thin country singer protagonist of Crazy Heart, was made famous by Jeff Bridges’ Academy Award winning performance in the 2009 film adaptation.  (The best part of the movie, if you ask me, is that it got the book back in print!)

The iconic satirist from Texas, Kinky Friedman, was not kidding when he said, “Crazy Heart is a beautiful book… The characters are cut cleanly out of America–the roadside West, the dance halls and beer joints, the occasional big concert, Houston, Nashville, Southern California, and the endless, eternal hotel rooms that are as close to home as any country singer ever gets… Bad Blake is a man you will not soon forget.”

Thomas Cobb is the sort of writer whose stories will make your ears ring.  Yes, they’re that good. 

Below, Cobb and I talk about the characterization at the heart of all stories, about research, and about why we are who we are.

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What do you enjoy about writing the West?

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Thomas Cobb:  The West, specifically the Sonoran desert, is home to me, even though I no longer live there, and don’t expect to move back there.  It’s a special landscape for me that strikes some deep sympathetic chord.  In a way, writing about the west is living in the west while I’m working.  Though I’m a proud member of Western Writers of America, I don’t really consider myself a western writer, as much as I consider myself a writer who often writes about the west.
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And what is the biggest challenge in writing the West?
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Thomas Cobb:  In writing about the historical west, it’s getting the history right.  There’s the actual history and the mythic history and they get pretty convoluted.  I side with the actual more than the mythic, though I’m not sure they can be completely separated.  No matter how good a John Ford western is, as soon as we see the Cavalry chasing Apaches across Monument Valley, all of the credibility of the story is gone for me.  I’m anti-romantic in my writing, especially when it comes to my own romanticism.
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Has your approach to writing fiction changed over the years?
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Thomas Cobb:  Well, I hope I’ve learned some things.  Crazy Heart is essentially a long character study.  Shavetail is a multi-layered novel that is not really dominated by one of the characters.  I like to think that in the intervening twenty or so years, I learned to plot and structure in a way I didn’t understand in Crazy Heart.  I spent a lot of time on Crazy Heart trying to get the music right, researching what I didn’t know.  That hasn’t changed.  I spent an enormous (probably too much) time researching Shavetail.  I don’t think writing what you know is nearly as good an idea as knowing what you write.
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Your novels are simultaneously character-driven, plot-driven, and setting-driven…  which makes me wonder what comes first?

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Thomas Cobb:
  Character always comes first.  Novels are chronicles of character if they’re any good.  I know that the real process of writing a novel has begun in earnest when I can hear the voices of the characters in my head.  If that doesn’t happen, the novel doesn’t happen.  Characters create plots.  If you pay attention to the characters, they’ll take care of the plot pretty much for you, though you will still have to do some significant engineering.  I do spend a fair amount of time on setting.  Characters live in the physical world and are in many ways shaped by it.  I have a fundamental belief in evolution that makes me believe we are who we are in large part because of our surroundings. 
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What do short stories allow you to do that novels don’t?
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Thomas Cobb:  Finish before dinner.  I don’t write many short stories because when you finish one, you have to come up with another one.  With novels, that’s a process that takes place over months or even years.  With short stories, it’s days or weeks.  I like to take my time and not always be projecting into some uncertain future.

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What can a writer who doesn’t usually read Westerns learn from reading within the genre?

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Thomas Cobb:  First, that there are good writers, serious writers, who write about the West.  Once Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy were anomalies, because they wrote anti-romantic westerns.   They’re less so now.  They showed a lot of us that the Western is a viable form.  Aside from history, western novels also teach us that people are a combination of basic human traits that carry down through the generations and specific responses to specific situations.  I don’t believe, though, that good westerns show that carrying loaded fire arms is a noble or safe practice.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.