I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.
Dont bring a candlelight vigil to a gunfight
How is it that I could run into a gunfight against overwhelming odds and put myself between bullets and civilians, but I couldn't scrape together enough courage to speak to the one person who mattered the most to me?
Westerns aren't about the gunfight, even though it has to be there at one point. It's not what they're about, at least the good ones. It's about the drama. It's about the resourcefulness of men and women.