Writing and Editing
Writing and Editing is a podcast for authors that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to writing and editing. Listen in each Thursday for a new twenty-five-minute episode with an author or industry expert. All episodes are freely available in audio wherever you get podcasts. Hosted by Jennia D'Lima
Writing and Editing
332. Preserving a Legacy with Beau L'Amour
Author and editor Beau L'Amour discusses his father Louis L'Amour's work, how he carries his legacy, and some behind the scenes facts of the process.
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Visit Beau's website and check out his work:
http://beaulamour.com/
Keep up with Louis L'Amour's preservation:
https://www.louislamour.com/
Follow Beau on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/BeauDLAmour/
Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Louis L'Amour's name is recognized even by those who wouldn't call themselves readers, and his many contributions to the literary community are still well-loved and much read. Continuing that legacy is his son, Beau L'Amour, and I'm delighted to have him with us on the show today. Well, first, thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 00:thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 02:So what made you first realize that this was something that you wanted to do? Or did you maybe have a different idea of how to preserve your father's legacy?
Speaker 00:Neither one of those things really happened. I had been working a little bit in the publishing business, doing a little bit of work with the art department and in the very early days of audio publishing. And my dad passed away and I recognized that there were an awful lot of things that needed to be restructured in order to keep us going on into the future. Our business had been all about the new book. It always had been the new book. And I realized that the entire backlist needed to be treated kind of as one unit and that we needed a publishing program that looked at all of it kind of rather than sort of a scattershot approach. So it kind of grew out of that.
Speaker 02:Oh, interesting. I just assumed that maybe there was always this inkling of an idea and then you just sort of launched it from there. So that's much different than what I had in mind. If you want to tell people very briefly what it is about the book, Having
Speaker 00:taken over my dad's literary estate and managing that, we've had to do many different things over the years. It's really a good idea if you have a kind of legacy product that occasionally you pull a rabbit or maybe even a rhinoceros out of the hat and show it to the publisher so that they don't start to take you for granted. The publisher often has to do exactly the same thing with the booksellers. Bye. So over the years, we've done many things. We did a magazine of new Western short stories for a while. We had this very innovative audio publishing program where we did almost all of our work for many, many years, not so much any longer, but for many years as a radio drama. So full cast and sound effects and score and everything else. And towards the beginning of this century, there was a moment where the publisher had an awful lot of books in their warehouse that had the wrong price on them. They were wanting to up price. And this was before a lot of these shorter print runs and just-in-time delivery that has now become a part of the business. And one of the things that we arranged for them to do was to give over a million books to the U.S. Armed Forces.
Speaker 01:as
Speaker 00:a gift, but hopefully to start readers off. You have one kid in a tank reading a book, and maybe in the next 10 years, you've sold 100 books. So I'm always trying to kind of spin the next thing and get it ready to go. And Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures grew out of a problem with a particular bookseller about 10 years ago, who was complaining that they had us on their shelves, but there wasn't anything new. We had been publishing books of unpublished short stories for a while, but that had eventually given out. We got to the end of pretty much everything that my dad had written and they wanted something new. And the publisher was talking to them about maybe new covers, just something to make it look fresh in some manner to create a better sense of morale amongst the store managers. I've got no idea what exact problem they were facing. And I didn't like that very much. And I just thought new book covers, I mean, we're always involved in doing things like that, but it takes an incredible effort to try and get all the covers sort of looking the same and reflecting
Speaker 02:similar
Speaker 00:values and things like that, because we've got 130 plus books.
Speaker 02:Right. And then all that backstock that you'd be left with too, if you would decide.
Speaker 00:Exactly.
Unknown:Yeah.
Speaker 00:Exactly. And they're not going to let us give it away to the military again. So anyway, what happened was, is we had had a website. I had taken a whole bunch of my dad's material and we had created a subscription website. And you could pay a little bit of money if you were a dyed in the wool, Louis L'Amour fan, and you could go in there and you could find all kinds of early drafts of books that had been produced. drafts of stories that had never been produced, correspondence, all kinds of stuff. We had this kind of wonderful setup where you could go in there and kind of explore the inside of Louis L'Amour's creative mind. And it had never been particularly popular, especially in those days, pre-social media days, person went on the web, they did not want to pay for anything. The attitude we ran into all the time was, yeah, yeah, I do it, but it's, you know, you want whatever it was, $2.99 a month or something like this. And I took that material. I repackaged it into two new books, Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures Volume 1 and Volume 2. Those would be the unfinished and unpublished short stories or novels, both. And I would take the material that was my dad's material that was there, and I would write a piece about it. After you read it, you'd get to... section and I would sort of describe why he had written it and what he was hoping to do. And then through possibly notes or journal entries or correspondence, I would say, you know, this is very likely what was going to happen with that particular story. So this is how that story would be finished, would play out this for the unfinished ones. Some of these stories, there would be multiple drafts. So in the book, if the drafts are interestingly different, I'll give you different drafts so you can see how my dad was playing around with getting the story started. Sometimes there would be a bunch of drafts and I would meld them all into kind of the best of single version. And sometimes there'd be an outline for the book, various things like that. Some of these beginnings of stories are quite long. There's one piece in there that's, I think it's 240 pages. So it's probably almost all of act one of a relatively big novel. So they go from a couple of pages all the way out to multiple chapters. And so we had, those were in two books. And then I put together, I wrote with my dad, I finished an unfinished novel of his called No Traveler Returns, which would have been his first novel had he ever published it and kind of got it set up so that you understood how it fit into his career. So there's a piece in there about what he was trying to do with that novel and when it was. It was written in the late 30s. And then in about 30 plus of the old novels that have been in print for quite a while, I did a postscript. And it did the same thing as I did in Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures Volume 1 and 2. I would try and tell the story behind the story, what he was doing, early drafts. Was there a short story that inspired this? What was he going to try and do with it? Sometimes I'd write a piece on him doing Did you ever have multiple choices for what you would include as
Speaker 02:postscript material where you had to pick and choose a little bit?
Speaker 00:Not so much because that's kind of the interesting thing when you have different aspects of something, you know, I could produce one aspect and then I could talk about another aspect. Occasionally there would be several of those things. It wasn't too much of a choice. I mean, I try not to let these things go over 40 pages and I really don't like them to go less than six. So, you know, I just kind of depend.
Speaker 02:Yeah. It all makes sense too, to have that parameter in place just to figure out where's the reader going to be comfortable feeling like they have enough bonus material that it counts as bonus material versus when it should be almost this whole separate piece on
Speaker 00:its own? It's all different. It's a little hard to say. I mean, each story has a different thing that I'm able to say about it. It's very rarely the least bit repetitive. Like I said, sometimes it would be research, sometimes it would be the fight to get a particular manuscript published, the walking drum, a kind of Crusades era adventure story that my dad was only able published late in his career was actually written in 1960. And all the publishers were just saying, no, Louis, we just want Westerns. So there are different trials and tribulations. That's so
Speaker 02:fascinating too, because, you know, you think about it as just, okay, I'm going to find the best piece that matches this book. I'm going to find this and this, but know that there are so many other variables at play and that you do have all this other personal information where you're able to make the most informed decision too.
Speaker 00:And it's a, you know, a way that hopefully the casual reader will like reading. There's definitely a lot of education about the publishing industry. I mean, it's about a guy dealing with the publishing industry from 1953 or even a little bit before to 1988 and the various adventures that he had there, what was possible, what wasn't possible. And sometimes where various inspirations came from, there's actually kind of a four-step program in there that deals with my dad's relationship with Katherine Hepburn. They were somewhat distant friends. And she was originally... John Wayne wanted her to play in the movie Hondo, which my dad wrote the story that it was taken from. And she didn't like Wayne because of his political position, so she told him to get lost. And then she and my dad became friends. They explored doing a couple of different stories. None of that came to fruition. But eventually, she became dear friends with John Wayne.
Speaker 02:talk a lot now about how interconnected the creative community as a whole. You'll be talking to someone and you find out they know this musician that you listen to, or they're going to go somewhere and meet this other artist that you're a fan of. And I think this just proves that that's really always been the case. Creatives just sort of meld together somehow. It doesn't really matter how you express that creativity. Yeah. It's still this like-minded group.
Speaker 00:And it was even close, you know, in Hollywood in those days, the bonds were even closer. I used to say that in the days when studios had walls and agents didn't control everybody's career, the community was very, very tight
Speaker 02:knit. And I would say it extends past just author life during that time period. But now, because I think it's so easy for readers to just see that book on the shelf or pick it up as an ebook, and they don't really think about everything else going on behind the scenes or that maybe this author did want to write in a different genre and was told, no, you're not allowed. And they might have those questions like, why doesn't this person branch out? Or why don't they try something new? Or I wish there was another story with this character in it and not realizing how many roadblocks are in their way to really find There are
Speaker 00:a surprising number of things that hold writers back. And, you know, on the inspiration side, you look at a guy like my dad, he wrote 92 novels and 250 some odd short stories. And you think, oh my gosh, you know, this man was such a productive master that everything he did kind of turned to gold. And it didn't. It's Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures Volumes 1 and 2 are full of all the things he did. that didn't work, they are at the same time, some of the most interesting material he ever worked on, because this was the stuff that was too ambitious for him to finish. So as an insight into him and his interests, it's really quite amazing. And I was lucky in writing this material about my father's material and about the publishing industry and things like that. I was lucky that I went to work occasionally, once in a while in publishing in the 1980s. And so I knew a lot of the people also through my dad that had really started the paperback business in the 50s. They were just kind of slightly going out as I started. I had an office when I was working in audio publishing at Bantam Books. I had an office down the hall from Ian Ballantyne who, I mean, he would tell you that he personally brought the paperback book format to the United States from England. I'm not sure that's entirely true. But he would tell you all kinds of stories about that. And Ian had been around, obviously, forever and bent my ear endlessly. Then even before I was working, you know, I was kind of playing under the desks of Oscar Distel and some of these other guys at Bantam who had gone into that business from magazines. A lot of those guys had been in the OSS during World War II. So there was this kind of camaraderie. There were a bunch of of them that had been with the OSS in Cairo during World War II. And so they were kind of buddies from the war and clear through till today. So I certainly haven't seen the business evolve as an adult like my mother has, but I've had a pretty good run.
Speaker 02:Yeah, I would say so. So also just not even looking at the industry, but even just looking at your dad's work, how has your view of that maybe evolved? And not just as going from a child to an adult, but perhaps looking at his finished work There
Speaker 00:isn't an awful lot of difference. odd abilities that he had. My dad was a master at knowing what not to write.
Speaker 01:And
Speaker 00:I don't mean subject matter. I mean, like literally the difference between what to include in a sentence and what not to include in a sentence. So many times I'll have fans who will write to me and they'll tell me how beautifully and wondrously he described an area of the country where maybe they live or they visited or something of the sort. And there's not much of a description in the book.
Speaker 01:My
Speaker 00:dad was incredible at just giving like just enough details to fire the imagination of the reader and give them a co-authorship of their imaginary experience. page, 225 page format that existed in those days. They were very, very good at doing this. And it's a wonderful thing because so many times you'll see in what is supposedly higher grade literature, an author telling you everything.
Speaker 02:Yes. And that leaves no room for the reader.
Speaker 00:Leaves no room for the reader. I mean, I struggle with this. My dad never struggled with it. He just, he kind of knew just how to, you know, I drop her out the information. And it's a wonderful, wonderful quality.
Speaker 02:Oh, that is definitely an admirable skill because it's exactly like you said. And I think we do, most people have that tendency because we're almost thinking cinematically and we're trying to get that across in words, but we don't need to do that in words. And again, it almost becomes like a passive experience for the reader because their imagination is no longer activated and engaged because there's nothing for them to really imagine when they're spoon fed every single detail. A
Speaker 00:writer who was writing up until, maybe he's still around, I'm not sure, but writing up until a few years ago, who was wonderful at that was Alan First, who wrote a whole bunch of kind of pre-World War II thrillers. And he could put you, you know, a rain damp street in 1938 Paris in like seven words.
Speaker 01:Yes.
Speaker 00:He was just, he was incredible, incredible at it.
Speaker 02:Yeah, that really is such a gift. And I think it's one of those gifts we don't talk about enough, but- Especially when you think about the people that did go from short stories first. So they're used to that brevity with their words and knowing how to very judiciously pick each single one. So it has that impact and that very limited page space you have. And then just carry over that skill into their longer work.
Speaker 00:You will see with my dad and other writers who were masters at certainly popular short stories, Stephen King would be one of them, where sometimes you read their work and you kind of go, you know, there were a lot of these short stories that actually were a better short story than some of the novels were later. There's just an elegance to the way they do that. It's hard to make the difference. Of course, Stephen King went from short stories to gigantic four-inch novels. So maybe it stands out a little bit more, but there are some very good writers who wrote some very good short stories who unfortunately no longer do.
Speaker 02:Yeah. So before you were putting all of Lost Treasures together, were you already aware of how much material there would be to work with, or was this a surprise to you?
Speaker 00:My dad had a large kind of combination office, library, four or five hundred square feet with 12 foot tall bookshelves that were on doors that opened up. So there were more bookshelves behind them. And still the room was hip high in books and papers and things. There was a little trail that went over to an area where he could roll his chair around at his typewriter. And then there was a trail that once had led to a couch on the other side of the room. But once the couch disappeared, the trail sort of peaked. out and there wasn't anything left. And when my dad passed away, it fell upon me to clean up all of that. And one of the last things that we cleaned up were all of these manuscripts. Some of them were broken into sections. Some of them, we didn't know what belonged to what, you know, we had a whole room stacked full of manuscript pages that we had to reassemble into books that we knew and we could file away or things that were mysterious that we were just learning existed and that's where a lot of that stuff came from.
Speaker 02:How long did it take you to sort through everything and not just sort through it but put those related pieces together. I'm
Speaker 00:still doing it. 30 plus years later. And I still, I will go out to my archive room and a display that's going up at the Reagan Library. And they wanted a couple of pieces of something. And I went out to try and find them. And I was looking through these various sections of notes and realizing that I really should file some of these with the manuscript that they pertain to, that I use them for the lost treasures of that manuscript. And really I should probably put them both in the same file. So there's still a refinement going on.
Speaker 02:Yeah. So how are they currently organized?
Speaker 00:The manuscripts are all in fireproof file cabinets in their own files. And so are the finished short stories. And the problem is the notes that made up some of these things. I have several boxes full of notes and they're all kind of in there at random. We scanned them when we did the website way back in the early days, and we only sorted them out at that point. And so I used that material to create the Lost Treasures books. I didn't go back to the original documents. And so the original documents need some filing. Yeah.
Speaker 02:So I was reading on your website and it was saying that everything is left in its own unfinished form or most pieces are. So can you explain why you did that and why you decided not to add anything to them or that you just use the raw material?
Speaker 00:Yeah. So you're talking about the unfinished work that's in Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures 1 and 2. And there have been some things that I've finished. So I finished No Travel Returns, which was this unfinished novel that my dad had. And I also am just finishing a second unfinished novel right now. I don't know when, you know how long the publishing business takes to get around to actually distributing a book. So I'm saying this, but a warning to your audience, don't go looking for this book tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. But I thought at least presenting Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures, I thought the fascinating thing was to allow people to find the work like I found it and to just experience the mystery of, I did organize it. I did put the notes with the stories and I did comment on the stories and things like that. And I presented it in an order that was fun to read, not necessarily the order in which it was written or anything like
Speaker 01:that.
Speaker 00:But I thought that it would be an interesting thing for a reader to be able to kind of go through the archaeology of Louis L'Amour and uncover these different things at different times and recognize that when you get into volume two, dad was working on a nonfiction book on a man who traveled all over the Arab world a thousand years ago, Ibn Battuta. And he tried to sell that nonfiction book to several publishers. Nobody was interested. And then he sat down and wrote kind of a fictionalized version of it, The Walking Room. So it's not a fictionalized version of a character who is traveling the path of Ibn Battuta or anything like that. But it's definitely inspired from what he learned at that time. And I thought, you know, if you're flipping through this and you start reading this outline for a nonfiction book, and when you get to my section of it, you say, and this became The Walking Drum, that's maybe kind of exciting to sort of explore these things in kind of a random matter and have the experience of discovery.
Speaker 02:So for the book that you did finish, what made you decide to finish that piece? And then how did you also seamlessly blend both author voices?
Speaker 00:So the easier one to talk about in that way is No Travel Returns. It's easy also because it's out there and somebody could go buy it right now.
Speaker 02:Right.
Speaker 00:It was a stack of chapters. Dad started his career writing what we call his yondering stories is because we published them in a collection called Yondering Back Around 19. They're kind of Ernest Hemingway-esque sort of personal adventures that were quite realistic, taken from his time traveling around the world in the 1920s. And it actually created kind of a nice career for him. He was published in some very good magazines, and he developed quite a good reputation based on those particular stories, but they didn't make him any money. And And so he went on to write for the pulp magazines, kind of pulp adventure and crime stories and things like that. But in the process, while he was doing that, he started work on a novel that was part of that series, that sort of world building event. And it was this No Travel Returns. It shares a number of characters with yondering short stories and things like that. But it was really a pile of chapters. Every other chapter in this book is a different crewman on this particular tanker ship. that the story follows.
Speaker 02:I love all those different perspectives when they're added in.
Speaker 00:Yeah. So there's a continuing perspective that keeps appearing in between each one, but then the alternating chapters are different stories, a different background for a different guy, different approach to what's going on, the problems that are happening on the ship, things like that. And they just sort of piled up. They weren't really associated with one another. But as I read it, and it seemed like, I mean, I think the story I just finished is a Cold War of thriller. So you'd think that that would be the easier one to do. But as I was looking through this, I suddenly realized this is one of those all people are connected stories. There was a motif in the work that touched on that. It didn't play it hard, but it touched on it. If you can think back to, there was a whole spate of movies for a while, Vine movies, Lantana and Magnolia. There was Crash was another film that came out. out back in the 90s that was this kind of mysterious intertwining of lives. I had a friend who made one called Mojave Phone Booth. And I was inspired by that. I went, this story is all people are connected. That's the theme behind this. And on top of it, it's a ship that is taking a cargo to the Philippines and China, afterwards to China. And I just thought, well, whoa, I get it. You know, I know what to do with this.
Speaker 01:So
Speaker 00:it needed pieces. It needed a beginning. It needed a better ending. It needed some of the coincidence kind of pulled out of it. It needed the chapters more intertwined with one another. If I have a point of departure from my father's writing and a point that I have to hit, I find it very easy to duplicate his style. It's more difficult if you just kind of have to keep going and going and going and going. Oh, true.
Speaker 02:Interesting. Yeah. I was going to ask about that too, because that was something I wondered, you know, how do you do that or how easy it comes to you?
Speaker 00:My dad wrote in five different styles. I mean, I don't know that somebody else would think so, but I've kind of broken it down that way. And the first four from the beginning, from this one that I'm talking about through his pulp style, through his early paperback original style, kind of his mature paperback original style, and then kind of the later style, I can do the first four. The later one where the got a little more complicated and things like this, I have some trouble with that would be that, you know, maybe the last 10 books that he wrote, but the early stuff I find pretty easy. I would say I could not go back into no traveler returns and point out where his work stopped and mine started.
Speaker 02:Oh, that's impressive.
Speaker 00:So it's, you know, I try to do generally when I'm editing something now, this would no travel returns was literally the two of us as co-writers. But when I'm editing something and I take out a section and I do the same sort of thing, I make a jump like that. I always try to have as little impact as possible. So if I'm going to fix something, I try to do it with a cut first. And if it takes some bridging material, then I try and do the bridging material as minimally as I can. And a lot of times it depends on what I'm bridging. If I'm bridging just a section where I cut it because it needed to be a little shorter or something like that. That's easy. If I'm making a cut because I've got an inconsistency in a character voice or something like that, then it's a little more
Speaker 02:complicated. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 00:And every once in a while, there's one where it becomes a little difficult. We had a story by the waters of San Diego, short story, where it was very much this young lady's adventure and kind of getting herself traumatic stuck in a situation down on the coast of South America. And there was kind of a guy that came in at the end that sort of solved everything. And I thought, you know, we've done that one. We've done that one over and over. And we've stuck with this gal for so long. I'd like to see her handle that. And I know I get letters all the time. People tell me they loved it, but they're like going, that woman was really kind of feral. It's like, you know, It's like, she was really tough at the end of that thing. I'm like, yeah, I know I may have overdone it a little bit. But that's what it took to have her sort of solve her own problem without this outside influence. And I try not to let that happen. I don't ever want somebody to pick out, oh, you did this, you did this or something. At the same time, and I'm sure you've experienced this in your business, people really don't understand the impact that editors and publishers have on a manuscript. And I mean, I will have fans talk to me about how dare you change this comma. And, you know, it's kind of like, I'm joking, of course, when I say this, but, and I mean, I have to kind of politely write back to them and say, you know, if you thought Louis was in charge of commas, you're out of your mind. You know, it's, it is not that purely the writer's voice, purely the perfect thing. We've never had much editing until I came along in all my work in the publishing business. I've never met an editor that I knew does the kind of work that say you do.
Speaker 02:Oh, really?
Speaker 00:Yeah. So mostly we're going to get like line and copy editing. So development editing. I mean, I saw that once I had one issue where I realized I was dealing with a development editor on Lost Treasures because we got in kind of a tiff about a particular thing. I was in the middle of this Louis and Catherine Hepburn story. And I had said that Catherine Hepburn was too old for a particular role.
Speaker 01:And
Speaker 00:the editor got very upset about that. Just like, you know, Catherine Hepburn couldn't possibly have been too old. You know, it's like she was at the time you're writing about, she was only 28. I was like sitting there going, Like I met Catherine Hepburn a couple of times and she was pretty old by the end of her life. And I'm like, going back to 28, I'm like going, was my dad even writing when she was 28? And then I realized she was talking about Audrey Hepburn.
Speaker 02:Oh, yes. That is a very
Speaker 00:big difference. The weird thing was, is she had the age exact, but somehow she'd gotten the two women mixed up.
Speaker 02:Interesting.
Speaker 00:And I mean, she really knew which he was talking about age-wise. But she didn't know one actress from the other, which was weird. But I was sort of like, we're not talking about the same lady.
Speaker 02:This is a great story to leave it on because I think it's hysterical. But yes, so just for our final question, where can people find out more about you and more about these books that you've written? Well, not really written, but compiled.
Speaker 00:Compiled and various things. Yeah. So louislamore.com. is a great entry point to everything because on louislamore.com on the top banner, there will be a additional websites thing, which will take you to a website for Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures and a bunch of other interesting things that we've done that we haven't talked about, but I think somebody would be interested in.
Speaker 02:Well, thank you again. This has been so amazing. Oh,
Speaker 00:thank you so much. It's been a wonderful, wonderful time talking to you.
Speaker 02:Same. And thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for additional information. And then please join me next week when author Janelle will discuss why opposing character goals work so well when you're writing romance. Thanks again.
