Writing tips from a quartet of Texas greats

Considering how many books, magazine articles, television scripts they’ve written, listeners at the recent Authors LIVE! “Four Great Texas Writers” program featuring Texas writers H.W. Brands, S.C. Gwynne, Stephen Harrigan and Lawrence Wright understandably wondered how the foursome kept track of everything. What ultra-sophisticated program did they use? And by the way, can it help the rest of us as well?

For some, the answer is something as simple as . . . notecards.

OK, Brands admitted that after decades of teaching, he knows enough about most of his subjects (presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Reagan and Eisenhower, General Douglas McArthur, et al) to keep many of his notes in an even more low-tech system – his brain.

“I do the ‘60’s grad student thing,” said Lawrence, author of The Terror Years, Thirteen Days in September, Going Clear, The Looming Tower and more. “I use notecards. But,” he added, “you don’t put everything (from hours of interviews) on notecards. You must discriminate.”

“How do you file those notes,” Brands asked.

“In a file box with tabs – FBI, etc.,” Lawrence said. The material on those discriminating notecards, filed by subject, means that, “Implicitly, you’re already outlining your book.”

“Outlines, for or against,” Brands asked, turning to Gwynne (author of The Perfect Pass, Rebel Yell, and Empire of the Summer Moon).

“I do, implicitly,” Gwynne said.

“Stephen,” Brands said, turning to Harrigan (author of A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, Aransas, Eye of the Mammoth, Challenger Park and more), “outline, for or against?”

Since Harrigan’s works are historical rather than contemporary, his research tends to be from books, not interviews, and he makes notation from his reference material as he reads. But, “when I’m writing a book, it’s more improvisational.” And, he noted, it’s tempting for an author to become too involved with research. “Unless I start writing before I think I should, I’m never going to write the book. I have to break it up into chapters and dwell in that chapter until I find a way through.”

“I’m with Stephen on that,” Brands said. “I teach what I write. I’ve been teaching these three guys (19^th century senators Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the subjects of his work in progress) for 30 years. The easy part for me is to write the background. I know the broad story. What’s hard is, what the story line is within the broad picture.”

Given the work, and that these writers could find some other way to make a living (and usually have), why write at all?

“What is it about the craft of writing that gives you the greatest satisfaction?” Brands asked the group.

“I like having written,” Gwynne said. “Loving to write is not in my vocabulary. It’s a struggle and a pain.”

“I get great satisfaction in the end of a scene,” Brands said, but admitted, “I hate reading stuff that I’ve already written.”

“When people who most want to be writers stop writing,” Wright said, “it’s because they can’t take the frustration. But sometimes you break free and there’s this moment of flow.”

(Want more from writers about writing? See the Authors LIVE! site. The series continues February 2 with Will Schwalbe, author of Books for Living.)

A gathering of Texas literary giants in Dallas

The Authors LIVE! literary series opened its 2017 season last week with a bang – an appearance by four major Texas writers in a single evening. Lawrence Wright, Stephen Harrigan, S.C. Gwynne and H.W. Brands filled the stage on opening night of the series sponsored by Friends of the SMU Libraries, Friends of the Highland Park Libraries, and Highland Park United Methodist Church, and listeners filled the auditorium in Dallas.

And after major publications in 2016, what are they writing now? And how do they do it?

Brands, author of The General vs. The President among other works, acted as moderator for a discussion by the prolific, bestselling and critically-acclaimed group. But often no moderator was needed as the writers warmed to their conversation, beginning with a discussion of their current works.

Harrigan, the lone fiction writer in the group, confided that he’s turning to from historical novels, such as The Gates of the Alamo and 2016’s A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, to nonfiction in his work in progress, “a complete history of Texas from Cabesa de Vaca to Rick Perry on Dancing with the Stars.”

“Have you consulted Sam (Gwynne)?” Brands asked, in a reference to Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, a biography of Comanche war chief, Quanah Parker, and more recently, Rebel Yell and The Perfect Pass.

Not that everything has to be about Texas, it turned out.

Wright, fresh off 2016’s The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, has just submitted an article to The New Yorker. “My editor asked me to explain Texas,” he said. “He couldn’t imagine why I can live here. I reminded him that I get paid by the work, so I turned in 50,000 words.”

He’s also writing a script for HBO based on the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, facilitated by then President Jimmy Carter. Borrowing a page from Harrigan’s techniques, he imagined a fictional tour given by Carter of the nuclear command center of Camp David, the presidential retreat in rural Maryland.

“You don’t have foreign leaders in the command center,” Brands objected.

Maybe not now, but one did in fact happen during a term of President Eisenhower, Wright said.

“When you find something is too good a story, how much leeway do you give it,” Brands asked, perhaps not completely convinced.

“We’re trying to tell a story,” Harrigan said. “When you’re writing a fact-based story, you don’t make things up, but you (can) rearrange things to make it more interesting in the telling.”

Gwynne chimed in. For instance, he said, “I can decide when to begin my story, and when to bring my character on stage. I can move backward or forward in time. It’s not making things up, but it is using fictional techniques” to enhance the narrative.

“Talk about rearranging dates,” Harrigan said, “I start with Big Tex catching on fire” at the 2012 State Fair of Texas.

Big Tex? What happened to Cabeza de Vaca? Is Big Tex a prologue?

“Never call anything a prologue, because people will think they can skip it,” Gwynne said.

“I put a lot of weight into my prologues,” Wright said.

“Prologues are OK. I have forewords, introductions. I misspoke,” Gwynne said, possibly feeling a little left out because he’s the only one of the group who doesn’t regularly breakfast together at Austin’s Sweetish Hill bakery. Or maybe concerned because Wright knows so much about terrorism techniques from his work on The Terror Years and 2006’s The Looming Tower, about the 9/11 attacks.

“There are great writers who do it both ways,” Brands said, coming to the rescue, a role probably developed by years as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “But if you put too much stuff in the way of the readers, you lose them.”

(Later: now that they’ve written dozens of books and hundreds of thousands of words, how do they everything straight? The answers may be surprising. . . )