This Ain't Your Grandaddy's Western

Why the Western isn’t dying, but evolving... and how modern writers can honor the genre’s grit, themes,

and legacy while reaching new readers hungry for relevance, complexity, and hard-earned truth today.

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By Casey W. Cowan & Reavis Z. Wortham​​​​

 

​​​​    The American West has always been about survival, and right now, the genre is in a shootout with irrelevance.

​     We hear it all the time from writers: “Readers just don’t appreciate a good, old-fashioned Western anymore.” And sometimes that's true, but just as often, the problem isn’t with the reader. It’s with how we’re telling the story.

​     There’s no denying that the American Western isn’t what it used to be, either on the shelves or on our screens. Sales aren’t where they once were. The publishers who’ve been in the trenches the longest—Kensington, Berkley, Five Star—have all pulled back, consolidated, or stepped away entirely. The old familiar medium of paperback Westerns and novels are in a shallow grave and will remain there for the foreseeable future, another stake in the heart of a tried and true friend who helped define generations of readers.

​     Classic Western readers are a loyal bunch, but they’re dwindling by the year, and younger generations aren’t picking up Louis L’Amour the way their grandfathers did. They’re looking for something different.

​     But contrary to popular opinion, the genre’s not dead. It’s simply going through a generational shift. In order to be successful, Western writers and publishers must adapt. Not because they don’t believe in the genre, but because they're struggling to make it sustainable in a market that’s shifting beneath their boots.

​     The evolution of the Western isn’t just commercial. It’s philosophical. Legendary author, David Morrell, creator of First Blood and one of the sharpest observers of modern storytelling, sees four primary ways writers are redefining the West.

​     “The first,” he says, “depicts what happened when westward pioneers reached the Pacific Coast and found nowhere left to go. I’m reminded of the first great classic Western novel, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, which was written in 1826 (the modern era for Cooper) about events on the New York frontier in 1757. Already, the tone is mournful—that something has ended. Cormac McCarthy explores this theme, as well—how the modern West can’t compare to the hopes of the frontier.”

​     “The second dramatizes the reverse—those pockets of the modern West that still echo the frontier and the conflicts associated with it.” He points to authors like Craig Johnson, C.J. Box, and Anne Hillerman for keeping those values alive in a contemporary setting.

​     “The third,” Morrell continues, “is about deep historical re-creation—scrupulously researched accounts of the Old West, providing in-depth historical depictions of its heritage and significance, helping us to better understand and appreciate the quest for frontier.”

​     “And the fourth is the hybrid approach—to incorporate tropes from classic Westerns as a way of making contemporary stories feel archetypal.”

​     Together, those four modes form the backbone of today’s Western revival. Writers aren’t abandoning the trail, they’re blazing new ones through different terrain.

​     As writers and publishers, we’ve seen this shift firsthand over the past decade. Every day brings new work from authors trying to balance respect for the classics with storytelling that connects with readers raised on streaming TV, fast-paced thrillers, and deeply flawed antiheroes. This experience gives us a unique perspective on writing Westerns for a modern audience, and it all boils down to this: don’t try to be the second coming of Zane Grey, Max Brand, Donald Hamilton, or Louis L’Amour. Emulating these fine authors is an exercise in futility. They were the undisputed masters of the genre in their time, and for good reason. But that was then, and this is now. They’ve already told their stories, and the key to success in any genre is finding your own narrative voice. Audiences and their tastes change over time, and the author who fails to change with the times dooms him or herself to invisibility and irrelevance.

​     As David Morrell tells his writing students, “We need to be first-rate versions of ourselves and not second-rate versions of other authors.”

​     It’s time to find a new format.

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Understand Your Audience—Not Just Their Boots

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​     Let’s face it, authors. We’re not just writing for cattlemen, cowboys, and ranch hands anymore. When Westerns first caught fire, the people reading them were the very ones who’d lived that life. In 1937, E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott—one of the last of the trail cowboys—wrote We Pointed Them North, a memoir about driving cattle from Texas to the railheads in Kansas and Nebraska. Readers of his time didn’t need to imagine the world he described. Like him, they’d seen it, smelled it, lived it.

     Back then, America was still eighty percent rural and twenty percent urban. After World War II, that ratio flipped, and so did our audience. We’re no longer writing for readers who’ve wrested a living from the land, roped calves, or branded steers. We’re writing for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, for nurses, welders, schoolteachers, gamers, single moms. People who may never saddle a horse but still understand what the Western stands for—independence, sacrifice, justice, integrity, and redemption.

​     But here’s the catch: they don’t want to read their grandfather’s Western. They want fully realized characters, immersive worlds, and compelling moral conflict that cuts deep. They want grit, but they want it earned. And more than anything, they want stories that make them feel something.

​     Today’s readers—especially the younger ones—consume genre fiction differently. They’re drawn to dynamic characters, tighter pacing, internal conflict, and themes that feel relevant to their own lives. They also tend to read across genres, so a Western might need to wear more than one hat: historical thriller, mystery, romance, even horror. A cattle drive can still pull them in, but only if the stakes are personal, the characters are layered, and the story feels urgent.

​     We had several extensive discussions with a high school librarian on this subject, and she educated us on new desires among young readers. In the “olden days,” readers wanted justice, wrapped in western lore. Today’s audience asks for genre first, then feeling.

​     “They come into my library with specific questions,” said high school librarian Chelsea Hamilton. “My students don’t want to look for a story set in the West, for example. They’re asking for dystopian romance, morally complex characters who have forced proximity to enemies where they learn about life, and maybe those enemies become good guys or friends.”

​     “They might ask me, I’d like to read horror, but set in the Old West.” And then she grinned. “They specifically ask for angst and conflict, but with a touch of humor and maybe some history that will spark a desire to read more in that genre.”

​     Yes, six-shooters, saloons, and frontier justice still hold appeal. But younger readers didn’t grow up on Bonanza, Gunsmoke, or Rio Bravo. They grew up on Justified, Yellowstone, Red Dead Redemption, and Longmire—stories where moral ambiguity reigns and the heroes are often broken, reluctant, or on the edge of becoming villains themselves.

​     If your Western clings too tightly to outdated tropes, it risks reading like a museum piece instead of a living, breathing narrative.

​     “I’m a firm believer that a good story is a good story, no matter the genre,” says New York Times bestselling author Marc Cameron. “That said, as a reader of Westerns, I like to see plots where Good triumphs over Evil. No reader, but especially a Western reader, wants to be talked down to. A good Western—all good stories, really—should feel as though we’re sitting around a campfire with a reliable narrator—a favorite uncle, or our grandparent, who is recounting some adventure. Some uncles cuss a little more than others or add a little more bawdy spice, but the best ones speak to us on our level in our vernacular.”

​     The Old West wasn’t monolithic, and the modern Western shouldn’t be either. Readers are hungry for stories told from underrepresented perspectives—women, indigenous characters, Black cowboys, Latino vaqueros. These aren’t political statements or historical corrections; they’re factual, overlooked realities. Including them expands not only the authenticity of the story but also the range of people who see themselves reflected in the genre.

​     “We’re fortunate enough in the modern era that a lot of the unheard voices that have been marginalized over the centuries are now being validated,” says Craig Johnson, New York Times bestselling creator of the Longmire phenomenon. “It makes for a more varied and interesting storytelling technique. I don’t think it’s fair to re-write history, but you have to be sure and tell the entire story, and a good one. In western literature and history, it’s very easy to go down the gopher hole and forget important things like, Is the reader already aware of this? Is there another and more interesting way to tell this story in a way that hasn’t been done before?”

​     The most exciting Westerns being written today are hybrid animals. In Johnson’s Longmire novels, mystery meets cowboy grit in the form of Sheriff Walt Longmire. C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett books blend political thrillers with high-country suspense. Marc Cameron carries the same code north in his Arliss Cutter series, where a Deputy U.S. Marshal faces justice on the edge of the Alaskan frontier. Taylor Sheridan’s work folds in family drama, land disputes, and crime noir. The Western doesn’t have to stay in one lane. It thrives when it straddles several, keeping its boots dirty but its heart in the now.

​     “I firmly believe that genre is only a sales term the publishers use to pigeonhole books into marketable packages,” said Johnson in a recent interview with Saddlebag Dispatches. “There are only two genres: good books and bad books. The trick is reading the good ones and avoiding the bad. I like writing the books in layers, attempting to reach readers in every way possible.”

​     If your story is still focused on cattle rustlers and outlaw gangs, that’s fine, but make sure it’s saying something new. A strong emotional core, tight modern pacing, and deeper internal arcs can breathe life into even the most familiar setup.

The Western has always been a story about endings—about change, loss, survival, and the people stuck in the middle of it all. That part hasn’t changed. The trick now is to tell it like it matters again.

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Writing Craft That Speaks to Modern Readers

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​     This is where so many otherwise talented Western authors fall short. They're still relying on storytelling techniques that haven't evolved in decades. What worked for classic, genre-defining writers like Wister, Grey, and L'Amour in the golden age of Westerns don’t appeal to most modern audiences. Even the things that worked for Dusty Richards, Elmer Kelton, or Cotton Smith twenty or thirty years ago are now dated.

​     Young readers don’t know the West. When we said “this ain’t your grandaddy’s western,” we meant those old black and white days of early television horse operas. Good guys with a gun. Bad guys with black hats. But even then, young directors like Sam Peckinpah who directed The Westerner way back in 1960 saw the need for better storytelling. His scripts and settings dealt with… wait for it… angst and troubled characters. It was a groundbreaking TV series for that time and, unfortunately, arrived on the scene far too soon. He hadn’t yet figured out how to reach those who were looking for something different but didn’t know it.

​     If you want to reach younger readers—or even just hold the attention of modern adult readers—you need to bring your craft up to speed. While you can love and honor the classics, writers like Johnson, Morrell, Box, Cameron, Nevada Barr, Anne Hillerman, and—shameless plug—Reavis Z. Wortham, among others, should be your lodestars for writing in today’s evolving Western market.

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1. Deep POV is your new saddle.

     

     “As writers,” Marc Cameron says, “our job is to entertain and, to a lesser extent, teach (albeit slyly without letting anyone know they’re being taught.) Today’s readers have an endless supply of entertainment and information blasting them in the face like a firehose. I used to start at the ten thousand foot level and zoom in. Now, I generally start as if I’m looking the main character dead in the eye—whether they’re riding a horse, racing a motorcycle, or engaged in a running gunfight—and explore how their surroundings are affecting them. Then I allow myself to zoom out and give a little more description of where he or she is at that moment—through their lens.”

     If you’re still writing in omniscient third-person, you’re probably losing readers. Modern audiences want connection. They want to be the character, to get inside their heads, and not just watch them. That means deep third-person POV—or even first-person. Or better yet, learn from the master James Lee Burke and switch viewpoints when they are dictated by the story and characters. Get into your character’s skin. Let us feel their fear, anger, grit, or grief.

●       Eliminate head-hopping. Stick with one POV per scene or chapter.

●       Avoid italicized direct thoughts. Just write them in the narrative.

●       Keep tense consistent—present-tense thoughts in a past-tense novel are jarring.

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2. Show, don’t tell—or else.                                          

     Exposition, info-dumps, and “telling” readers what to feel don’t work anymore. If your writing reads like a Wikipedia entry, fix it.

●       Use action, dialogue, and internal reflection to convey emotion.

●       Let readers interpret what a character is feeling based on behavior and context.

●       Cut the narrator’s voice unless it's a first-person POV character.

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3. Dialogue needs to snap.

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     Your characters shouldn’t all sound the same, and they shouldn’t all speak in full sentences. You’re not writing a courtroom transcript. Craig Johnson’s bestselling Longmire novels are a masterclass in the use of dialogue. Just as in real life, each character is imbued with a unique way of speaking and expressing themselves.

     “Charles Dickens once said that to be a writer you have to be a student of human nature,” Johnson said. “I’ll take that a step further and say that you also have to be a student of language. Writing a novel is something like conducting a choral group, and before you begin, you have to know what voices it is that you need for this particular piece. The voices are the characters, and they are the ones telling the story, their voices providing the tone and rhythm the story creates. The old saying is that character is fate, and I might add that story is character.” 

     This not only enriches the story, it lends an authenticity that becomes so familiar, a reader will come to know the voice of a certain character without having to be told they’re speaking.

●       Give each character a distinct rhythm, vocabulary, and attitude.

●       Keep dialogue tags to a minimum, or even eliminate them altogether. Let the reader know who’s speaking through action and tone. Give your characters something to do in order to identify the speaker.

●       Don’t overuse names in dialogue—it sounds unnatural.

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4. Let the setting become a character.

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     Readers don’t just want to see the West—they want to feel it. Marc Cameron’s bestselling Arliss Cutter novels are set in Alaska, where climate and terrain play a starring role in every story. “I spent much of my career with the United States Marshals Service working in rural areas—Northeast Texas along the Oklahoma border, Northern Idaho along the Canadian border, and Alaska,” he explains. “Weather, terrain, and access routes played important roles in any operation. Very often, especially in Alaska, the weather is far more dangerous than the outlaw we happen to be hunting. [It] plays a much more important role when you experience more of it than merely walking between your house and a warm car.

     “A foot chase or fight at forty below… or ten below, for that matter… is far different than any fracas on a spring day. A fugitive hunt that crosses glacial rivers requires far more detailed logistical planning than a hunt in the city. It’s not just Alaska, though. Michael Connelly is brilliant in his use of Los Angeles as a character in the Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer novels.  Western readers are, in my experience, grounded to the land. Louis L’Amour often said if he wrote about a certain rock, a reader should be able to find that particular rock. I’ve been a tracker for much of my professional life and as such have had to be hyper-aware of the world around me. It’s fun for me to pass along the little things that, again, might slip by unnoticed had I not pointed them out—to show the reader what my characters are looking at and let them feel the same snow stinging their face.”

●       Use sensory detail: dust, heat, creaking leather, cold coffee, distant thunder.

●       Let the land shape your characters’ decisions and values.

●       Make isolation, weather, and geography active forces.

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5. Tropes aren’t sacred.

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     David Morrell sees the crossover method as a way of making contemporary stories feel timeless. “My novel, First Blood, is set in modern Kentucky but has the feel of a classic Western and the frequent theme of a gunfighter who isn’t allowed to hang up his guns,” he explains. “A stranger comes to town, looking for a place to settle. The local sheriff has suspicions about him and arrests him. A jailbreak leads to a chase into the mountains. In this case, the stranger (Rambo) escapes on a motorcycle, not a horse. In the end, the stranger returns to town and has a gunfight with the man who wouldn’t let him live peacefully.”

     If your hero rides into town in a white hat and cleans up the place with a six-gun, you better be doing something interesting with it.

●       Challenge the old archetypes—loners, damsels, stoic sheriffs.

●       Subvert expectations. Make the bad guy the town preacher. Let the outlaw be the voice of reason.

●       Ask yourself: have I seen this exact plot before? If so, change it.

●       There’s a new western feature film out, with sweeping photography and big name actors. Unfortunately, it’s the same old same old. Character One comes into town to regain possession of his family’s land that is now owned by the local bad guy sheriff. Come on!

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6. Flawed characters beat perfect ones.

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     “I think all interesting characters have some flaws,” says Cameron. “I’m not too big on anti-heroes. I want my heroes to be imperfect and real, but I want their mistakes to be of the head and not the heart. That said, I think modern audiences enjoy complex plots with complex motives. The ‘good’ guys and the ‘bad’ guys should both believe that they’re the ones on the right side of history.”

     In other words, nobody wants to read about a walking cliché. Perfect men with perfect morals in perfect hats don’t sell.

Craig Johnson agrees. “I think that if you’re going to write perfect characters, then you really need to be writing comic books or religious tracts—we’re all broken, we’re all imperfect, and I think that it’s in the way that you embrace those faults that make characters not only interesting, but believable. As the old saying goes—We like people for their virtues, but we love them for their faults. The two are totally entwined, and I can’t help but think that you can’t have one without the other.”

●      Give your characters weaknesses, blind spots, and regrets. Have them second guess themselves sometimes or find some quirk that appears over and over in the manuscript.

●      Make their growth real and hard-earned. How does your character feel? But for cryin’ out loud, don’t tell us your character is sad. Explain it through story and actions.

●      Let them make mistakes that matter.

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7. Keep it lean.

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     Word count matters more than ever. With production costs climbing, most publishers are looking for books in the 40k–70k range.

     “Understand the economy of words,” says George “Clay” Mitchell, Executive Publisher of Roan & Weatherford Publishing Associates, which has published multiple award-winning Westerns under its Hat Creek imprint. “Lean doesn’t mean thin. Lean means muscle. In a modern Western, every sentence, every line of dialogue should do work. They should move the reader, raise the stakes, deepen the scar. If a scene doesn’t change something in the character or the world, it’s just dust on the trail. Sweep it out. Leave only what kicks.”

     “Tony Hillerman once told me, ‘Don’t forget to tell a good story, Craig,’” says Johnson. “‘You’ve stripped enough green beans in rocking chairs and trailed after the ass-end of enough cattle to know a good story when you hear one. You can slow a story down, but there better be a reason for it rather than just padding a page-count to get a book written.’”

     David Morrell thinks of it “as choosing words in a novel with the same care that we choose words in a short story.”

●       Cut filler scenes that don’t move the plot or develop character.

●       Avoid long-winded descriptions. Choose one vivid detail instead of five.

●       If a scene isn’t pulling weight, kill it.

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8. There must be blood.

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     “The Northern Cheyenne have a saying,” says Johnson. “‘You judge a man’s strength by his enemies.’ I think the challenge is finding antagonists strong enough to go up against Walt [Longmire] but also believable and relatable enough for readers to find them as compelling as he is. I love it when readers write to me and say that they may not have liked a character, but they understand why it is that they did what they did. I think the antagonist has to be properly motivated, and as my ol’ buddy Tony Hillerman used to say, ‘You have to sit in all the chairs.’”

     Conflict and consequence are the lifeblood of modern storytelling. Don’t pull your punches.

●       Raise the stakes early. What happens if your hero fails?

●       Let violence have meaning. Don’t make gunfights cheap.

●       Endanger characters readers care about. Make them bleed.

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9. Know your audience.

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     Younger readers don’t want to read their granddad’s books. But they might read one that feels like a Western with a modern engine under the hood.

     “Our Western and Historical line is still actively seeking Western novels,” Mitchell says. “But we’ve moved past the straight Gunsmoke kind of storytelling that used to define the Classic Western. These days, the stories that stand out are crossovers—Western at heart, but with the muscle of other genres. A Western can ride through horror, science fiction, crime, or romance and still stay true to its roots. The setting doesn’t matter nearly as much as what the author’s trying to say.”

●       Embrace thematic relevance: justice, identity, land, legacy.

●       Write with moral complexity. Don’t spoon-feed lessons.

●       Consider crossover potential: Western/noir, Western/horror, Paranormal Western  (try Reavis Z. Wortham’s new release, Comancheria), or even sci-fi Westerns.

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10. Publishing in an Unforgiving Market

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     The publishing world isn’t easy right now, especially for Western authors. Most big houses aren’t biting, and the niche market’s crowded. But that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck.

     “Your name has to mean something,” says Mitchell. “Not because a publisher anointed you, but because you showed up and did the work where people could see it. You can’t build a brand in the dark. Drive your own cattle—send the stories out, read in public, talk to folks, let them know who you are and what you stand for.”

●       Focus on indie and hybrid publishing with dedicated Western audiences.

●       Build your own brand via newsletters, events, and social media—especially YouTube and TikTok, where BookTok is impacting sales.

●       Join anthologies and contests to boost discoverability.

●       Think about serialization—most younger readers consume fiction episodically. They ask authors and librarians specifically for stories that are part of a series, where they can build a relationship with a character or characters over the course of multiple books.

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Keep Riding. Just Train a New Horse.

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     The Western isn’t dying. It’s adapting, and so should we. The values at its heart haven’t changed—rugged individualism, survival against the odds, justice in a lawless land, and the complicated morality of right and wrong. As Mitchell puts it, “...The Western is an enduring symbol of the untamed frontier—dusty towns, rolling plains, stark deserts—where action, crime, and status collide and where themes of justice, morality, and survival play out in a uniquely American but universally human story.”

     What’s changing is how we tell the story. The craft has to evolve. The tropes have to stretch. The characters have to breathe. And most of all, the stories have to resonate with the people who pick them up today—not yesterday.

     And to the writers tempted to throw up their hands and blame the reader, consider this. Maybe the issue isn’t that modern audiences “don’t appreciate Westerns.” Maybe it’s that the genre hasn’t always given them a reason to. The burden of relevance is on us, the writers and the publishers. Readers don’t owe us their time—we have to earn it.

     We’ve seen the future of the Western, and it’s not one voice—it’s a chorus: traditional, contemporary, diverse, hybrid, strange, nostalgic, and gritty as hell. Westerns are making a comeback on the screen. Find where they’re heading and cut them off.

     If you’re writing Westerns today, don’t just ride the trail already blazed. Cut a new one. That’s how legends are made.

 

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The Authors

Casey W. Cowan is co-founder of Roan & Weatherford Publishing Associates and Saddlebag Dispatches magazine, and has served as publisher of Roan & Weatherford’s Western and Historical line for the past thirteen years. With over thirty years in journalism, publishing, and design, he continues to champion powerful storytelling that preserves and reimagines the American West.

 

New York Times bestselling author Reavis Z. Wortham has penned over twenty novels, most recently the paranormal Western Comancheria. His work has earned both critical and popular acclaim, as well as multiple Spur and Will Rogers Medallion Awards. A retired educator and sought-after speaker, Wortham now writes full time and lives in Texas with his wife.

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