Good Writing
Here’s an excerpt from the book I’m currently reading. It’s the opening from A Rider of the High Mesa, and I think it’s a good example of the way Haycox writes.
Coming across the flat valley floor. Lin Ballou, riding a paint horse and leading a pack animal, struck the Snake River Road at a point where Hank Colqueen’s homestead made a last forlorn stand against the vast stretch of sand and sage that swept eastward mile after mile until checked by the distant high mesa. It was scorching hot. The saddle leather stung his fingers when he ventured to touch it, and the dry thin air seemed to have come straight out of a blast furnace. Colqueen’s dreary little tarpaper shack stood alone in all this desolation, with a barbed wire fence running both ways from it along the road–a fence that separated just so much dry and worthless land from a whole sea of dry and worthless land. And by the ditch side, hank Colqeen himself was working away at a stubborn strand; a slow-moving giant of a man whose face and arms were blistered and baked to the color of broiled steak.
I like the way the writer alternates between short and long sentences. It’s also interesting to note his combination of formal, almost stodgy word choices (“The saddle leather stung his fingers when he ventured to touch it..”) with informal, more down-to-earth references (“blast-furance,” or “…baked to the color of broiled steak.”)
on March 8, 2010 at 2:47 pm
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Sharp passage. I like:
a fence that separated just so much dry and worthless land from a whole sea of dry and worthless land.
on March 8, 2010 at 2:52 pm
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This was another Haycox that was reprinted as a Black Horse Western, in February 1994. Haycox was a “writer’s writer” and many were influenced by him, consciously or subconsciously. I hadn’t read this particular book but the opening would seem almost to have had influence on the first paragraph of my first Black Horse Western, Gunsmoke Night, which was published in September 1993. That said, my paragraph was not as long or as immediately colorful:
Coming sundown, a lone rider reined in a handsome black stallion, concealing himself and his mount among the deepening shadows of the cluster of cottonwoods on the slope above and west of the Paynter spread. He was a bulkily built man, beefy, and his well-cut clothes bespoke power and money. He noted the failing light and tugged a heavy gold watch from his vest, frowning. He flipped open the hinged front cover.
on March 8, 2010 at 10:39 pm
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David, I love sentences. And I love a sentence like this one– so obvious, I can’t believe Haycox wrote it.
Chap, that’s a lean and lyrical piece. Nice work.