Writing group at the senior center

This looks nothing like the writing group I go to.

I can't imagine anyone being interested in this, but, in the writing group I go to, I finally stopped writing about movies. I've written fiction the last two times. Westerns. I've managed to do it with all the violence off-screen so to speak. They're pretty much all-dialog.

I probably shouldn't write it all in Western dialect. In real Westerns, characters talk like normal people. Ignorance, sexism and distorted 19th century morals probably aren't as amusing as I think. I wanted to have a teenager as a continuing character but it's not that easy to wedge a 14-year-old into a story. But I think I've done pretty well keeping an even mix of male and female characters. I worry that expressions of sexism will be considered sexist rather than reflecting the different time. And I've avoided it, but I'm afraid I'll sound like a gun enthusiast if I talk about guns or show any knowledge of them.

The thing is that I've always disliked Westerns. Even when I was four or five, when Westerns were big on TV, when kids played freely with toy guns, I didn't like them. The ugly clothes, the ugly towns, every man a moron with a gun. Why would anyone want to ride a horse or live in the desert? I could see what they were doing to the horses. I could tell whether they were using trip wires or if they were trained to fall. 

Having no respect for the genre gives you a feeling of freedom while writing.

Here's what attracts me to it: There are scenes and other elements I want to steal from foreign films, but the only way to put them in an American setting is to make them into westerns. I never thought Samurai movies made into Westerns worked very well, but there was a movie I just saw set in present day rural China that I'd like to steal from. I haven't done it. No one would notice, but I don't want to blatantly steal it.

In one scene, a man is talking to his doctor. The doctor comments that he hasn't been sick in years and wonders why he got sick now. The man says that the only people who don't get sick are the dead. The doctor thinks it's a ridiculous statement because how would anybody get sick if they were dead?

In another scene, a kid is alone in a house. His uncle comes to the door. The kid lets him in. "Why was the door locked?" The kid says that his father went somewhere and told him there was a Wild Man loose in the area. "He just said that to scare you so you wouldn't leave," the uncle said. The kid doesn't want to eat the food in the house so the uncle takes him out to get something.

There was the Russian movie, Okraina (The Outskirts),  the Italian movie, Night of the Shooting Stars, scenes from Japanese juvenile delinquency films, Luis Bunuel movies. There were some scenes from a Ukrainian movie I liked even though the movie itself was pro-fascist. 

I think the real trick with a Western would be to create a situation where killing people is the only possible solution to the problem.