Cowboy-Author Maynard Lehman, Part III

Spring and fall roundups were the best of times. "Riding fence and checking on the cattle at calving time, but it was not all work you did in the saddle, There was hay to put up and feeding the cows in the winter, but I didn't mind that too much. I enjoyed breaking in the new saddle and work horses. When I worked at Venables, he's buy a bunch of horses and a lot of times there would be saddle horses. If it looked like there was a saddle mark on a horse, you'd grab it and ride."

Grooming them was a hit and miss practice, whenever the men had time. "We'd trim their hooves and pull a long hair and cockleburs out of their manes and tails. If we were riding in the dust, like working a herd, there would be a ring of muddy sweat around the saddle blanket that we would rub off. That was about the extent of grooming."

While Lehman worked the JK ranch he received $60 a month. After the financial crash of the Great Depression in 1929, "that changed things," he said. "Before the depression the going wage was forty to sixty dollars a month. After the crash you were lucky to find work at any wage. During the early thirties, cattle wasn't worth enough to ship to market. I broke horses for five and a ten dollars each and I broke horses for hay to feed my own horses. The JK Ranch was owned by some people who had a steel mill in Pittsburgh, and when the steel mill went broke so did the ranch in thirty-one. My  job went with it and they still owed me money, the only wages I ever lost. So from then until about nineteen-thirty-seven, it was whatever you could find  to do."

The cowboy worked two winters feeding sheep and hunting coyotes. "And I worked for twenty-five dollars a month. When I worked for CBC I got forty to forty-five a month, but they figured it by the day."

Feeding sheep was a cowboy's anathema. "My dad had a band of sheep, which is one of the reasons I left home," he said laughing. The CBC job was the only job available so he took it because it included hunting coyotes. He also managed to work cattle. The JK, located on the Tongue River, ran a thousand  head of cattle as well as Shire and Morgan horses. "We had one Shire that weighed twenty-four hundred pounds and a couple of other [heavyweights]." There were no real quarter horses. Most were range horses, Morgan and Arabian blood among them. The short-legged range horses, regardless of their bloodlines, were a cowboy's favorites. They were less likely to stumble over their own feet, and made better cutting horses, much like current quarter horses.

Lehman and his cohorts worked long hours during the depression. He worked for the CBC outfit, "and they always said, 'Sell your bedroll and buy a lantern,'" because we'd get in about ten o'clock at night and were up at four-thirty. I worked for them until they cleared the range of all their horses. They ran over two hundred thousand head in seven states, with headquarters in Rawlins, Wyoming. Most of the horse meat was shipped overseas."

The CBC was owned by the Chappel Brothers, who ran a packing plant in Rockford, Illinois, "And their horses were nothing by scrubs. They didn't have a decent horse on the range. Same way with our saddle horses." Most spreads, he said, like the LO and larger ranches, had 75-100 saddle horses available and each cowboy had seven in his string. Most of them, including the CBC, had no strings at all, and "you rode whatever you could catch, whether it was broke, wind broke, it didn't make any difference. You rode it. 

That was the general rule around most horse ranches.Spring and fall roundups were the best of times. "Riding fence and checking on the cattle at calving time, but it was not all work you did in the saddle, There was hay to put up and feeding the cows in the winter, but I didn't mind that too much. I enjoyed breaking in the new saddle and work horses. When I worked at Venables, he's buy a bunch of horses and a lot of times there would be saddle horses. If it looked like there was a saddle mark on a horse, you'd grab it and ride."

Grooming them was a hit and miss practice, whenever the men had time. "We'd trim their hooves and pull a long hair and cockleburs out of their manes and tails. If we were riding in the dust, like working a herd, there would be a ring of muddy sweat around the saddle blanket that we would rub off. That was about the extent of grooming."

While Lehman worked the JK ranch he received $60 a month. After the financial crash of the Great Depression in 1929, "that changed things," he said. "Before the depression the going wage was forty to sixty dollars a month. After the crash you were lucky to find work at any wage. During the early thirties, cattle wasn't worth enough to ship to market. I broke horses for five and a ten dollars each and I broke horses for hay to feed my own horses. 

The JK Ranch was owned by some people who had a steel mill in Pittsburgh, and when the steel mill went broke so did the ranch in thirty-one. My  job went with it and they still owed me money, the only wages I ever lost. So from then until about nineteen-thirty-seven, it was whatever you could find  to do."

The cowboy worked two winters feeding sheep and hunting coyotes. "And I worked for twenty-five dollars a month. When I worked for CBC I got forty to forty-five a month, but they figured it by the day."

Feeding sheep was a cowboy's anathema. "My dad had a band of sheep, which is one of the reasons I left home," he said laughing. The CBC job was the only job available so he took it because it included hunting coyotes. He also managed to work cattle. The JK, located on the Tongue River, ran a thousand  head of cattle as well as Shire and Morgan horses. "We had one Shire that weighed twenty-four hundred pounds and a couple of other [heavyweights]." There were no real quarter horses. Most were range horses, Morgan and Arabian blood among them. The short-legged range horses, regardless of their bloodlines, were a cowboy's favorites. They were less likely to stumble over their own feet, and made better cutting horses, much like current quarter horses.

Lehman and his cohorts worked long hours during the depression. He worked for the CBC outfit, "and they always said, 'Sell your bedroll and buy a lantern,'" because we'd get in about ten o'clock at night and were up at four-thirty. I worked for them until they cleared the range of all their horses. They ran over two hundred thousand head in seven states, with headquarters in Rawlins, Wyoming. Most of the horse meat was shipped overseas."

The CBC was owned by the Chappel Brothers, who ran a packing plant in Rockford, Illinois, "And their horses were nothing by scrubs. They didn't have a decent horse on the range. Same way with our saddle horses." Most spreads, he said, like the LO and larger ranches, had 75-100 saddle horses available and each cowboy had seven in his string. Most of them, including the CBC, had no strings at all, and "you rode whatever you could catch, whether it was broke, wind broke, it didn't make any difference. You rode it. That was the general rule around most horse ranches.

Cowboy Author, Maynard Lehman, Part II

When Maynard Lehman was 16, he and two Indian boys his age decided to rescue horses from the Sioux Reservation. “Any horse not branded or not running with its mother was called a slick. It belonged to anyone who put a brand on it. That rule didn’t hold true on the reservation because slicks belonged to the agency. Every two years they held a roundup and the white guys who ran the roundup would take any horse that looked good for themselves. The Indians didn’t like the practice any more than I did, so we decided to hold our own roundup.”

Lehman paused to envision his small roan roping horse and the forty-five slicks they rounded up. Grinning, he said the three boys had first located an abandoned spread and repaired the pasture fence. Following the roundup they corralled the horses in the pasture until they learned that members of the Indian agency were on their trail.

“It was raining and dark as the inside of a boot when we got what we could out of the pasture. By  daylight we were across the state line, but we only had 36 head.“ The horses were driven to the Lehman’s North Dakota ranch where they were sold, and the Indian teens returned to the reservation. There they were arrested and placed in the county jail. Lehman wasn’t sure whether they were charged with horse theft and never returned to find out.

That spring the young cowpoke drove 12 horses on a triple plow to break up alfalfa sod that gone to grass. He said, “When we started I had four gentle horses and eight broncs. The boss rode alongside to keep them in line while I sat on the plow with a handful of reins.  After the second day the boss turned me loose with the outfit, so I learned to drive early on.”

That winter Lehman supplemented his meager income with coyote pelts. “The first winter we had pretty good luck. We got about 35.” The ranch owner had a pack of hounds “and we put ‘em on the front bobs with a rack on it. When we’d spot some coyotes, we’d open the rack and turn ‘em loose. Then they’d run the coyotes down. Coyotes weren’t that speedy but the dogs wouldn’t kill ‘em, so you had to have a killer among the pack, which was generally a Russian wolfhound. The dogs would knock the coyotes down and play with ‘em until the killer came along and grabbed ‘em.” The coyotes were skinned and sold to fur houses for $7-$8 apiece. “Pretty good pay in those days. If you could catch one a day, you were doing good.”

Good food depended on the ranch. “When I was working at the Venables, Herm had just married and his wife couldn’t boil water. She’d put on a pot of beans half an hour before dinner and they’d rattle on your plate. At the SY Ranch I was the cook so we ate pretty good. The ranch was 45 miles from town and I cooked for the haying crew, but we didn’t have bread or butter. We had syrup and I made sourdough biscuits all the time, but we had lots of good meat and potatoes.”

With abundant cattle the cowboys didn’t waste time hunting game animals, and there were always plenty of bacon and ham. “We had purtinear every kind of canned food and we’d butcher a critter, usually a two-year old and hang ‘em up at night, propped on a wagon tongue. Leave ‘em out overnight and wrap ‘em [the following morning] in a blanket or tarp  and put ‘em in the wagon. That meat would keep for a couple of weeks. It wouldn’t spoil and the older it got, the better it was.”

Lehman rode herd accompanied by chuck wagons several times before they were fazed out of cattle roundups. “Most of the ranches were smaller by then and didn’t use one. But the JK went together with the Birchers, and some others still used them for a couple more years. He knew a man whose lower arm had been blown off during the Johnson County War. “He was the cook for the LO outfit for a time. He made sourdough biscuits that would melt in your mouth. He showed me how to make ‘em but over the years I must have forgotten, ‘cause mine don’t turn out like his.”

The best part of cowboying, he said, was the comraderie among the men. “I really enjoyed it. In fact, I never enjoyed anything I’ve ever done as well. I would have chucked any job I’ve had since to go back on the range.”

(Continued next week . . .)

Maynard Lehman, Cowboy-Author-Musician

Maynard Lehman missed the job he held in Montana in 1923. He didn’t mind the pay—$40-$60 a month—if he could hunt coyotes to supplement his income. He didn’t decide to write about his experiences as a cowboy until he was 75, but wrote more than twenty books well into his 90s.

Lehman grew up on his parent’s ranch in North Dakota, twenty miles south of the Canadian border. There his family raised and broke horses for the American Express Company in Milwaukee. His father was not “what you would call a regular cowboy,” he said, “but I guess I grew up with horses in my blood. I went to work as a cowboy away from home when I was thirteen.” Not exactly a tenderfoot, he had worked for a neighboring ranch the previous summer.

His first riding job was to help swim 300 horses across the Missouri River to Culberton, Montana. “I was a good-sized kid and could rope and ride with the best of ‘em.” Adding three years to his age, he told everyone he was sixteen. “I worked there until the horses more or less got used to the territory. Otherwise, they would have kept right on going. I then went to work for the Cantanio Ranch, downriver a ways, and I stayed there the rest of the summer.”

Cattle herds of 12,000 to 15,000 were not uncommon during the later years of the nineteenth century, but the Cantanio Ranch only ran 2,000 head, which grazed between the Red Water and Missouri River. The young cowpoke worked until the end of summer, then returned home to attend school. His classes were scheduled after his assigned chores, which included helping his father with thrashing and harvesting.

Young Maynard managed to complete eight grades in five years, but by the time he reached high school, the horseback ride was twelve miles through North Dakota snow. The weather, however, was not the reason he quit his studies. Unable to start school until after thrashing season, he couldn't catch up with the other students. “And nobody offered to help.” Frustrated and discouraged, he decided his education was over. The following January he left school in 40 degrees below zero weather to find a job.

That spring he arrived in Miles City, Montana, where he went to work for Van Venerable, a horse buyer for the Hansen Packing Plant at Butte. There he worked on horseback in the area between the Mespaw and Pumpkin Creek, which later became the first BLM Project.

“Van bought three thousand horses from the roundup and turned them out on Laney Creek on the Powder River with the rest of his herd. I worked for him until there were no more horses to bring in to ship,” Lehman said. The cowboy then worked several ranches in the Powder and Tongue River areas for the next 18 years.

He soon learned that he couldn’t keep a steady cowman’s job if he returned home each fall to help with the family harvest. “That’s when I went to work for the Quarter Circle JK Ranch and only went home for a visit.”

His fiddle was his most prized possession. He also owned “a saddle, bridle, chaps, 35-foot lariat, spurs, bedroll, extra pair of socks, and enough Bull Durham to last two weeks.” The fiddle often accompanied him, “but if it wasn’t standard equipment, it stayed behind in the bunkhouse.” From the age of 12, he played the violin and accordion for dances and later performed on the organ.

“The winter I was fourteen, I hung up my saddle and traveled with a road troupe that showed movies along the Canadian border in North Dakota and Montana. Joe Alberts traveled with us and wrestled the big bear. But when spring came, I was back in the saddle.”

(Continued next week . . . )

Now on Sale Through November 21st

The true story of a young couple hanged by greedy cattlemen to take over their land, as seen through the eyes of fictional character Susan Cameron, a single woman homesteader who leaves Missouri to find independence in Wyoming, where women have had the vote, served on juries and in public office since 1865. The following is an excerpt from the novel's first chapter:

Wyoming Territory: June 1, 1889

Susan Cameron awoke from her nap to the sound of gunfire. Bolting upright in her seat, she was surprised when two men rushed past as the train came to a jarring halt. Handguns were drawn and at the ready. Across the aisle, a small boy screamed in his mother’s arms. The woman glanced at Susan with frightened eyes as her young daughter crawled beneath the seat. 

The connecting door burst open and an aging conductor signaled for silence. “Train robbers blocked the tracks. When they come aboard, give ‘em whatever they want or somebody's liable to get killed. You men keep your guns holstered. There's women and children on board."

Heart pounding, Susan removed most of the money from her reticule. Loosening the laces of her high topped shoes, she slipped the bills into the sides of each one. Her dress was then arranged to hide her ankles.

Gunfire ceased as three men entered the coach. Their sweat-stained hats hung low over their brows, bandannas hiding all but their squinting eyes. They were dressed like photographs Susan had seen of working cowhands. 

"Hands up if you wanna live," the first man yelled in graveled voice.. 

The children screamed as their mother attempted to comfort them on the floor between the seats. She pulled their faces to her chest when one of the bandits yelled, "Shut them kids up."

Demanding that everyone stand, two of the disheveled men moved down the aisle, flipping open canvas sacks and ordering them filled. Susan got to her feet and glanced at the other passengers, whose trembling hands were held aloft. She and the young mother across the aisle were the only women occupying the coach. The other seats were filled with men of every description, including a number dressed as cowhands . She wondered if they were members of the gang. 

"Empty your pockets," the first bandit yelled.. "And you ladies open your bags." He offered his canvas sack in one hand while waving his gun with the other. Susan sighed with relief when he walked past to the middle of the coach.

"Guns, money and jewelry," the second man said as he approached Susan's seat. His body odor made her recoil as he stood opposite her. Holding her breath, she emptied the contents of her reticule onto the seat.

"No jewelry?" 

"Single women can't afford jewelry." He wasn’t much taller than Susan and she curbed the urge to grab his gun. 

"Where's the rest of your money? Maybe I oughta search ya."

"While you're doing that, I assure you the men in this coach will disarm you." Susan hoped her voice didn’t belie her bravado.

Grunting, he turned to demand cash from the young woman across the aisle. When she released her children, their screaming increased in volume until passengers' upraised hands were covering their ears. Placing the sack beneath his arm, the burly bandit stooped to reprimand the boy, who promptly bit his hand. 

"What kind of monster are you, slapping that child?" Susan cried.

"Didn't do nuthin' to the brat." Shaking his injured hand, he moved on to passengers in the next row. Amanda Turner dipped her head and smiled her gratitude.

Susan drew a sharp breath. While the bandits were collecting their bounty, she wondered what had happened to the passengers who had rushed from the train. Imaging them lying on their backs, bleeding from multiple wounds, she shook her head to dislodge the disturbing image. 

The third bandit stood guard at the front of the coach, waving his pistol while watching as passengers were relieved of their possessions. When his companions left the train, he fired a shot through the roof and ordered everyone down on the floor. Moments later they were back in their seats, watching the trio ride south through the sagebrush toward the mountains. As she took her seat, Susan heard a chorus of men’s low-voiced cursing.

The conductor mopped his perspiring brow. "Stay in your seats. We're lucky no one was hurt.." Susan yelled above the din. "Where are the missing passengers?" 

The conductor turned back at the connecting door. "Gang members, ma’am. I just watched 'em ride off with the rest of the bunch."

"Why didn't they stay and rob us?"

"I reckon they didn't want anybody to recognize ‘em. They boarded the train down the tracks in Douglas, and probably robbed the adjoining coach. They were wearing masks when they left but I recognized their clothes." He turned and grumbled his way through the connecting door between the coaches.

Susan pulled the money from her shoes and returned the bills to her reticule. No one had warned her about train robbers. What had she gotten herself into? She thought of homesteading as a peaceful venture, and knew that other single women had proved up on land of their own. Could she carve out a living on her homestead, without being robbed? Wyoming Territory had seemed a panacea for a single woman seeking independence. The territorial government had granted women suffrage more than twenty years earlier, allowing them to not only vote, but serve on juries and hold public office. Those privileges alone had brought her to the territory.

Less than an hour later, the train whistle shrieked, signaling the conductor to announce their arrival in Casper. Tired of traveling, Susan rose from her seat, lifted her reticule and made her way down the steps. Standing on a makeshift platform were more than a dozen men, most of them in dusty, wrinkled clothing that must have slept in for quite some time. Several had missing teeth and stringy, shoulder-length hair. Horrified, she drew back when one of them offered his hand. 

"Welcome to Casper, ma’am .”

No Escape: The Sweetwater Tragedy is an historical mystery-suspense novel available at: Amazon.com

English Doctor, Novelist, Medical Journalist and Nonfiction Writer

Keith Souter is a part time doctor, medical journalist, non-fiction writer and novelist. He's the current vice President of Western Fictioneers and is a member of Western Writers of America as well as  several other writers’ organizations. He also writes in four genres – westerns as Clay More, crime as Keith Moray and historicals and YA as Keith Souter. He's won prizes for his short stories, including a Fish Award in 2006 for his short historical fiction. He lives with his wife in England, "within arrow-shot of the ruins of a medieval castle."

When did you decide to write Westerns, Keith?

A few years ago I received an invitation to join a fledgling organisation called Western Fictioneers. This was based in the USA and included many prominent authors in the Western genre. The membership requirement was to have been paid for writing Western fiction, but not merely be self-published. By that time I  had published five Western novels with Robert Hale, a London based publisher of Westerns, so I joined. I must confess that I did so with some trepidation, as I was unsure whether I could actually cut it as a Western writer in the USA.

Almost immediately I heard that the Western Fictioneers were putting together an anthology of short stories by its members and everyone was invited to submit  a tale. So I threw caution to the wind and wrote a story, entitled Boot Hill Neighbors, which appeared in the anthology The Traditional West. That gave me a buzz to have a story in there with so many prize-winning authors in the genre.

Is the western written from England any different from those written in the USA? That is a difficult one to answer. When you watch a movie and you hear an actor trying to do an American accent, it may jar. But does the same thing happen with a writing style? Again, I am not sure that it does.

Of course, people may spot an inaccuracy about horses, gun lore, ranching practices and feel that it spoils the book. Yet those errors can occur just as easily in homegrown books. It all comes down to research, in my opinion. If the research is done adequately, then those jarring moments should not occur.

My own approach when writing a Western is to steep myself in research into all aspects of a locality. I study the flora, the fauna, the geography, geology and the history of the area. Then I set it against the history of the time and then I begin to build my story. And nowadays with the Internet you can research anywhere anytime. You can find newspapers of the epoch you are writing about and you can get instant pictures of the terrain. I have to say that I love this aspect of my work as a writer. I write medical and all manner of non-fiction books and I am a medical journalist, so I have a good nose for research. In medicine you have to get things right and I try to do that with everything that I write about.

I use the old writing adage – write about what you know. I think it is a piece of advice that is often misunderstood. It doesn’t just mean that you should only write about the places you are familiar with, or about the background that you come from. What it means to me, is use the things you know about and let that give your writing authenticity. I am a doctor and I use my expertise in medicine and in surgery to good effect in my stories. Virtually all of my novels have a doctor in the story somewhere and I can make things seem real. I can make wounds and operations seem plausible.

I think that I have always had a love of the old west. I was brought up with all the old Western TV shows.  You may have guessed that my choice of pen-name is a homage to Clayton Moore, the Lone Ranger. I loved those shows, along with Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, the Virginian and The High Chaparral. My father was a western aficionado and we had loads of books by Zane Grey, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour. I read voraciously, so they were all a great influence on me. Yet  I would have to single out the works of Elmore Leonard. Goodness, what a superb writer he was.

I have a couple of on-going writing projects at the moment. Firstly, I write the character of Doctor Logan Munro in the Wolf Creek series of novels for Western Fictioneers Library. These are collaborative novels featuring five or six authors at a time. Each author writes one or two chapters from the viewpoint of his or her character. Logan Munro is a Scottish doctor, as am I, so I can get authenticity in my stories from both the medical viewpoint and with my voice as a Scotsman. We have published ten of these so far, with the eleventh due out next month.

Adventures from the case book of Dr. Marcus Quigley

The other project is a series of short stories about Doctor Marcus Quigley, a qualified dentist, gambler and bounty hunter, who is on a long-time quest to find the man who murdered a friend some years ago. Here I use my knowledge of dental history, my knowledge of dice and gambling and I structure it as I do a crime novel. In fact, all of my Westerns are really mysteries. There is no ‘shoot ‘em up’ allowed in my tales. The protagonists have to solve the mystery and extricate themselves from danger using their brains rather than their brawn or their speed with a gun. And there is usually some love-interest along the way.

My latest book is due out in mid-April from high Noon Press. It is the collection of my short stories, Adventures from the Case Book of Doctor Marcus Quigley. Each story is self-contained, but linked into a greater quest.

You can learn more about Keith Souter at his website: http://www.keithsouter.co.uk 

 as well as at his Western blog – More on the Range: http://moreontherange.blogspot.co.uk

and Western Fictioneers://westernfictioneers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-doctors-bag.html

A Scottish Author Discusses Crime and Mystery Fiction

by Bill Kirton

I’m a fan of both crime fiction and mystery novels and I know that they’re the same thing. It just depends which side of the Atlantic you live. It was only when my first book was published in the USA, in 2007, that I started to wonder whether the different labels signified a difference in readers too. I still don’t know, but it’s made me think about the genre there and here. And guess what? I’ve come to no conclusions.

It all started with an American, Edgar Allan Poe, in 1841. Then a Scotsman gave it a boost with his Sherlock Holmes later in the century. Between the wars, the UK started its Golden Age, typified by cosy tales, with amateurs making the police look silly and clever old ladies riding on bikes past thatched cottages stuffed with eviscerated corpses. In the USA, Hammett, Spillane and Chandler created their private eye archetypes and started crafting the gritty, hard-boiled version. For the Brits, it was a game, a puzzle; for the Americans, it was serious.

I’m generalising, but from the start there seemed to be a contrast: on the one hand reflective, genteel stories in a rural setting; on the other violent, fast-moving accounts in the mean streets of cities. Restraint versus mayhem.

Nowadays, it’s not that simple. Leaving aside the TV series such as CSI, the preference in the States still seems to be for Private Eyes – male and female (although Ed McBain and others focus on team efforts). And the British produce police procedurals.

BUT …

Statistics seem to suggest that there’s a strong cult appreciation of the hard-boiled genre in Europe while readers in the USA gobble up cosies and Golden Age-style mysteries. Maybe staid Brits with their alleged sang-froid and taciturnity long for the brash, up-front individuality of the American Way. Maybe helter-skelter Americans, surrounded by technological expertise and the responsibilities of being the sole remaining superpower dream of sipping Earl Grey on the village green.

Or perhaps it’s the exoticism of the differences between us. The mysterious implications of the distinctions between felonies and misdemeanors (or, as we’d call them, misdemeanours), the quaint notion that an Attorney General actually has to solicit votes. Or, over here, the arcane role of the Procurator Fiscal in the Scottish system or the plusses and minuses attaching to Scotland’s ‘Not proven’ verdict, and the striking differences between police procedures north and south of the border.

If only it were that easy. No, in the end, there’s no future in trying to second guess readers. Wherever they are, you either entertain or you bore them. In a recent email, an English reader wasn’t impressed with me because, as he wrote, ‘your story disturbed me, and do readers really want to be disturbed?’ Well, I’m not sure, but do they really expect laughs in a story which exploits the fear of being buried alive? I guess I’d better work out how to turn it into an Edgar Allan Feelgood tale.

How to Become a Successful TV Journalist

by Hank Phillipi Ryan, bestselling novelist and award-winning journalist 

Here's what you need to produce a successful television story. Develop memorable characters. Build suspense. Show conflict. Tell a compelling story. Find justice. Change lives.

Here's what you need to become a successful television journalist. Never miss your deadline. Be fair. Get people to tell you things they wouldn't tell anyone else. Understand how the world works.Work with an editor. Create a brilliant and flawless product every time. Be completely devoted to your job.

As I began to write my first novel, I realized the number of parallels between writing for television and writing a mystery novel. Your primary focus is telling a great story, right? With compelling characters. And centering around an important problem. You dig for leads, track down documents, conduct intensive research, and see where the clues take you. You want the good guys to win, and bad guys to get what's coming to them. You want a satisfying and fair ending, and you want some justice. And if you're lucky, you get to change the world. 

Here's a new way of looking at your work as a journalist. And it doesn't matter if you've never written a news story in your life. 
You won't use every news story every day. Some you won't realize you need, until you do. On those days, there are journalism-based questions you can ask yourself to prod your brain into story telling--kind of a who-what-when-where-why and why-not that just might get you out of that pre-deadline panic.

Why do I Care?

If you're in a scene that seems to be flabby, or boring, or simply not compelling, there may be there's no reason to write it. Se your intention before you write the scene. What's the point of these next 200 words? Why do we care about these next 200 words? Why do we care about what's going to happen next? Figure that out. It may be that you're writing a scene that you don't need. You may be writing a scene that needs to move faster, or go a different direction, or wind up in a different place. 

Am I in the Right Place?

Not only the right place geographically, but the right place in time or space. If you've got two guys sitting around talking, or someone looking up a name on a computer, or talking on the phone, or if it's the fourth scene in a row that's taking place in an office--hmmm. Television is all about good video. Can you place your characters somewhere more cinematic? What would happen to your characters when you do?

Who said that?

Maybe you've got the wrong person talking, or using the wrong point of view. Placing the same scene in the point of view of a different person changes the perspective and as a result, shows you motivation in a different way. What's at stake in your scene? Who has the most to lose? Sometimes even thinking about a scene through a different character's eyes can open your own to different ideas.

What's the goal?

Are you at the beginning of the book where you need a big compelling hook? In the middle of the book where you need to twist and turn and keep the readers turning the pages? Or near the end, when you need to ratchet up the suspense and come up with the big finish or happy ever-after ending? Make sure you're clear on your goal. Think about what you should write to accomplish that.

(You can read more of Hank Phillipi Ryan's article as well as her  interview in The Mystery Writers.)

You can also learn more at her website: http://www.hankphillipiryan.com