Category Archives: First Draft Blog

Capturing the Thrills

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security cameras, street corner

(photo: takomabibelot, creative commons license)

Among the workshops at the Liberty States Fiction Writers’ annual conference last weekend were two directed specifically to writers—and readers—of thrillers, led by highly-rated author Melinda Leigh and featuring Dan Mayland (espionage) and Ben Lieberman (financial thrillers). The first was on “Technical Difficulties”—and the three experts described how the ubiquity of cell phones (especially their GPS capabilities), public and private security cameras, and increasingly sophisticated facial recognition software make it harder and harder for urban bad-guys to evade discovery. (Here’s an example of the many websites and articles focused on defeating facial recognition technology.) While security and cell phone cameras were key to finding the Boston Marathon bombers, they are a black hole for story ideas, if authors want to write an accurate and believable modern-day thriller or crime story.

Similarly, a photo posted on social media may well have embedded geotags that reveal where it was taken—at the crime scene, at the perpetrator’s home, at his/her favorite hangout. This explains, I think, why so many mysteries are set in past decades—even centuries—or in small towns, where such capabilities don’t impose plotting impossibilities for their creators. I’ve had to let a protagonist’s phone battery run out, for example—imperfect, maybe, but we’ve all done it.

Understanding how such technology works, in order to construct a plausible 2015 plot requires research, and, like many authors, I’ve confessed to really loving the research I do for my books. These presenters’ second workshop—“The Thrill of Thrillers”—discussed restraining the impulse to put all that research in the actual book. Technothrillers (of the Tom Clancy/Frederick Forsyth/Michael Crichton variety, to which I am addicted ) are an exception. Too much background research slows readers down, and when they’re skipping over as much as they’re reading, face it, the thrill is gone!

Another advantage of leaving any type of too-detailed information out is, of course, that the reader can imagine a technology (likewise torture) that is more vivid, scary, or powerful (or gruesome) than the author can. You need just enough to jump-start their own creativity.

A side issue: I noticed how Amazon’s author pages for Leigh, Mayland, and Lieberman provide “Customers also bought books by . . .” information, and there is almost 100% gender concordance between the authors’ gender and that of the other authors customers reportedly purchased. Is that true? I like books by men AND women, if they are well done, and most other readers I know are the same. So, do these lists reflect real reader preferences, or just Amazon’s marketing assumption? Signed, Wondering . . . See this related post.

A Cozy Arrangement

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Murder, She Read, is a research report from Nielsen Book Research (a copy will set you back $1,500), on the book-buying preferences and habits of some 6000 nationally representative U.S. mystery/crime readers. The researchers defined “mystery/crime” as

a genre of fiction typically focused on the investigation of a crime. Mystery fiction is often used as a synonym for detective fiction or crime fiction—in other words, a novel or short story in which a detective (either professional or amateur) investigates and solves a crime mystery.

This is a more restrictive definition than most, but a lot of books fit it. Highlights of the study results:

  • cat reading

    (photo: raider of gin, creative commons license)

    Most “mystery” readers (70%) are female

  • The biggest age group of mystery readers (28%) comprises people 65 and older, with almost half of mystery readers 55 and older and
  • Many mystery readers are not actually buying their books; they’re getting them free.

The gender and age concentrations revealed come as no surprise. Month after month, I see lists of the mysteries agents and publishers are signing. Their decisions are creating and reinforcing this important audience, and its dominance is an effect of the choices they make.

I certainly don’t want to suggest there shouldn’t be books geared to the older female demographic, but mysteries that involve clever kitties, cutesy shops, knitting patterns, and recipes not only succeed in appealing to one specific group but also fail to develop new communities of interest.

Authors can—and do—write novels that appeal to both men and women. And many women readers devour books by Michael Connelly, Tana French, Ian Rankin, and Laura Lippman just as much as men do. However, a focus on novels with marketing appeal to only one segment of the population (and a low- or non-paying one at that) may prove counterproductive in the long run. I hope authors and publishers read the Nielsen findings as a call to reach out to tomorrow’s audiences—readers who will be as loyal and enthusiastic as the older woman audience is today.

Related articles

Nobel Laureates in Literature: Women’s Division

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woman writing

(photo: Mike Licht, Creative Commons License)

In the past 111 years, only 13 women have received Nobel awards for literature. This Infographic lists them (and, if you’re like me, many still slumber in obscurity) and may make us hope that Virginia Woolf was wrong when she said, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

But when you look at the whole list, many of the men are not well known, either. The male winners the year previous to the first five female winners were, after all: Rudolph Christoph Eucken, George Bernard Shaw (heard of him!), Henri Bergson, Roger Martin du Gard, and Johannes Vilhelm Jensen.

And women still choose to obscure their gender with initials or pseudonyms. Why they/we do it! This handy tool lets you paste your text and assess whether it comes off as more “male” or “female.” I just used it on two short stories—one from a mostly male point of view (judged by the tool as “weakly male”) and one from a female point of view (“weakly female”). Hmm. Creators of the tool say “weakness” suggests the writer “could be European.” Not quite sure how to interpret that!

Easy-to-Read?

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Goodnight Moon, Children's book

(photo: wikipedia.org)

Not just authors, but most of us often have to communicate in writing, whether in reports for the office or papers for school or other purposes. But, how readable are our efforts? What readability standard should we strive for? Shane Snow’s recent Contently article began by saying, “Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers. After running some nerdy reading level stats, I now respect him even more.”

Leaving aside the “world’s greatest” issue, certainly Hemingway is considered one of the most direct and uncluttered authors of the 20th century. This is an assertion that can be tested using the various scales developed to measure the readability of texts. How does he stack up? Snow ran The Old Man and the Sea through one of the most-used readability tools, the Flesch-Kincaid index, and Hemingway’s classic was pegged at a fourth-grade reading level.

He reports results of similar analyses of a number famous authors’ works–both fiction and nonfiction. Among fiction writers, Hemingway’s effort was at the low end of the scale, only slightly less demanding (in terms of readability) than the writing of Cormac McCarthy. Most demanding was Michael Crichton’s work, which scored at almost grade 9. So even the “most challenging” of the 20 or so fiction authors tested required less than a high school education. That isn’t to say that the content of these works was suitable for children in those grades. Just because the words and sentence structure are simple, the meaning may not be.

Test your own work here: Just cut and paste your text into the window and instantly find out how it scores on six different readability measures. (This piece, which seems pretty straightforward to me, tests out at almost the ninth-grade level.)

I ran a short story I’m working on through the tests, and it came out at grade 6.1, approximately the difficulty of the work of Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer. In another popular measure—the Flesch-Kincaid “Reading Ease” score—my story had a score of 74.2, similar to the work of Dan Brown (holding my tongue), J.K. Rowling’s 7th Harry Potter book, John Grisham, and James Patterson, but easier than work by Tolstoy and David Foster Wallace. In this particular test, Hemingway and McCarthy are both more “readable” than Goodnight Moon.

The most recent national studies, which are now more than a decade old, suggest the average American reads at about an eighth grade level. Inexperienced or academic writers shoot themselves in the foot when they make their writing too complex in an effort to appear more intelligent. This strategy fails miserably, according to the results of experiments published a decade ago and summarized here.

And, even if people can read at a higher than eighth grade level, do they want to? My theory about the booming popularity of “young adult” fiction is that people like it because it’s easy to read. They don’t want to have to slog through a lot of complicated vocab and syntax. Looks like Hemingway was onto something!

“Come in, Sit down . . .

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cafe at night

(photo: wikimedia commons)

. . . Let me tell you a story.”

Like the author of this recent Gawker post about novels with compelling opening sentences, which includes many relatively recent books, I was inspired by Joe Fassler’s 2013 Atlantic interview with Stephen King, in which King talked about the first lines of his books and why those first words are so important. His all-time favorite opener, from Needful Things: “You’ve been here before.” King says he spends weeks, months—years sometimes—getting them exactly right, so remembers them well: “They were a doorway I went through.”

Analyzing King’s Approach
The opening line of King’s 11/22/63 is “I’ve never been what you’d call a crying man,” and the reader immediately and correctly anticipates a fair amount of crying before the last page is turned. The opening line of It: “The terror that would not end for another 28 years, if it ever did, began so far as I can know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

Fassler’s interview made me think, “He’s a big success, right? Maybe I can learn something here.”

So I visited my library and pulled all the King books they had on hand—18 different novels. I sat at a table and wrote out the first few sentences of each. (If you’ve never done this, try handwriting passages from a book you admire. For some reason, possibly in sync with research on how people learn, the act of hand-copying a text puts you—well, me, anyway—in the author’s mindframe much more directly and powerfully than reading the same words or typing them out.)

What the First Lines Contain
What I found out by doing this is that the opening sentences of many Stephen King novels have certain characteristics in common. They:

  1. Put the reader in a precise location and time
  2. Identify the protagonist, usually by name
  3. Address the reader directly – “you”
  4. Use simple language and quotidian details, which create an easy tone (nice rhythm, too)
  5. Include something to provoke a vague anxiety
  6. Put the protagonist’s experience in a larger context
  7. In some way invite the reader to “sit and listen to a story.”

Three Examples
Recently I read King’s Mr. Mercedes (2014), which does 2, 4, 5, 6 and to some extent 1—at least he gets the reader into the geographic and temporal ballpark:
“Augie Odenkirk (2) had a 1997 Datsun that still ran well in spite of high mileage (1-ish), but gas was expensive, especially for a man with no job (4, 6), and City Center was on the far side of town (1-ish), so he decided to take the last bus of the night (5).”

And, another example, from The Tommyknockers (1987):
“For want of a nail the kingdom was lost, that’s how the catechism goes when you boil it down (5). In the end, you can boil everything down to something similar—or so Roberta Anderson thought much later on (2, 3). It’s either all an accident . . . or all fate (6). Anderson literally stumbled over her destiny in the small town of Haven, Maine, on June 21, 1988(1, 4). That stumble was the root of the matter; all the rest was nothing but history (7).”

A look back at King’s very first novel, Carrie (1974) shows he used these methods from the start, though his technique has grown in subtlety and creativity over time. Carrie begins:
“News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966 (1):
“Rain of Stones Reported
“It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th (4). The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs. Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25 (4). Mrs. White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta (2).
“Mrs. White could not be reached for comment (5).”

These examples invite the reader in like a cafe’s bright lights as dark is coming on. They say, “Sit down, listen, let me tell you about this.” I wouldn’t describe King’s approach as a “formula,” because his books begin in such different ways, but rather a discipline. Early on, he gives readers a clear sense of “who, what, when, and where,” and the rest of the book provides the “why.”

In My Own Writing

So what did I learn from this exercise? I rewrote the beginning scenes of my two novels with these thoughts in mind, making several tries of it, and was sure to name the books’ protagonists and place them precisely in time and location, use simple language, and forecast the larger context of the action. And I’m happier with the result. We’ll see what comes of it.

If you have some King sitting on your bookshelf and look for these 7 points, I’d be interested to know what you find.

Famous First Lines

  • A list emphasizing the classics, starting with Herman Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.”
  • Writers reveal their favorite first lines in this list.

Looking for Something Good to Read?

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reading

(photo: Nico Cavallotto, Creative Commons)

The stack of books I’m excited to read in 2015 is already pretty high, and to make room, sorted the books of 2014—keep, donate, donate, keep, keep. Handling them again and in writing last week’s post on the 11 very best, I couldn’t help thinking how many more really good ones there were! All 22 **** books of the past year.

Mysteries & Thrillers

  • Sandrine’s Case by Thomas H. Cook – originally I gave this 3 stars, but when I couldn’t stop thinking about it, slapped on a fourth
  • The Golden Hour by Todd Moss—believable political thriller, awesome first novel
  • Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin—an always-satisfying outing with Edinburgh’s Inspector John Rebus
  • Mystery Girl by David Gordon—a wacky Hollywood tale with oddball characters and LOL dialog
  • The Cottoncrest Curse by Michael H. Rubin—I met Rubin, so bought his book about late-1800s murders on a Louisiana plantation. So glad I did!
  • Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger—won all the big mystery world prizes in 2013
  • Spycraft by Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, and Henry Robert Schlesinger—non-fiction, describing the technologies of espionage (and avoiding recent scandals entirely)
  • The Reversal by Michael Connelly—Harry Bosch AND Mickey Haller
  • The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty—really makes his Belfast-during-the-Troubles setting work for him

Other Fiction

 Biography, History, Politics

Great Places

  • The White Rock by Hugh Thomson—adventurers still discovering lost Inca outposts
  • The Danube by Nick Thorpe—from the Black Sea to the river’s origins in Germany
  • The New York Nobody Knows by William B. Helmreich—this sociologist walked more than 6000 miles of NYC streets and talked to everybody

 Stephen King

book, imagination

(Cinzia A. Rizzo, flickr.com, CC license)

Best Reads of 2014

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2015-01-04 10.28.26This is the season when the lists of “Best Books” published in the previous year sprout like mushrooms after a wet week, and the Wall Street Journal has produced a handy consolidated list in different categories. (Scrolling down that web page I encountered the surprising revelation that Lena Dunham is “friend” of the WSJ.) Other lists take into account that people actually read books in years other than the one in which they are published, and this is one of those. I read and listened to 56 books last year, and here are the 11 very best: Links below are to my full reviews.

The Cowboy and the Cossack by Clair Huffaker – I hope I’ve worn you down sufficiently in my praise of this novel to make you give up and read it for yourself. An adventure tale when life was, if not without complexity, less ambiguous. As refreshing for today’s reader as cool morning air after a sleepless night in a smoke-filled room.

Down by the River by Charles Bowden – this nonfiction book describes the failings of the U.S. War on Drugs and the consequent destruction of Mexican society. In the 12 years since the book was written, the situation has worsened. Bowden died last summer, and my review includes links to remarkable reminiscences about his work and fearless character.

Miracle Boy and Other Stories by Pinckney Benedict – a collection of amazing short stories by an author whom I met recently at a celebration for his former teacher, Joyce Carol Oates. (Got his autograph, too.) Benedict’s viewfinder is just one click away from reality as you see it. Unforgettable.

Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling – caught up in Monuments Men fever, I found this novel hit just the right note of adventure story, intellectual interest, and writing style. A bit of a sleeper.

His Excellency George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis – historian Ellis set out to write a readable, not over-long biography of Washington and for the first time succeeded in making him interesting—no, fascinating—to me.

The Fragrant Harbor by Vida Chu – I would read more poetry if it were as satisfying as the work in this slim volume. Poems to revisit and savor.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris – a novelization of the Dreyfus case, in which anti-Semitism ran amok in late 19th c. France. I never could keep straight what this case was all about. I’ve got it now.

The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor – having spent so much time in Upper Canada (Ontario), I was captivated by historian Taylor’s descriptions of the motivations and tactics of people on both sides of the St. Lawrence. A much more interesting war than you probably think (!).

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy – To preserve my mental health, I allow myself only one Cormac McCarthy novel per year, given his bleak plots and searing (here’s a case when that word legitimately applies) writing style. Wouldn’t have missed it.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – Some readers found this novel hard to follow. I listened to it, which can make continuity problems even more difficult, but had no trouble. A contemplation on “how things might have been different,” from the perspective of a hall of mirrors. The author must have cornered her local market in post-it notes.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – OK, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has received mixed reactions, and it’s the only Big Book on this list (Big also in terms of its 775 pages). I’ve read and liked her other books, and I liked this one a lot. Especially Boris. See if you don’t end up speaking with a Russian accent . . .

Off to a great reading start in 2015, with four new book reviews to post soon.

Comfortable Ambiguity

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keyhole, shoes, Cristian Iohan Ștefănescu

(photo: Cristian Iohan Ștefănescu, Creative Commons license)

A novel should leave “a little room for the reader to interpret, to bring in his or her own perceptions and conceptions,” says Celeste Ng in a recent Glimmer Train essay. Ng’s novel, Everything I Never Told You is one of NPR’s “Great Reads” for 2014 and has been selected by the Amazon editors as the #1 book of the year. Ng’s essay suggests we can look through the keyhole, we can see the pink velvet shoes, but we may never know everything about them, so we fill in the rest of the story to our own pasts, preconceptions, and predilections.

In her “literary thriller,” Ng artfully leaves room for interpretation of the events leading to the disappearance of a family’s daughter. A familiar premise, but “If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now,” says Alexander Chee in the New York Times, as she turns “the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of the secrets the family members won’t share.”

There’s a difference between the deliberate ambiguity Ng advocates—“a space, however small, for the reader to fit into the piece”—and simple confusion. The challenge is to walk the tightrope between answering every question and leaving out important information about character, motivation, or even plot that the reader needs in order to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. As a writer of mystery and thriller stories myself, I am constantly aware of that tightrope and the expectations of readers in this genre.

Discomfort with ambiguity leads to such devices as the flash-forward epilogue “that tells you exactly where everyone ends up and what everything means.” This was my one quibble with the otherwise lovely novel All the Light We Cannot See. Movies do this, too. In general, I find this trick disappointing, because by the time I reach the end of a book or compelling movie, I have a rich array of ideas about the potential future lives of the characters, and the novelist/moviemaker can pick only one of these.

Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Preoccupation with, you could say, “closure,” may not be simply a response to ambiguity per se, Ng proposes, “but to ambiguity done badly.” If ambiguity results from the writer’s own indecision, she says, then it often doesn’t work. If the writer is relying on readers to sort out the evidence and arrive at a conclusion, “the reader senses that crucial pieces are missing and ends up confused.” When the writer knows how the situation resolves, but simply chooses not to say, like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, “a modest monument to the bold pursuit of ambiguity,” said poet Brad Leithauser. The ambiguity in that novel has sparked 116 years of speculation, a level of interest that likely wouldn’t have occurred, had James made it perfectly clear whether the governess was delusional.

In the batch of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine stories I reviewed 12/12/14 was one by Joyce Carol Oates (“Equatorial”) in which the timid wife of a much-married man grows to believe he’s trying to kill her. Evidence mounts that he might want to be rid of her. He seems, a time or two, to try. But then he injures himself and the imbalance in physical strength between them tips slightly in her direction. She takes a risk to further even the odds. The story ends as the two sides of this interpersonal equation teeter on the brink. Will he succeed, or will she? The ending is classically ambiguous, and Oates has given sufficient information for readers to plausibly choose either ending.

Everything I Never Told You ends without telling exactly what happens to its characters outside the bounds of the book, and readers ask Ng about them. At first such questions made her worry she’d left out some key bit of information, but then she realized that readers believe they know the characters and are firmly convinced about what happens to them. What they wanted from Ng was “to confirm what ‘really’ happened—because they wanted to be right!—but all of them were already positive that they knew.”

It is these readers’ “intense and comfortable certainty” that shows she left sufficient ambiguity for readers to take hold and give the story their own meaning. “The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.”

See how she does it!

“Where the West (Still) Begins”

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Lest you think Fort Worth has nothing more to offer than cowboy culture and steak, here’s the lowdown on its Culture, Characters, and Community!

A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington, Amon Carter Museum

A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington (wikimedia.org)

Culture

Fort Worth’s Cultural District includes three art museums notable for their architecture as well as their art. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, designed by Philip Johnson, was founded to display Carter’s collection of pieces by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.

Boatmen on the MIssouri, George Caleb Bingham

Boatmen on the Missouri, G. C. Bingham (wikimedia)

It now houses more than 200,000 objects, many of which are classics. They run the gamut of American artists and include a newly acquired full-length portrait of actor Edwin Booth by John Singer Sargent. A special exhibit on the work of George Caleb Bingham (through 1/18/15), documenting 1800s life on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers uses modern Xray techniques to discover how these iconic paintings were assembled.

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Louis I. Kahn

Kimbell Art Museum (wikimedia)

The adjacent Kimbell Art Museum comprises two buildings—one with beautifully vaulted spaces designed by Louis I. Kahn, which opened in 1972, and the other a Renzo Piano-designed pavilion used for special exhibitions. Currently on view in the latter is a popular showing of Impressionist portraits. There simply wasn’t time to visit the visually striking Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth or much of the Will Rogers Memorial Center.

Bass Performance Hall, Fort WorthThe downtown has preserved some of its rich architecture, including an impressive collection of Art Deco buildings. Helpful plaques explain many of these buildings’ history and interesting design elements. However, the three-dimensional exterior of downtown’s  Bass Performance Hall has to be the most jaw-dropping, with the angels’ trumpets extending waaaaay out into the street.

 

Characters

Two daytrips took us away from Fort Worth. In one, my cousin and I revisited the tiny town of Loving, Texas, where our great-grandparents settled in 1906, and a classic “wide spot in the road.” There’s little left but the cemetery, although the town claims a population of about 300. Loving is named for the family of Oliver Loving, who with Charles Goodnight developed the Goodnight-Loving Trail, used to drive cattle from Texas to New Mexico for the Army and on to Denver. Oliver Loving was wounded in a Comanche attack on one of these expeditions and died at Fort Sumner in New Mexico.He extracted a promise from Goodnight to bury him in Texas, and this episode was one inspiration for Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove.

Sam Rayburn museum and library, Bonham, Texas

Sam Rayburn museum and library

Our second sidetrip, through some beautiful north Texas countryside, was to Bonham, Texas, and the library, home, and burial site of Sam Rayburn. Rayburn, from an American political era that now seems almost unimaginably collegial, served 48 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and was Speaker for 17 years. Brochure: “Rayburn’s fairness and mastery of the political process earned him respect from both sides of the House floor.”

And, another reason to go to Bonham that shouldn’t be discounted is the opportunity to have lunch at the Hickory Bar-B-Que on Sam Rayburn Drive!

President and Mrs. Kennedy spent the night of November 21, 1963, in the Presidential suite of our Fort Worth hotel (which our room’s windows looked out on). It was raining on the morning of the 22nd, but the President saw a crowd gathering, and went downstairs to greet people. Seeing them standing there in the wet, he said, “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth.” Those words are inscribed on a memorial to Kennedy adjacent to the hotel, and the hotel itself contains numerous photographs from that visit. He and Mrs. Kennedy attended a breakfast at the Chamber of Commerce before leaving on the disastrous trip to Dallas.

2014-11-27 08.51.09

 

Community

Fort Worth - Loving 11-2014 024Philip Johnson designed a spectacular water garden in the old Hell’s Half Acre district, behind the Fort Worth Convention Center, a surprising urban feature that includes a quiet pool, cataracts of water (photo), and a sure-fire winner for any “most delightful use of fountains” award. The Japanese Garden at the Botanic Gardens is another urban getaway, with elegant vistas at every turn.

Fort Worth - Loving 11-2014 045

Even the best laid trip plans sometimes confront the unexpected, and so we learned that Fort Worth’s annual holiday “parade of lights” would pass the back of our hotel on the day set aside for museum visits. This meant we had to return to the hotel early before the streets were closed. We watched the parade for more than an hour and over a hundred entries before requiring nourishment. It was amazing that there were any Fort Worth residents left to crowd the street as onlookers, there were so many people in the parade—on horses, in cars (antique and sports), on floats, in bands, in informal marching groups of indeterminate origin, in Shriner assemblages, on fire trucks, you name it. But the most hilarious entry was the one that led the parade: the black-pompadoured “World Famous Wheelie-ing Elvi.” Good Rocking Tonight!

(photo: twfwe)

(photo: twfwe)

“Where the West Begins”

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Fort Worth, Chisholm Trail

(photo: author)

Just back from a week in Fort Worth, Texas. Enough fun to make any Easterner sit high in the saddle and holler “Yee-haw!” When friends heard where I was spending Thanksgiving, the universal response was either “Where?” or “Why?” Now I’m here to tell you. It’s a vacation you might enjoy, too. Fort Worth has its own running “w” brand, but it could just as easily be the 5-C’s: cowboys, chow, culture, characters, and community.

Just to remind you, in 1849, Fort Worth was established as an actual fort, one of a string of outposts at the very edge of the Wild West, meant to protect settlers after the Mexican-American War. Soon “civilization,” such as it was, moved westward, and the fort was abandoned (now the site is occupied by the Beaux Arts Tarrant County Courthouse). A town grew up around the place on the Trinity River that was so well suited to watering and grazing livestock for a few days before the long trek north to market along the Chisholm Trail, and while the cows rested up, the cowboys made the best use of the neighborhood called “Hell’s Half Acre.”

Cowboys

Unique to Fort Worth is the stockyards area, much of which has been preserved as a tourist attraction, where once literally millions of beeves, sheep, and pigs were housed, awaiting their trips that end at our dinner tables. At first, cowboys drove the longhorn cattle north to slaughter, to feed Easterners’ desire for beef after the Civil War. Then the railroads came and made transportation faster. Then the big meat processors—Swift and Armour—decided to build factories right there and save the animals the trip.

cowboy boots

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Several museums and walking tours describe the cowboy way of life, including a fine exhibit of beautifully maintained wagons. Shops of cowboy and cowgal gear, too, including drool-worthy boots.

In keeping with the cowboy theme, we attended an initial National Cutting Horse Association World Championship Futurity round at the Will Rogers Coliseum. Despite having no idea how such an event is scored, we spent a morning spellbound, seeing these talented horses and their riders separate a cow from the herd and keep it from doing what it most wants to do—rejoin its companions. Lightning reflexes, flawless technique, intensive training, and inbred determination.

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame (photo: author)

Must mention the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, about the women who’ve participated in rodeo events, trick riding, barrel-racing, sharp-shooting (Annie Oakley!), as well as the Romance of the West (Dale Evans!!). (The horse-head detail is from a column in this museum.) Beautifully put together exhibits in an Art Deco building in the Cultural District.

Chow

With all this stockyards-walking, museum-going, and cow-watching, a gal’s gotta eat. What can you get, besides Tex-Mex? Steak. Big and delicious. Hickory Bar-B-Que in Bonham, Texas (why Bonham? Answer next week). Chicken-fried steak, a personal favorite, at Cowtown Diner, where the wry humor of our server-manager-barman provided unexpected entertainment. Saint-Emilion—Le restaurant Français de Fort Worth. Great wines, excellent food! Not a bad meal on the whole trip.

It’s always great to leave a place feeling there’s more to see and do, and that’s how we left Fort Worth! Culture, Characters, and Community next week!