On the frontier with novelist Paul Lederer

Paul Joseph Lederer is the author of more than 100 novels, many of them Westerns. His newest is “On Cimarron,” set on the Kansas frontier as the Civil War is brewing.

Born in Ocean Beach, Lederer attended San Diego State, was in Air Force intelligence during the Vietnam War, and lives now in La Mesa. He’s 70.

Q: How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a writer?

A: When I didn’t see another future in front of me. I was up one morning on the Black Sea, in Turkey, and I looked out over the ocean and I said, “OK, you’ve got to do something, boy.”

Once I had an artist praise my work and once I had a writing teacher in high school who said, “That’s pretty good,” so I thought OK, it’s one of the two. Either that or manual labor, and I don’t like that much, although I ended up doing a lot of that. I thought writing was something I could do and make a decent living.

Q: What do you get out of writing?

A: A living. No, it goes a lot deeper than that. I get to create people in my stories. I have made this person and now I need to give him or her a life and carry it through to a happy ending, hopefully, and do it in a consistent and entertaining way.

Q: Has it gotten any easier for you?

A: It has gotten easier in most ways but it depends on what kind of book it is. There are tricks that I try studiously to avoid because then you’ll wind up not writing the same book but writing it in the same way every time.

Q: The new book falls into a category of historical fiction. Have you done others of those?

A: Yes. I have two more coming out in the next year or so. I don’t know how they decide what to call them. I think it was Louis L’Amour who said, “Everything you write east of the Mississippi is a historical novel, but if you write it west of the Mississippi, it’s automatically a Western.”

Q: This one is set on the Kansas frontier at the start of the Civil War. What was it about that time and place you found intriguing?

A: It was the setup, mainly. There’s an Indian woman living on the west side of the Cimarron with her husband, a very warlike guy, and they’re trying to establish a new home and hold out the white encroachment. There’s a new white family moving in on the eastern side of the river who just want to get away from the city and poverty and start an honest, new life on the frontier. They’re mirror images of different races on separate sides of the river. Unfortunately, these two goals do not synchronize with each other.

Q; How long does it take you to do a book?

A: It depends on the book. This one took me 10 years. But I have done them in six weeks. When I was doing a series in the 1980s, there was a brief surge in interest in Westerns. I did a lot of those.

Q: Are you someone who outlines your books before you start writing?

A: No, I don’t do that. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I just scrawl hundreds of notes on the pieces of paper around my desk, mostly so I can remember names and where people are supposed to be. I think in school they still teach you to outline your projects, but if there is a fiction writer out there who does that, I don’t know who it is.

I’m more organic in my system. I put this person in a situation. What’s he likely to do? He goes into a town, what could happen? What should happen? I take my choice and try to make things progress evenly.

Q: Have you been able to write full time, or did you have to do other jobs, too?

A: Well, there were times. I ran heavy equipment for the county of San Diego for a while. I was the guy you saw sitting on the dozer out there. I worked in the police department crime lab. Didn’t like that for a darn. A lot of menial jobs.

Q: What did you study at San Diego State?

A: English. I have a son who is a professor of English now in Ireland. He’s just gotten there. His wife is in Poland. He met her in Iceland and got married in Gibraltar. He’s much more interesting than I am.

Q; Tell me about the Indian Heritage series you did.

A: There were eight them, each about 500 pages long. Looking for inspiration one day, I found this biography of Tecumseh. I said, “I could do that.” I got that one out, and my agent said Indian stories are in so I did some more: “Way of the Wind,” “Manitou’s Daughter,” and so on.

The work I like, I’m proud of. Some of what I’ve had to do as a working writer I am not. I don’t even think about it any more. I don’t want to.

Now everything has gone to these e-books. I sold 50 of my earlier books to Open Road in New York City, so they’re out there again now.

Q: Do you have an e-reader yourself?

A: No. I told you: I’m an old guy.