How to write a western: the frontier as character

A rider comes into a town that needs something done, and the landscape watches him do it. The western is fixed by place and period: Wikipedia defines it as "a genre of fiction typically set in the American frontier, commonly referred to as the 'Old West' or 'Wild West'", with stories set during 19th-century westward expansion, from around the California Gold Rush "through the closing of the American frontier in 1890". The American Film Institute's definition, quoted in the same article, points past dates to the genre's real subject: the "spirit, struggle, and demise" of the frontier. That is the contract in miniature. The western is not a costume; it is an argument about what happens where law is thin and the horizon is open.

What a western is

On the page, the genre has its own history. Western fiction is "a genre of literature set in the American Old West, most commonly between 1860 and 1900", and its first critically recognized novel was Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), followed by Zane Grey, Ernest Haycox, Luke Short and Louis L'Amour. The genre's popularity "peaked in the 1960s", and "Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and reached a new low in the 2000s", with most bookstores outside a few Western states now carrying only a small shelf. The form keeps returning anyway: after being "previously pronounced dead", film westerns surged again in the 1990s with Dances with Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992). For a writer the lesson is double: the readership is smaller than in its golden age, and it knows exactly what it wants.

The genre is also bigger than its dates. Wikipedia notes the western is commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, and its subgenre list shows the archetypes travel: some subgenres "take the Western theme and archetypes into different supergenres, such as neo-Westerns or space Westerns" (space western, weird west).

The western reader contract

What the audience buys is named precisely by craft writer Rachelle Ramirez: "Audiences choose Westerns to experience a sense of freedom, righteousness, and bravery without risking danger themselves." Freedom, righteousness, bravery: three promises, in that order of difficulty. The genre's classic statement of them is structural: "The classic Western is a morality drama, presenting the conflict between wilderness and civilization", Wikipedia summarizes. Readers arrive expecting a sparse, lawless country, "a sparsely populated, often lawless region inhabited by cowboys, outlaws, sheriffs, gunslingers, settlers, soldiers, and Native Americans", a wrong that wants righting, and a protagonist centered enough, or damaged enough, to right it alone. Stories "commonly center on the life of a male drifter, cowboy, or gunslinger", the article notes, which is a description of the tradition, not a casting order.

The frontier as character

Setting does more work in a western than in almost any other genre, and the sources say so nearly in so many words. "Westerns often stress the harshness of the wilderness and frequently set the action in an arid, desolate landscape of deserts and mountains", Wikipedia notes, and "the vast landscape plays an important role, presenting a 'mythic vision of the plains and deserts of the American West'". Ramirez compresses it into the craft rule: "The harsh, hostile, and wide-open landscape is a character in the story." Design it like one. Distance is plot (a ride for the doctor is an act), water is politics, weather is an antagonist, and isolation explains everyone's choices (see how to write description for making terrain carry scene pressure). Because the genre trades on a real past at a real date, it inherits historical fiction's obligations: research the period honestly and keep its facts straight, or read why it matters in how to write historical fiction and the anachronism entry.

The code of the West and frontier justice

The western's society runs on honor, not courts. Wikipedia's formulation is the genre's spine: the western "depicts a society organized around codes of honor and personal, direct or private justice", the famous "frontier justice", "dispensed by gunfights". Its hero is descended from the knight-errant, "bound to no fixed social structures, but only to his own innate code of honor". That code is your protagonist's real skeleton, and Ramirez gives the genre's two controlling ideas as a matched pair: "Justice prevails (and life is preserved) when an uncompromising individual chooses to risk their freedom to save the victims", and the negative form, "Tyranny reigns when the hero is betrayed by the very people they defend." Write the code before the plot: what your hero will not do, what he will not walk past, and what it costs to hold both at once. He is an antihero by genre default: "The protagonist operates outside the law (selectively or as a matter of course)", Ramirez notes, and "Sometimes upholding what's right means taking the law into one's own hands."

Violence and justice

The genre's stock plot is a moral instrument, not a scheduling convenience. Wikipedia describes it: "Many Westerns use a stock plot of depicting a crime, then showing the pursuit of the wrongdoer, ending in revenge and retribution, which is often dispensed through a shootout or quick draw duel." The showdown, "a stereotypical scene in the popular conception of Westerns", is the genre's courtroom, and it should be staged with the same weight: everything said before it is testimony. Craft consensus, in line with both sources: violence must cost. If the draw settles nothing that matters, or leaves nothing behind, the morality drama collapses into choreography. Ramirez's structural notes help here: "The Western is a plot driven story", but "Editors recommend you pair any plot driven story with a supporting character driven story", and her climax definition says the ending "plunges the protagonist into a life and death battle of the big shoot out". For staging the action itself, see how to write fight scenes; for the interior arc the plot carries, character arcs. Screenwriter Frank Gruber's seven basic western plots (railroad, ranch, empire, revenge, cavalry, outlaw and marshal stories), listed in Wikipedia's article, are a workable checklist for what kind of story you are actually telling.

The revisionist western

The genre's second life is its self-criticism, and a contemporary writer should know the tradition before joining it. The classic western's record on Native Americans is what revision answers: traditional works portrayed them "as averse foes, savages, or through stereotypical depictions", though "later works increasingly presented more nuanced and sympathetic portrayals". The 1960s and 1970s brought the international wave: "Spaghetti Westerns from Italy became popular worldwide; this was due to the success of Sergio Leone's storytelling method", films in which the frontier town is, in Leone's own words, "where life has no value". Later still come the explicitly ambiguous works: "some notable examples", Wikipedia notes, such as "Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, about an old contract killer", "are more morally ambiguous". Revision, done well, is not reversing the code but testing it: the same honor that saves the town also destroys the hero. Ramirez's contemporary casting advice belongs to the same program: "Women on the frontier aren't just school teachers or sex objects", and "Native Americans can be tragic victims and brave heroes of their own stories." Write people the old plots flattened.

Writing a western series

The drifter structure is a series engine: a rider with a code meets a town with a problem, the problem is settled, the rider moves on. Each book renews the premise and keeps the two durable assets, the protagonist's code and the landscape's myth. The genre's paperback tradition ran exactly this way, and the craft of carrying a fixed hero across variable stories is covered in how to write a series. The register the genre grew from is folk speech, tales retold a little larger each time (see tall tale), which is to say the western was serial before it was a shelf.