Interviews
Montana

When I began to write full time in 1985, I had some goals in mind that have not changed much over the years. I loved the West but I knew that most western stories don't explore the historical truths of the West, or the diversity of the people who came into it, or the remarkable native people who already lived there.

The result was a career that pushed the boundaries of western fiction outward. I began writing character-driven novels. In fact, I never plot a story, but let my characters take over and tell me what they will do. I include diverse people. One of my series characters, Barnaby Skye, is a deserter from the Royal Navy. Another, Sam Flint, is a cantankerous frontier editor. I write novels about the mountain men, the miners, the cattlemen, the lawmen, the prospectors, and sometimes about those eccentrics and adventurers who are simply escaping the East and its settled ways. The hallmark of my work: my characters have interior lives; the reader can follow their thoughts, see how they respond when their ideals are challenged, see them change for better or worse under pressure.

My hope has been to tell a compelling story, one that will hearten the reader. Now, after almost twenty years of full-time writing, and after fifty-odd published novels, I'm still struggling toward that goal. I am sixty-nine. As I approach my eighth decade, I'm still writing full time and hoping to give readers whatever gifts remain within me.

--Richard S. Wheeler