BookLife

“Anytime you write in a long-established genre, the challenge is to find themes and plots that haven’t been done a thousand times already, and characters who are not caricatures,” said Western novelist Cameron Judd.  “When you sense you are achieving those goals the writing is fun.”

Cameron Judd is the author of more than 30 novels written under his own name and pseudonyms.  He got his start in 1980, on a lark, and has referred to himself elsewhere as a sort of unintentional novelist.  Yet, there is nothing unintentional about his historical novels set in Tennessee and traditional Westerns.  The plotting is intricate and intense and the characterization rich.

To put it poker terms: Cameron Judd writes with a cool hand, but he most definitely isn’t bluffing.

I first met Cameron Judd in 2005 at the Kentucky Book Fair where he was promoting the re-release of his historical novel, Boone.  I was struck with how simultaneously kind and no-nonsense he was as an interviewee, which shouldn’t have surprised me.  He brought the best of the Tennessee mountains into the room with him.

I discovered Judd’s novels at a time when a number of them had gone out of print.  I photocopied all his OOP titles so I could study how they were put together.  (Can’t write in library books and I had a lot of notes to make!)   When St. Martin’s began re-releasing Judd’s back catalogue in two-for-one editions, I re-read them all and discovered that they hold up exceedingly well to a second read.

Below, Judd and I talk about going freelance, finding something new to write, and otherwise writing the West.

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And what is the biggest challenge in writing the West?

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Cameron Judd:  There have been so many western stories written over many decades that it is easy to be repetitive in both plot events and character types.  A few years ago I observed a few writers essentially trying to rewrite Lonesome Dove over and over again.  Not a good idea.

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 What sort of Westerns do you write, and what are they key elements?

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Cameron Judd:  My westerns tend to be what are usually called “traditional” westerns.  The best comparison I can come up with is that they are compatible with the kind of westerns Louis L’Amour used to write.  Not to try to compare myself with him … but people who enjoyed his books tend to like mine as well.  A theme that often seems to arise in my novels is that of unresolved issues of the past arising in the later life of a character or characters, and demanding to be reckoned with before that character can move on.

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 Early in your career you were pegged by Bantam to be the heir to Louis L’Amour. Was this a blessing or a curse? What did you learn from L’Amour about writing in the genre? In what ways are you significantly different?

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Cameron Judd:  I never perceived Bantam as trying to lay that mantle on my shoulders, actually … and publishers can’t manufacture that kind of thing anyway.  If they could there would be a hundred Louis L’Amour replacements out there already.  Every author in the frontier/western area during that period heard the “next Louis L’Amour” thing all the time.  The late Don Coldsmith used to tell people that, “No, I’m not the next Louis L’Amour.  I’m the first Don Coldsmith.”

I think the lesson L’Amour’s writing has to teach is to keep the story in the forefront, and make your leading character someone the reader would want to be like, at least in his own imagination.  And don’t slowly slide into the story; jump in with both feet from the very beginning. 

One way I differ from L’Amour is that I feel free in my stories to invent communities, towns, counties, etc., that did not exist in history.  L’Amour always claimed to use only authentic locales, etc., though frankly I don’t believe that was always true. By putting so much emphasis on the “historical accuracy” of his stories, he opened himself to criticism when he made mistakes, and all authors make some mistakes from time to time. 

Another difference: I don’t write nearly as much in first person as L’Amour did.  A third difference: I don’t wear a cowboy hat.  I write about western characters, but don’t try to be one myself, because I’m not.  I’m a Tennessee guy.

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 One difference I see between you and L’Amour is that you books are more intricately plotted. How do you go about building a plot?

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Cameron Judd:  Building a plot is mostly playing a game of “what if?” for a few hundred pages.  I try to think out the logical possible actions a character might take in this or that situation, and see which one seems the most promising for building a story. That sets up a new situation, and the process repeats. But it’s also important to remember that, in the real world, people often don’t do the most logical thing. They get blinded by emotions, ambitions, temptations … and the characters in a story can do the same.

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 How have your novels and/or your approach to writing them changed over the years?

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Cameron Judd:  I’ve become more confident and natural in my own writing style over the years.  And I’m more prone now to introduce unusual elements into my stories … elements you don’t necessarily expect to find in a western story in the way you expect to find saloons and ranches and gunfighters and railroads and saddles, etc.  I’ve had stories featuring unexpected things such as traveling “ghost shows,” an embalmer who figures out the secrets of Egyptian mummification and applies them to the preservation of slain outlaws he can then display for profit, and a murderer who actually manages to get himself killed by the first man he murdered years before.  I’ll not say here how that comes about.

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 You recently quit your day job. Has being a full-time writer changed things much for you?

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Cameron Judd:  Definitely. Most dramatically it changed things on the personal level for me. I was in a job that I had held for nine years and which at one time had been a job in which I fit quite well. That changed over the years and I began living in dread of going to work every day. Leaving that behind was quite important to my mental and physical health. Of course it did involve leaving behind my monthly paycheck, but on the other hand I now have more time for writing.

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What are you working on now, and what’s next?

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Cameron Judd:  I’m completing a traditional western called Spurlock, a story involving a home invasion in the old West. Next is a frontier historical novel, The Long Hunt, set on the frontier of Tennessee and Kentucky in the late 1700s. It will be published in 2011 by Signet.

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Which of your books is a good one to start with?

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Cameron Judd:  Mr. Littlejohn is a good choice, as is Timber Creek or The Hanging at Leadville, the latter being kind of a mystery story with a western setting.  My most recent title, Outlaw Train, is a fun read.  Among my historical novels I suggest The Shadow Warriors or The Overmountain Men, both of those being the first novels of trilogies.

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

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Cameron Judd:  Good writing is good writing regardless of genre. Writers should read many different kinds of stories, particularly those by authors of good reputation as storytellers. For western storytelling, I recommend reading Loren D. Estleman. For more general storytelling, I recommend Mark Twain, John Grisham and Charles Dickens. Stephen King’s On Writing is great … a high-quality course in writing in a small, fun package.

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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.