Always a Character: Larry D. Sweazy on Writing the West, Part 2

Always a Character: Larry D. Sweazy on Writing the West, Part 2

The prologue of Larry D. Sweazy’s The Rattlesnake Season is a real kick in the gut. In a few short pages the protagonist Josiah Wolfe and the reader go through emotional hell together. Wolfe staggers, the reader staggers, and a (hopefully) long-running series begins.

Sweazy’s Josiah Wolfe novels feature outlaws and Texas Rangers, a small family farm and vast distances.  The central character is a single father trying to balance grief and happiness, career and family.  The novels are fast-paced, full of action, and still very much character-driven.

Picking up where we left off in Part 1, Sweazy and I continue our conversation about writing the West with an emphasis on that which he does so well — characterization.

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What comes first – character, setting, plot, image, sight, sound, or something else? And how does it grow from there? Is it the same for stories and novels?
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Larry D. Sweazy:
It’s always a character for me. I have strived over the years to focus more on plot, but character is my thing, and no matter how much I try, it always come first. I may catch a glimpse of something in my mind, a man standing over a grave, or woman staring out into the desert, and the stories comes along from there. Most of my plots are quests, and I just follow on as the writer and take down notes on the journey and pass them onto the reader. Both aspects are important, but I think character comes more naturally to me.

It’s the same for both short stories and novels for me. Though some times with a short story the title comes along first. When I first started writing seriously, I wrote a lot of short stories, and titles were really important for the start. I don’t write as many short stories as I used to, but I still keep a list of titles that pop into my mind.

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The prologue of The Rattlesnake Season is very powerful.

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Larry D. Sweazy: Thanks, I’m glad you liked the prologue of The Rattlesnake Season. I wanted the prologue to introduce Josiah Wolfe in a completely different way, and I also wanted the reader to know up front that my novels are an emotional journey, as well as a physical one.
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Where’d the character Josiah Wolfe come from?

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Larry D. Sweazy:
The origin of Josiah Wolfe is a little interesting, I think. I wrote a modern day short story, “The Promotion”, that was published in the anthology Texas Rangers in 2004. That story featured a main character, Samuel “Red” Wolfe, who was a Texas Ranger, who had recently lost his young son in an accident, and wanted to solve one last case before taking a promotion and moving away from the town his son was buried in. To my great surprise, the story won the WWA (Western Writers of America) Spur award, and that really gave me the confidence to continue to write about Texas Rangers. But even before the award came along, I was already thinking of writing a family saga set in Texas with the main character being a Texas Ranger in each of their appropriate generations. It was a big idea, and one that I’m still thinking about. Anyway, I wrote another short story, “Rattlesnakes and Skunks,” at the start of the Frontier Battalion, that featured Josiah Wolfe, Samuel “Red” Wolfe’s great, great, grandfather. I published that story, and decided to expand it into a novel, The Rattlesnake Season.

I had the advantage of looking back in time from Red Wolfe’s perspective and lineage, to find Josiah and his story. I’m currently writing the fourth book in the Josiah Wolfe series, The Cougar’s Prey, and I’m not sure where Josiah’s story will end. That’s up to the readers, and my publisher, of course. I still have ideas for other Wolfe generation stories, one set in the Depression in the Bonnie and Clyde days, and another in the fifties, when oil became king in Texas. I think the historical backdrops of these periods of time offer a lot of opportunities to mine for the saga I’d like to write.

But back to Josiah Wolfe, and your question about development and growth over a series. There’s no question that Josiah starts the series a broken man, and ends up, after the first novel, with a little more hope and knowledge about life than he started with. He has a young son to raise all by himself, while still trying to carve out a career. A very modern problem, with solutions, that, I hope will ring true with today’s readers. So there are those challenges to continue to face in the upcoming books, and Josiah still must prove himself as a Ranger. He has face the historical events coming his way, which will affect how he reacts.

And then there’s the question about his personal life. Will he start another family? Have a relationship with one of the continuing female characters, or not? My readers seem very invested in Josiah’s personal life, so there is plenty of room there to explore that, as well as the supporting cast I have created, most notably, Josiah’s partner, Scrap Elliot. Scrap is young, brash, mouthy, and nearly opposite of Josiah in most every way. I wanted to explore their partnership from the very beginning, so as the books progress, so does their relationship. I do look at a long arc interweaved with historical events that dictate a response from all of my characters, not just Josiah.
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Who are you reading these days? Whose work excites you?
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Larry D. Sweazy:
At the moment, I’m reading Tana French’s Into the Woods, a moody police procedural set in Ireland. I like the writing a lot. I have a few Richard Matheson Westerns on my TBR (to be read) stack to get to. Matheson is a writer I admire who writes in multiple genre. I already mentioned a few Western writers, Estleman, Conley, etc. whose work I read as soon as they hit the bookshelves, but I like to read outside the genre, too. Thomas H. Cook’s Breakheart Hill is one of my favorite novels. I’m a huge fan of the Hap and Leonard books by Joe R. Lansdale. These are action-packed, laugh-out-loud books that never fail to satisfy me as a reader. The list is really long. I’ll forget someone, but I range from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game to John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and everything in between, go figure…
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What’s next for you?

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Larry D. Sweazy: I’m finishing up Josiah Wolfe #4, The Cougar’s Prey. It’s due at the end of November. Beyond that, I’m not sure. We’ll see where we stand after that, whether Berkley wants more Josiah Wolfe novels, or not. I have a few things in the works outside of the Western genre, and a few in, so it’s really hard to say. Regardless of what happens, business-wise, one thing is for sure: I’ll be sitting at my desk writing something. I can’t imagine doing anything else.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.  He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  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.

One thought on “Always a Character: Larry D. Sweazy on Writing the West, Part 2

  1. Thanks for the fine interview with Larry Sweazy. He's a thoughtful writer who puts a lot into his writing, and it shows. His Josiah Wolfe novels have been a high-point of my reading this past year and I look forward to reading forthcoming volumes in the series.

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