Even Experts Make Mistakes

I’ve been reading The Anatomy of Story by John Truby, one of the most respected gurus of story craft in the film industry, and now sought out by novelists as well. He has an overall method for how to study and write stories that takes into account story structure, character, theme (which he calls moral argument), story world, symbols, and plot. There’s lots more, but that’s the basics.

One of the more interesting concepts, although obvious when you think about it, is that different genres emphasize different pieces of this story generation, and so in each section, he gives examples from works (which have often been novels before they were screenplays, with sometimes a stage play between those two) in the genre or genres that apply to that piece.

In what he calls the “symbol web” section, one of the genres he cites as being strongest in this area is the Western, which of course, immediately drew me in. I started salivating over getting important information that I could use in my next Cactus Cowboys story. But then, in the second paragraph, he wrote:

“The heyday of the Western genre was from about 1880 to 1960. So this story form has always been about a time and place that was already past, even when it first became popular.”

Uh, sorry, John, that’s not true.

Oh, not the bit about the time when Westerns were most popular, although I could make an argument that with TV shows like Yellowstone and its spinoffs, we may just be entering the second golden age of the Western, but the western era had not passed in Arizona. In the Arizona Territory, it was the Wild West until at least 1909. That was the last year the Arizona Rangers existed as a law enforcement group. There’s still a version of the Arizona Rangers today, but it mostly acts as a police auxiliary.

You see, there were cattle rustlers and train robbers, and the ranchers and businessmen prevailed upon Governor Nathan Oakes Murphy to form a group modeled on the Texas Rangers to get the lawlessness under control. He was further persuaded by the fact that Arizona statehood might never become a reality as long as the situation remained as it was.

And so, in 1901, Governor Murphy authorized the formation of the Arizona Rangers. They fought the bad guys until 1909, on horseback with six-guns and a badge. (Yes, those are three of the symbols characteristic of the Western.) Finally, in February of 1912, Arizona became the 48th state.

I think this points out how easy it is to get something wrong in a novel, or maybe how hard it is to get things right. I’ve lived in Arizona for a dozen years, and over time, learned a lot more about it than I ever would have if I still lived in the Northeast.

I could have been the novelist who wrote about a Texas town where there were saguaro cacti growing. From my visits to the Desert Museum, I learned early on that saguaros only grow in the Sonoran Desert, which is an area of land in southern Arizona and northern Mexico. It needs the unique climate and altitude of this desert to survive. But it’s become such an iconic symbol of the Western, I’m sure there’s more than one author who’s made that mistake.

Something I learned on my visit to Empire Ranch was that a good number of ranches in this period were owned by Mexicans. Do you remember hearing about the Gadsden Purchase in history class? Yeah, it wasn’t a big deal to me, either, when I had to memorize stuff like the date for tests. That was 1854, in case you don’t remember. (I didn’t either and had to look it up.) The city of Tucson was part of Mexico then. What I remember about that section of history class was that it was under “Manifest Destiny”, and the U.S. thought taking over land from sea to shining sea was its right. But what I found now was that the motivation for buying that chunk of land was to enable the construction of a railroad. In other words, it was more of a commercial venture than a political one.

The people who lived here didn’t always think of the land as two separate countries. Before the current border problem, people traveled freely back and forth shopping, visiting relatives, and even getting medical care (because it was cheaper in Mexico). It’s still common for family members to travel over the border on holidays to celebrate.

And, since it obviously wasn’t important to those drawing up the land transfer papers, the Tohono O’odham reservation is sliced in two by that border. It’s one of the problems with building the border wall, as well as being a huge stretch of mostly unpopulated land where illegals cross.

Even though, or maybe especially since, I’ve learned so much about my adopted home state in the time I’ve lived here, I still worry about getting things wrong in my novels. I do promise to try to make them as accurate as possible, with author notes at the end to explain where I’ve slightly altered the facts to suit the story, but I can’t promise I’ll ever get everything right.