Wordcraft -- So you want me to make you a writer?

Don’t ask Clay Reynolds to go all mealy-mouthed about the writing business. “A lot of what I have to say is not going to be very positive,” he told his audience at this month’s meeting of the Writers’ Guild of Texas. “I’ve been doing this for some time and the last thing I would want to do is mislead anybody just starting out.”

When he says “doing this for some time,” he’s not joking. He’s been writing (and teaching writing, and talking about writing, and writing about writing) for more than 30 years. He’s a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas (where he’s Dr. R. Clay Reynolds), a writer with nearly a thousand publications to his credit, including award-winning novels and short stories. In addition, he consults with writers, although I’d recommend reading his “so you want me to make you a writer” page at www.clayreynolds.info before daring to approach him.

There are, he told his audience, six basic avenues for publishing: commercial publishing in the United States, which he referred to as New York publishing “although a lot of it is no longer in New York”; commercial publishing outside the U.S.; university press/small press publishing; print on demand (POD) and e-publishing houses; online publishing; and self-publishing.

Although Reynolds stated that only about 20 percent of current books are published by the large houses, he concentrated on them because of the advantages they provide to authors. “They actually pay for books, they pay before a book is published, and their books are generally reviewed somewhere.” In addition, large publishers generally keep books in print about 12 months and are able to keep them on shelves in bookstores about eight to 12 months. Similar benefits apply to books published by large European publishing houses, but these are not generally reviewed in U.S. media.

Unfortunately, those big publishing outlets are becoming fewer. When he began writing fiction, there were 60 major U.S. publishing houses. Now there are six, and four of those are actually owned by non-U.S. corporations. University presses and non-university small presses are also dwindling. (Three large presses that describe themselves as university presses¾ Oxford, Harvard, and Cambridge¾ Reynolds explained, are now affiliated with the big six publishers.) Outside of the large publishing houses, marketing and publicity for books depends almost entirely on the author. And even within the big six, “author development, the carrying of marginal writers, disappeared by the end of the 1980’s” when big bookstores started marketing book like groceries.” From what he sees, this state of affairs is only going to continue.

Which raises the question: “Why do you want to do this? If you’re doing it for the money or fame, you’re in the wrong business.”

In case he hadn’t scared everybody away yet (although all of us hearing Reynolds speak had gotten very, very quiet), he went on to talk about what to do with any money an author might earn. “Everybody needs an agent. Without an agent, your chance of receiving commercial publication is nil. Agents effectively are clearing houses.”

The good part? “You don’t have to pay an agent until the book sells. Honest agents are not hard to find,” with listing in such publications as Literary Market Place,
www.literarymarketplace.com/. Book fairs and conventions are also good places to meet agents, he noted. (For more about upcoming Texas writing conventions with agents in attendance, see www.writersleague.org and http://dfwcon.org/.)

“Writing’s a funny business,” Reynolds mused. “You can write the best book in the world and nobody will buy it. You can write the worst book and it may become a best seller. Write from the heart and write honestly. Don’t pull punches. Don’t plan to give me a shock, don’t plan to make me laugh, don’t plan to make me cry¼ and you just might do it.”

Wordcraft -- Books and a life in review

Among the many joys of books are reading them and talking about them. Both, however, require some mental effort. And despite recent rain, the dog days of summer are not the easiest time to exert mental effort. Fortunately, for days when it’s too hot to do anything book related, there’s the wonderful Texas tradition of listening to other people review books they’ve read. It’s a tradition especially wonderful when the reviewers are both knowledgeable and entertaining.

I’m referring especially to The Rejebian Summer Series, sponsored on Wednesdays in June and July by Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas. Last week I attended the series for the first time, to hear University of Texas at Dallas professor Clay Reynolds discuss two recent books about President Eisenhower, Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower: In War and Peace, and Evan Thomas’s Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World.

That’s Dwight D. Eisenhower, the seldom mentioned Republican president of “I Like Ike” fame. A man with the kind of slogan that would be sneered at nowadays, with no blame, no finger pointing, not even an obvious political agenda.

Who was this man? “A shape shifter” who deliberately chose to appear older than his age, deliberately chose to appear befuddled, Reynolds said, to deflect attention from his agendas.

Without having ever belonged to a political party, Eisenhower won the presidency as a Republican, then killed the hundreds of bills initiated by fellow Republicans to dismantle the New Deal programs of his Democratic predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. Without ever having fired a rifle in combat, Eisenhower became one of America’s greatest war heroes but “not one (uniformed) American died in combat during the eight years he was president,” Reynolds said.

Ike’s accomplishments included the interstate highway system (after realizing the military implications of Germany’s autobahn), presiding over the racial integration of schools, and enforcing pre-existing laws about integration of the U.S. military, despite his personal disagreement with such laws.

His failures included his inability to establish a public health care system and obtain the détente with the Soviet Union he desperately wanted.

And in Eisenhower’s personal life, he failed to secure a future with the woman he was willing to divorce his wife for, his wartime driver Kay Summersby. In a bizarre twist, Eisenhower refused a request from Harry Truman to run for president as a Democrat -- but not because he hated Democrats. Instead, Reynolds said, his falling out with Truman occurred at least partly because he believed Truman had a copy of a letter sent to Eisenhower by George C. Marshall. The letter from Marshall, the man who had mentored Eisenhower, threatened him with court martial if he divorced his wife to marry Summersby. (The revelation that Eisenhower was ready to destroy his long-term marriage was a revelation that drew some “say it ain’t so” gasps and questions from Reynolds’ audience.)

Eisenhower was also “an inveterate gambler who had to quit playing poker because he was winning all the money of his subordinates.” He turned instead to bridge.
But his biggest bluff wasn’t with cards. The big bluff, the one that inspired the title of one of his biographies, was that of the ultimate weapon he wielded: “If you have the power to destroy the world, you have to know if you’d do it,” Reynolds said. But it’s a decision that can never be shared. Not even with those closest and dearest.

#

If not for a continuing schedule conflict, I’d have written sooner about the Rejebian Summer Series, inspired by the book clubs of Armenian-American reviewer (and longtime Dallas resident) Ermance Rejebian. The series continues through July 31. It’s free, with free parking at the church and in the parking garage of the neighboring Meadows Museum. For information, see www.hpumc.org/rejebian/.

The books Reynolds mentioned are available in the Dallas Public Library system. For more about Reynolds and his work, see www.clayreynolds.info/.