Ep. 98: Writing Texas History with James L. Haley

Wise About Texas

Ken Wise

Texan, Places & Travel, Education, Texas, Cowboy, History, Society & Culture, Culture, Jacinto, Texans, San

5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2021

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

James L. Haley is one of Texas' finest writers. He has written a preeminent biography of Sam Houston, an award winning narrative history of Texas called Passionate Nation as well as several works of fiction, also very highly regarded. But we Texans take our history very seriously, so writing historical fiction about Texas can be a risky endeavor. James Haley delivers. His latest work is a naval adventure series featuring American naval officer Bliven Putnam. In the fourth book, Captain Putnam takes on a secret mission for the Republic of Texas during its fight for independence. I talked Mr. Haley into sitting down and discussing his writing process, research process, writing historical fiction versus history, as well as other topics around his work. Enjoy this interview with award winning author James L. Haley in the latest episode of Wise About Texas.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Howdy and welcome the Wise About Texas, the award winning Texas History Podcast. I'm your host Ken Wies. Thanks for
0:14.4	tuning in today for some Texas history. I'm releasing this podcast on March 2nd
0:19.4	2021. That is the 185th anniversary of Texas Independence, so happy Independence Day.
0:26.3	To everybody, I've got a very special episode for you on this Texas Independence Day.
0:31.8	If you're listening to this podcast, you likely agree with me that Texas history is not just important, but it's also exciting, it's unique, frankly, it's fun.
0:41.0	The stories of Texas history are also just great stories, you know, the old
0:48.6	saying, the truth is stranger than fiction, well nowhere is that more correct than in Texas history. But since the actual history of Texas has so many great
0:58.3	characters and plot lines if you use Texas history as a basis for historical fiction, it gets even better.
1:06.0	But writers have to be careful.
1:08.0	If you start messing with the true stories of Texas history, you are most certainly going to hear about it. But if you're
1:14.9	skilled enough to let the history drive a great story, you end up with some
1:19.5	absolutely wonderful works and there have been some spectacular historical fiction centered
1:24.5	around Texas history and of course there have been some big misses too.
1:27.3	So what would you look for if you were to pick a writer to engage in a quest to write historical fiction around Texas history.
1:36.8	Well, how about somebody that can not only write great history, but they can also write great
1:42.3	fiction? Well, we're lucky. Texas has great writers
1:45.4	and one of its best is James L. Haley. Jim Haley grew up in Fort Worth he
1:51.5	graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington and he
1:53.8	spent some time at UT law school in Austin, but lucky for us he decided to
1:58.1	pursue writing instead of law. And he's written, I want to say 20 books and I hope
2:02.4	that number is correct.
2:03.2	He's won multiple awards. He's won the prestigious Spur Award from the Western
	...

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