Using Generic Incidents to Plot Your Western Novel (or Fiction of Any Other Genre)

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

As James Patterson points out in Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, thrillers are fast-paced and full of action that evokes intense emotion, “particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness.” As a result, thrillers tend to require incident upon incident; in other words, as stories, they eat up a lot of material.

The same is true of Western novels: in the telling (or the writing), the consume a lot of material.

I've worked out a way, I think, of making easier the task of devising incidents, based on a critical study I'm reading, The Clint Eastwood Westerns by James L. Neibaur.

In discussing Eastwood's films, Neibaur also summarizes their plots. By stripping the incidents of the plots, as he describes them, to the bone—that is, by transforming the specific details of the Eastwood plots into generic expressions of action similar to the narrative motifs, or functions or dramatic personae, identified by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale, we can develop a good size list of the types of incidents (and, indeed, their relationships to one another) that typically occur in Western movies (or novels). The same technique, of course, can be applied to any other genre as well, providing similar indices of motifs for any type of fiction from action-adventure thrillers to science fiction or young adult novels.

Concerning A Fistful of Dollars (1964), we can develop this list of generic incidents:

• The hero proves his worth.
• The hero is hired to join a gang.
• The hero plays two rival gangs against one another.
• While the gangs fight each other, the hero seeks to benefit himself at their expense.
• The hero commits an act that makes him somewhat sympathetic but does not make him less mysterious.
• To avenge and protect his injured friends or supporters, the hero tricks the villain and kills him.

To generate this list of generic incidents, I “reverse-engineered” them from the specific incidents that Neibaur identifies in his study of A Fistful of Dollars (the numbers in parentheses correspond with the page number in Neibaur's book on which he identifies the associated incident of the movie's plot):

• A stranger (Joe), confronted by four of John Baxter's gang, kills them all (9).
• Rival gang leader Ramon Rojo's brother Esteban hires Joe to the Rojo gang (9).
• Joe plays the Baxter gang and the Rojo gang against each other (9).
• During the fight between the rival gangs, Joe finds and steals the Rojo gang's stolen gold (12).
• Joe rescues a woman and her husband from the Rojo gang and gives them money to leave town; asked why he has helped them, he says he knew a woman like her, but no one was there to help her (13).
• After the Rojo gang beats one of Joe's friends because the gang believe that he is harboring Joe and another of Joe's friends is also beaten because the gang believe that he knows Joe's whereabouts, Joe conceals a steel plate beneath his shirt to shield him from the gang's gunfire and, to avenge his friends, kills the Rojo gang, their leader Ramon last, in a one-on-one duel (13).

Having extracted the generic incidents from the specific plot incidents of the particular movie A Fistful of Dollars, we now have the bases for building a plot of specific incidents unique to our own story, based on the generic ones we have listed.

For example, instead of the incidents of A Fistful of Dollars, we might use the generic incidents to develop these particular incidents for a plot of our own:

• When outlaw Clay Morrison demands that rival desperado Nate Billings choose who should live and who should die, Billings's mother or his wife, a bystander, Jake Sanders, risks the life of both women by shooting Morrison, who stands between the women, holding a gun to the head of each of them.
• Impressed by Sanders's skill with a gun, Billings invites Sanders to join his gang; Sanders accepts.
• Secretly also joining Morrison's gang, Sanders plays Morrison's gang and Billings's gang against one another.
• During the battle between the rival gangs, Sanders rigs the headquarters of each gang with explosives.
• Sanders rescues a girl abducted by the Billings gang and takes her to an abandoned stagecoach station to await his return.
• After the gang suspects that Billings has freed the girl, they threaten to kill his family if she is not returned, and Billings says he will “find” her and bring them to their hideout. Instead, he sets off the explosives in their hideout, killing them all. Then, he shoots the members of the Morrison gang as they arrive at the cave at which he'd arranged for them to meet him, ostensibly to recover gold the Billings gang had “liberated” from a train.

This may not be the best plot ever (it's just an example), it does show how the use of generic incidents can be fleshed out with detail to generate suitable action for a Western plot.

By extracting generic incidents from specific plot incidents of other movies, an extensive list of generic incidents can be developed for use in mix-and-match applications.

In future posts, I will list additional generic incidents to further facilitate the plotting of Western novels.