I’ve been using the Story Grid method to edit my stories for a little while — it’s just the best. One of the steps is to figure out what genre your story is so you can be sure to include relevant tropes.
The genre isn’t so much about how to label the story for sale, it’s more about what kinds of themes, action, and goals your story presents. It took me a hot minute to place it, but using the Story Grid’s definitions for the genres it recognizes, I realized that Night Falls is 100% a western. But with vampires.
So I started looking into some western tropes to make sure that I had included a nice selection of them to make the story work. And boy howdy, not only did I find some I really like, I used a bunch of them already without even realizing it!
For example:
1. Revenge. The whole thing that set me off to define Night Falls as a western was the main trope of revenge and vigilante justice — it doesn’t occur in other genres.
2. A Woman with a Mixed Past. That definitely describes Ms. Cleopatra Samir Wright, a side character in the story. She also shows up looking for the man who killed her father.
3. The Lone Wolf. If that isn’t Sebastian, and who Sebastian is learning to unbecome, I’ll eat my cowboy hat.
4. An Outlaw Gang. That would be the pack. Yep, they show back up in this story.
5. Showdown at High Noon. Yep, got one of those, but it takes place at midnight instead of high noon. Vampires, ya know.
6. Corrupt Sheriff. Got two of those in this story, actually. Oh, three? Hm. More like three.
7. The Railroad. It’s more of a metaphor in this story, but there are some hefty tropes of progress, changing with the times, and the changes that civilization and technology can bring.
Those are the tropes I can think of that I see right away. I have to say, realizing that this story has a strong western genre has made editing it and understanding it a lot easier. I came at it after the story was already written, and while I wish I had done some of this work before as part of the plotting process, I’m really enjoying finding the little treats I left for myself in the editing process.
I’d maybe worry that a story would be pressed too much in the same old clichés using this method, but I guess it can also be used to do the opposite, identifying what a genre would do and then deliberately do something else with it:
for example, you say Sebastian is the Lone Wolf. But in a Western he’d just ride off into the sunset. Characters like “Blondie” or “Harmonica” are specifically written to be unchanging. They’d also never be bothered by their past, or anything of that sort.
Or the vengeance factor. In a Western, getting revenge might also end in a (heroic) death, but you can still expect the “good guy” to shoot the “bad guy” and that being written as a positive thing. While in most other plots these days a motivation like that often gets written as very self-destructive (to the point where frankly some stories can get really, really annoying about it. Sometimes it *is* a good thing to shoot the evil guy …). But in any case there’s a few things to do with it (a variant I often like is the “misguided vengeance”, where at some point it’s revealed that the motivation was false all along).
PS: Night Eternal shows up oddly on Amazon for me. The first book is marked as first and second book in the series. The 3rd is correct but the 2nd is missing from the series list.
I get where you’re going with this, but the beauty of art is that you can change it. The newest story for sure has a lot of Western tropes, and would overall qualify as a Western, but subversion or alteration of tropes is also totally a thing. As you noted with the theme of vengeance. At any rate, I didn’t realize the latest book was a Western until I took a closer look at it, and then was sort of tickled.
Also, ah, Amazon. What the hell. Every time I think I have my books all lined up nicely, they change something and fuck it all up. I’ll have a look, thanks!