The Training Ground

Western fiction has always been the training ground for New York editors who had higher aspirations. Editing a western line was the lowest rung on the publishing ladder.

For years and years, my editors were all young people, mostly college grads in their early twenties, wanting to break into publishing.

They were talented young people, little interested in the West, but very interested in buying good stories, with compelling storylines. This was exactly what their superiors wanted. Westerns were major sellers, and their success was directly the result of strong story.

These young people didn't care about elegance of language, literary conventions, or anything of that sort. They just wanted stories that would hook a male reader and hold him.

The senior editing staff also believed that it would be difficult to harm a western; bad editing wouldn't damage a throwaway product. So there was little risk in loosing novices wielding the blue pencil on manuscripts. I experienced plenty of dubious editing, and looking back, wish I had resisted more of it. But the whole idea of writing pulp western stories was to get on with it and not fret about mauled stories; just write the next, and don't complain. That would lead to more contracts.

Not many of those youngsters ascended the ranks; they have mostly vanished from the publishing world. In retrospect, I think publishers should have kept skilled editors for their western lines and apprenticed novices to senior editors in a variety of genres and fields.