Stephen Harrigan - Interviews

The following chat discussion is brought to you in part by the support of the Texas Education Agency (http://www.tea.state.tx.us).

4empowerment: Welcome! We are so excited to present the opportunity to chat with best-selling Texas author, screenwriter, and journalist Stephen Harrigan. A former staff writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly, he has appeared in many other publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Conde Nast Traveler, and Life. Harrigan's sixth and best-selling novel The Gates of the Alamo was published in 2000. Some of the shows Harrigan has written for television include the award-winning The Last of His Tribe for HBO, the biopic entitled Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder for CBS, and the Western King of Texas for TNT (starring Patrick Stewart), which is based upon Shakespeare's King Lear. Also, Harrigan is a scuba diver and has woven his diving experiences into two of his novels.

4empowerment: Have questions about how to construct a great story? Wonder what kind of process it takes to create an entire novel? Ask Stephen Harrigan what career path he took to become a well-established writer.

Stephen Harrigan: I'm very happy to be here. And I'm eager to answer any questions you have.

Velvet: What is the best advice you ever got for writing?

Stephen Harrigan: Telling a story is all about conflict and clarity, so the best advice was to make sure the main character's motives are clear and there is a discernible goal that he or she is after.

Lindsay: The fictional characters of Mary Mott and Ed McGowan are wonderfully detailed - were any of their characteristics based on people you know? If not, how do you develop such depth?

Stephen Harrigan: In Edmund's case, there were a number of botanists and natural historians who were working in Texas around the time of the Texas revolution who were real people. I took some of their experiences and observations, and in a few cases their personal traits, and worked them into the fictional entity of Edmund McGowan. But basically, he and Mary were fictional creations, and not consciously based on any particular person I know. They just sort of sprung out of my imagination somehow. I'm sure it's true with most novelists that your characters tend to be in some way pieces of yourself. In other words, there are 5 or 6 main characters in the book and each one, whether good or evil, is a fragment of my own personality.

Sandy: Since your book "Comanche Midnight," would you say there has been an improvement in conditions for the contemporary Commanche?

Stephen Harrigan: I have to honest and say I don't know. That piece in that book was written quite some time ago, and I have since moved on to other subjects as a writer, and haven't had time to see how the conditions for the Comanche are now as opposed to ten years ago. I would have to defer to someone who is an authority on how the Comanche are today.

Simon: Stephen, you have written a few teleplays. How difficult is the transition to plays, and where is the focus placed when writing a teleplay as opposed to a novel?

Stephen Harrigan: A teleplay or screenplay is almost entirely about action, as opposed to reflection or language or interesting details that you might want to inform the reader about. It's sort of breathtaking how singular the demands of a movie are. It's difficult as a novelist or a poet or an essayist to understand how marginal the "writing" is in some ways. It's a difficult thing to get used to, that a movie is not about writing; it's about action, about imagining scenes and the order in which they take place, far more than it is about writing dialogue or scene description.

Rio Grande College: What do you believe the most authentic Alamo movie that has been made?

Stephen Harrigan: This is a fascinating question, since I am a scholar of Alamo movies! All Alamo movies, by their very nature, are terrible. But the one that has so far escaped the curse is the IMAX movie that is shown in the River Center Mall, called "Alamo - The Price of Freedom." It's only 40 minutes long, and I think is in a separate category from the other Alamo movies because it's not intended for a vast public, but just for the people who visit the Alamo. But I think it's the most historically accurate. It's the only one in which the final battle takes place, as it did historically, in nightfall rather than broad daylight. And it makes a fair-minded attempt to tell the story, to some degree, from both sides. Of all the other dreadful Alamo movies, my favorite is "The Last Command" for reasons I can't quite explain. Certainly the best-known most historically inaccurate Alamo movie is John Wayne's "The Alamo," which is wrong in almost every detail.

Raven: What is a typical working day for you? Are you structured in the time you allot to writing?

Stephen Harrigan: Yes, I'm structured in the time I allot to writing in that I give over the entire day to writing or working on projects. But every day tends to be different, because I'm typically working on more than one project at once. Usually, I'm always working on a novel, and that tends to be the constant background against which I do everything else. So a "typical" day would be working on a screenplay during the morning, say; researching another screenplay for the future for a couple of hours in the afternoon; and writing on my novel for 2-3 hours every day, either in the late afternoon or at night.

Sharpsberg: Do you always know the ending of your book, or are you sometimes surprised as to the outcome?

Stephen Harrigan: It's important for me to have a vague and at times very vague idea of the ending of the book. I need to know, to some degree, where I'm headed, but I don't want to know so specifically that I foreclose the possibility of surprising myself along the way. So for me, it's a kind of balancing act between keeping myself ignorant of what's going to happen, and knowing there is a sort of secure point I'm trying to reach.

Cat: Stephen, your book "Water and Light" was of your experiences diving the Grand Turk Islands - was this location chosen for any particular reason?

Stephen Harrigan: Yes, it was chosen because it was the only location I could afford. I had the offer of a free place to stay, and I had a relatively small advance on the book and needed to make the money stretch as long as possible. I was there for about two months, diving every day. It turned out that Grand Turk was an inspired choice, because there was not much happening above the surface, so I could focus almost all my attention on what was going on underwater.

Sam: Can you remember your first dive? What was it that drew you to this pastime and would you say that it was the first dive that had you hooked?

Stephen Harrigan: I remember very well my first dive. It was in a YMCA swimming pool! And it did have me hooked. There was something amazing to me about being and remaining underwater, even in a place where there was almost literally nothing to see except the bottom of the pool, and other people's flailing limbs. My first real dive was in Cozumel, Mexico, and it was the first time I had ever seen clear water in my life and I was completely overwhelmed by the notion that there was an entire world that was visible, with all sorts of strange and unreal properties.

Roma love: When writing your books, do you sketch out the plot and then fill in the detail, or do you just develop characters and then let the story just unfold while writing it?

Stephen Harrigan: I tend to do both. As I said before in an earlier question, I have a sketchy understanding of the course of the book, and then it becomes up to the characters to take me through these events. As they become clearer to me--and they only become clearer thought writing--they tend to predict or determine what the book is about and where it's headed. It's important to allow yourself to be surprised by unexpected turns that your characters may take. It's very common for me to introduce a minor character that I haven't thought about much who becomes a powerful driving force in the novel.

Greg E: What/who were some of your favorite books/authors when you were young?

Stephen Harrigan: When I was a kid, I read a lot of Hardy Boys books. In high school, when I was trying to be a little more discriminating, I tended to read a lot of historical fiction, especially Kenneth Roberts who wrote "The Northwest Passage." Later, when I really started taking literature seriously, my favorite writers were Herman Melville (I think "Moby Dick" is one of, if not the greatest novel ever), Hemingway, Flaubert, Willa Cather, and a number of recent novelists like Wallace Stegner and my most recent favorite is Patrick O'Brian. I've read all 20 of his Aubrey/Maturin novels.

Wendy: If you were not writing, what would you like to be doing?

Stephen Harrigan: I can think of a number of things I'd like to be doing, but only in the context of wanting to write about them. Archaeology, a trial attorney sometimes...but these things interest me because they're such fascinating things to write about, but I don't seem to be able to think about anything without that echo of writing about them. So I guess, in answer to your question, I'd be at a loss if I weren't writing. Diving fascinates me, I love diving and hiking and going to movies. There are many things I'd be thrilled to do pretty much all day long. But I think it's probably true of writers and actors, etc. that the thrill resides in being able to communicate about it and without the communication, these things would not be as interesting.

Dandy: What was the first teleplay you wrote? Are we to see more teleplays in the future?

Stephen Harrigan: The first television movie I ever wrote was called "The Last of his Tribe." It was the true story of Ishi, the last "wild" Indian in North America. It was produced by HBO in 1992 and starred Jon Voight and Graham Greene. Since then, I've written over a dozen television movies and had them produced. Two will be shown this year. One is a sequel to an earlier movie about Laura Ingalls Wilder that CBS aired a year ago, and the other is a movie for TNT starring Patrick Stewart and Marcia Gay Harden called "King of Texas." It's a Western retelling of Shakespeare's "King Lear," and it will be shown sometime in 2002.

Dembo: "The Gates of the Alamo" was obviously well researched. How long did the research take for this book?

Stephen Harrigan: It took me 8 years to research and write the book. It was a long time! But I spent 2 years researching before I started writing, and I never stopped researching as I wrote; not just about what happened at the Alamo, which is perpetually in dispute and will never be fully solved, but it was also important to convey a sense of the time in which these events took place. To do that, you have to know all kinds of weird stuff, such as when somebody puts their hands in their pockets, where are the pockets? Are the pockets in their pants? In their waistcoats? Are pants even called pants, or are they called pantaloons? You have to search for period expressions, and understand the entire social context of the time. You're always looking for little nuggets of historical detail that are not always easy to come across.

Soso: 8 years to research! How do you keep the enthusiasm going?

Stephen Harrigan: That wasn't a problem, because the subject was an obsession. Ever since I was a little kid, I'd been fascinated by the Alamo, and I knew since the age of 14 that I wanted to write a novel about it. The deeper into the subject I got, the more fascinated I became. And for me, that's true with any novel I undertake. If I start getting bored with it after 8 years, it's probably not something I should have been writing about in the first place!

Mr. Peabody: Do you ever get writer's block? If so, how do you deal with it?

Stephen Harrigan: Writer's block is caused by not having enough information about your subject, I think. It's not because you're afraid to write, or because you've lost your gift; it's because you don't know the people you're writing about, you've lost focus on who they are, you've written yourself out of your comfort zone and you're beyond the range of what you understand. For me, the cure for writer's block has always been research. If the world I'm writing about starts to feel static, it's because I'm not fully engaged in it, I've slacked off. The only way to get cranking again for me is to learn more about the people and the world I'm writing about; to be active rather than passive. My own personal understanding of writer's block is that it's kin to depression, and I think depression is a passive condition, a deflated condition. The only way out of it is activity and forward movement. So writing is the only cure for writer's block, and if you can't bring yourself to fully engage with the writing itself, go out and interview people. If you have a scene in a factory, go out and see the factory and talk to people who work there. Make yourself work toward the goal of finishing the book in whatever form you can.

Rosenator: Who or what inspires you as a writer today?

Stephen Harrigan: I honestly don't know what inspires me. Inspiration, to some degree, comes from repetition. I've been writing long enough that I have a certain professional pride in what I do and an audience that expects a certain standard. It's holding myself to that standard, and just wanting to be active that keeps me doing it. It's like training for an athletic event or going to the gym every day--you start to crave it because your body and your mind are used to it. It's when you fall out of the patterns that you become vulnerable to things like writer's block.

Stephen Harrigan: As for who inspires me, I'm not sure there's a specific answer to that. I think creative endeavor requires you to inspire yourself. There are certainly inspirational people and stories out there, and yet I think it's a mistake to try to specifically emulate them. Sometimes real stories inspire me, as does reading about real people. But as a writer, it all rests on your shoulders--you're the one who has to get up in the morning and write. I don't believe in anything like a "Muse." As you do the work of filling a computer screen each day, you discover the part of yourself that can be has created a muse. You discover the clarity that only comes from hacking your way through a disorienting jungle of words.

Jad: Have you always lived in Texas and what do you think are the greatest selling points for the State?

Stephen Harrigan: I was born in Oklahoma, but have lived in Texas since I was 5. What's great about Texas, and what can be obnoxious about Texas is that it has a powerful sense of its own history and identity. This can grate on people from other parts of the country, but it provides a very strong sense of belonging to people who have lived here most or all of their lives.

Sweloquent: Agents...love em? Hate em?

Stephen Harrigan: I love my agent, which is fortunate because I think agents can be a problem. I have one of the great agents of all time. Agents are, in my experience, a necessary part of doing business with the New York publishing world. It's set up that way. I also have a movie agent that I'm very fond of, who I've been with for many years. There, agents are even more necessary. I think agents are often caricatured as soulless, bottom-line opportunists. But in my happy experience, they are comrades in the endeavor of trying to formulate what it is you want to say as a writer.

Mackie: Where is it best to start researching for historical facts?

Stephen Harrigan: I always start with a kind of biography or narrative history of the time I'm researching. Then I go directly to the bibliography of the book, to look for the more specific sources that can tell you in greater detail the things you need to know. I've found it's very important not to trust any biography or history on its face because the sources are often contradictory or spurious. So it's necessary to double check the authors and their interpretations.

Stephen Harrigan: For me, one of the most valuable tools as a researcher is children's books, because if you're researching the life of Ancient Rome, for instance, there are picture books that tell you much of what you want to know--what people's houses looked like, what they wore, what they ate--and those are the very things it's often difficult to find in a vast sweeping history. Of course you have to check everything, but these pictures are a starting point. It's always good to read Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," but if you want to find out how people held up their togas, you won't find it. You're better off with a sixth-grade level picture book.

Stephen Harrigan: It's also important to go back to the primary sources, and to make your own decisions about what they're saying and how reliable they are. In the case of writing about the Alamo, this was crucial since there's such a wide variance in opinion about whether the sources are even legitimate. One of the major historical documents about the Alamo that historians have used for years is subject to an open debate about whether it's a forgery. So you have a sense of perspective and experience to be able to make those decisions for yourself.

Albatross: How did you get to where you are now, as a successful writer?

Stephen Harrigan: I began writing with no real expectation of writing as a career because I didn't know that was even possible. I think sometimes it's a mistake for people to expect too much that way. I've always wanted, more than anything else, to be a novelist, until I realized it was not possible to make the kind of living I needed to make and support a family on the erratic and puny income of a novelist. So I began my career as a yard man, mowing lawns. I was a yard man who wrote poetry in his spare time, then I became a yard man who wrote magazine articles in his spare time. Eventually I was making enough writing freelance magazine articles that I could give up mowing yards. But as a magazine writer and later as a movie writer, I was frustrated that I couldn't concentrate full time on writing fiction, which is what I wanted to do. One of the lessons of being 52 years old is that all the things you resented doing in your life turn out to be the things you most needed to do to get where you are! So I think it's a mistake for someone to think of a writing career as having a clear trajectory, of a specific goal-oriented stratagem. Authors tend to be successful mostly by virtue of a combination of factors, the most important of which is how badly they want to do it, and how the pursuit of that goal sort of underlies almost every other aspect of their lives.

Steffi: What would you like to be doing 5 years from now?

Stephen Harrigan: I'd be very happy to be doing what I'm doing now. It feels right to me to always be working on a novel, and to always be working on a screenplay of one sort of another. I'd like to be more focused on fiction than screenwriting but I think it's good for me to work in different genres because it keeps me fresh and alert and aware that in fiction, for instance, a certain amount of narrative velocity is not bad thing. That is a lesson I learned in years of writing screenplays.

Matt: Any words of encouragement for a budding journalist? How to get my foot in the door and how to make my work stand out?

Stephen Harrigan: Get your foot in the door by not waiting for somebody to give you an opportunity, but taking the initiative and going out and writing things--short magazine or newspaper pieces, even if you don't have an assignment to do it. Go interview people, see things, write them up, and send them to your local alternative newspaper or whatever you have in your town that's most receptive to freelance writers. It's important not to be discouraged by editors and your own ineptitude and inexperience, because what makes a journalist "happen" is curiosity and an active engagement with the outside world, rather than with your inside thoughts, and the craft of telling a story. All of this can be, to some extent, learned or at least refined. I would tell a budding journalist to be prepared for not just months, but years of abject frustration. A period during which the only person who believes in yourself is you. It's very, very hard to get the attention of the people whose attention you want. Nobody bestows anything on you, nobody comes after you until they see that you are somebody they want to be in business with. So you have to create yourself as a commodity, and that is something that is a result of just not giving up.

Robbie: Do you have another book in the pipeline? Can you share it with us?

Stephen Harrigan: Yes, I'm working on a novel set in the space program about the lives of astronauts and people who work at NASA. The working title is "NASA Road One" which is the name of the street in Clear Lake City, TX that is NASA's address.

4empowerment: Stephen, sadly our time is up this morning. You've been a terrific guest. Any final comments before we close for the day?

Stephen Harrigan: Only that it's been very satisfying to answer such interesting questions. I wish everyone out there who has an interest in being a writer the best of luck. It's all about perseverance.

4empowerment: Thank you for joining this fascinating discussion! Now that Stephen Harrigan has revealed some of the mysteries of writing, don't forget to watch the 4empowerment website for new info on topics ranging from film to water sampling to literature and more!

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