An Interview With

Victor Banis

Have fun.

See, somewhere down there, you're going to ask me if there is one piece of advice I always offer other writers, and that's it.

Oh, yes, I like to tell them to always give it their best shot, and for the most personal of reasons – because there is simply no real self satisfaction in doing anything half-assed, and if you do it right, you'll be happy with yourself when you crawl into bed at night, and so will save yourself a fortune in sleeping pills. I know.

But, the big thing, the most important, is, have fun. Writing is hard work, much harder than a non-writer could imagine, and if you're serious about it, you have to treat it like a job. But if that's all it's going to be, and you're not going to have fun while you're doing it, you might as well be sawing lumber or washing cars or whatever it is that you really enjoy. The day goes by, and that's it, it isn't coming back. After a while, a lot of them have gone by. See, I'm 72, or will be so close to it when this comes out as to not matter. I can tell you for sure, you do not want to get to this point in life and look back over your shoulder, and see nothing behind you but a trail of wasted minutes. Make some of them count, as many as you can. Have fun.

Also, you're going to ask about my career. I've been writing all my life, professionally since 1963, though I took about 20 years off. Too long a story to get into here, we'd be all night, and I don't do all nighters anymore. I've written just about everything, including restroom walls. I don't know how many books; I stopped counting, but I have about 150 on my personal shelf, and there are quite a few that aren't there, so 160 would be a safe guess.

But, wait, this was supposed to be an interview, not a monologue. Okay, your turn? But don't be surprised if I start dancing. My plan here is to enjoy myself. You can party too if you like, but don't stand on my train while I'm twirling.

ME: What is your approach to writing a novel: that is, do you outline or not?

VB: I'm not sure anymore that I even know what I do, or how. It's like driving a car, when you start out, you have to think about everything, but after a while, it's all automatic. Let's see, I don't as a rule do an actual outline; I have a starting point, and the finish line; often, I write the end of the book first, so I know where I'm going with it. And I have a sort of sense of how I'm going to get there, but I leave that pretty loose, and often the route turns out to be quite different from what I had planned. I just sit down and start writing. Somehow, I get where I was going, but I don't always know how.

ME:Do you keep files and piles of notes?

VB: Not really. Again, I do most of it in my head. If I'm writing historical fiction, I will have more notes, and reference books lying around on the floor (I'm not very neat and I don't have much furniture) so I can check details. I'm a very intuitive, and often impulsive writer. I can be doing something entirely different, peeling onions, say, or eavesdropping on the neighbor's quarrel (other people's quarrels are a fabulous source of inspiration; mine are less fun) and an idea will pop into my head for a line, or a bit of dialogue or description, and I run to the computer and put it in. While I'm working on a ms., it sometimes resembles a crazy quilt. Eventually, though, I get it all sewn together.

ME: What are some of the tricks, pitfalls, etc. that you need to keep in mind when writing in different genres (e.g. mystery, romance)?

VB: I don't think I write differently with different genres. That is to say, I don't think my writing process is much different. I still want a strong opening, I want to know where I'm going, I like to use hooks from scene to scene or chapter to chapter. I think all good stories are mysteries, in a sense; you want your reader to wonder where it's headed, what's going on. Someone once referred to the Durants' Story of Civilization as The Great Whodunnit, which I thought very apt. Now, I do have a kind of nutty sense of humor, and when I write humor, I let myself get outrageous; and when I'm writing something more serious, I kind of rein that in. So I guess that is a difference.

ME: What is it that kick starts a project for you: a character, a situation, or…?

VB: Hmm – generally, I start with a character, and then put him into a situation. Or, more accurately, I think a character starts with me. Angel Land, for instance, and bear in mind, this was the tail end of that long hiatus, and this guy kind of crept into my bed one night and started talking to me. Well, socially, that's kind of awkward, you don't want to just sit up screaming and be inhospitable, not when it's your Muse. See, my Muse talks to me a lot. It's funny, isn't it, when you talk to God, say, that's praying, and everybody approves. But when you hear God talking to you, that's schizoid. Which I suppose is just another way of saying, "I'm a writer." But, to be safe, I always insist it's my Muse. She's never introduced herself. For all I know, it could be my next door neighbor, getting back at me for eavesdropping. But, in those arguments, she invariably gets the better of her husband, and he's pretty smart, so I'm sure she's smarter than me.

ME: What started you in writing? (Was it always a dream of yours?)

VB: I grew up in a family of readers and storytellers. I still think of myself as more of a storyteller than an author. And, in my teens, I had a crush on this girl, we went to school from the first grade on. She started reading the Nancy Drew books, so I did as well, and then I started writing these Nancy Drew kinds of stories, with her as the heroine, and in time, she would do illustrations for them. We did this all through junior high and high school. By the way, Carol and I are still great friends. And she's a writer, too. I still have a crush on her.

ME: What keeps you writing? What inspires you?

VB: I'm a word junkie. I get high on the magic. Inspiration? Could be anything. People fascinate me, even boring people. I love to sort out what makes them tick. Mr. Maugham said he never spent fifteen minutes with anyone that he couldn't write a story about him. I wouldn't say quite the same about myself, but I can say I've never spent any time with an individual that I didn't discover something special about him – some rare talent, some knowledge that he has that most people don't, some secret. People are so incredible, aren't they? You can never fully plumb the depths.

ME: How many revisions do you normally go through when writing a novel?

VB: Somewhere between 1 and a million. Angel Land I revised more times than I can count, over a period of maybe 5 years. Avalon, I wrote a draft and hated it (this was a bad period in my life, and put it aside, and forgot all about it for 20 years or so, until I found it in a box, and completely rewrote it. But, Longhorns, I wrote in 2 weeks, and I tweaked it now and again over the next couple of weeks, but I never did what I would call a real rewrite. I was pretty happy with the way it came out in the first draft. When I did that, the process was what I call total immersion – I simply lived the book while I was writing it, the characters totally took me over. I was a zombie. It's kind of scary, in a way, like you've been possessed. And it's very exhausting. I did that more when I was younger, but I found it a real strain now that I'm older. There's a cattle stampede in the book, and I was so completely in that world, that one night here we had a lightning storm and I sat up in bed and said aloud, "The cattle will stampede!" Of course I live in the city and I don't have cattle beyond the groundhog who lives in the back hedge. Now, this is fairly close to padded-cell stage.

ME: When you see your earliest writings in print, do you have the urge to revise?

VB: I can't go back and look at anything without wanting to revise it, at the very least. I've said before, I would be standing by the printing press making changes as they fed the pages, if they'd let me – and yes, of course, I know they don't do it like that anymore, but that's how I see it in my imagination.

ME: Is there one work in particular that you wish you had the opportunity to redo entirely? (If so, what is it and how would you change it?)

VB: I'd probably throw out two thirds of it altogether. I was approached a few years back about reissuing some of my old books, and I agreed to the re-release of about two dozen of them, and to be honest, I wish I had left most of them in the closet. The books in the C.A.M.P. series, this was a series of spy spoofs, I think they have come to be regarded as classics of their genre, and I'm happy to have them available – but even there, one of them was so awful, I never released it, and probably never will. And The Why Not, my first gay novel, is a cult favorite. But, a lot of it is dated. The C.A.M.P. books are dated, too, of course, but they had their own virtues which outweigh the shortcomings. Let's face it, though, I was young and untrained and, for the most part, winging it. I'm amazed that any of it reads as well as it does, but some of it is pretty dreadful.

ME: What about your writing has gotten better?

VB: Well, sure, when you do something for 40 – 50 years, you either get very much better, or very much worse. I hope I've gotten better. I write with a great deal more confidence, and, this is hard to explain, but I have learned to get myself out of the way more, to let the story tell itself.

ME: What things have you dropped along the way?

VB: Surprisingly, a lot of ego. I talk often about learning to trust the muse, of getting myself out of the way. It's a matter of knowing, as a writer, when you have passed your apprenticeship, when you just know what to do and how to do it. Now, that could be interpreted as an ego thing, and I think for some it is; but, the truth is, it is a humbling thing, to realize that you are serving something greater than yourself, that you are just a writer in the great scheme of WRITING .

ME: What helped most in your growth as a writer?

VB: I think just doing it. I said earlier, it's like learning to drive a car. When I was a kid, I wanted to become a race car driver; you know, the mille miglia, the great road races of the fifties. One day I read a comment by the legendary Wilbur Shaw, that no one should try to drive in a race before he had 50,000 miles under his belt. Gosh, I thought, by that time, I'd be old – 25 or 30 anyway. So I switched to writing, never guessing how many words you have to get under your belt before you do that right. I have worked hard to master the craft, though. I read a lot, and I read with a writer's eye; I try to see how other writers accomplish their aims. And, I have been lucky to work with some wonderful editors. On Angel Land, for instance, I worked with Lori Lake , who is a fine writer herself, and a good friend, and her editorial approach is somewhat on the level of a cage, a chair and a whip. Now, I can get pretty bristly if some wet under the collar editor wants to take over a manuscript, but in this instance, Lori and I both respect one another immensely, and though she demanded a lot of me, I knew she wasn't coming from some ego trip, but really wanted to make the book as good as we both could – and, it worked, it's a really good piece of writing, and she deserves a lot of credit for the end result. So, see, I learned in the process. I hope I never get to where I can't learn anymore. I do have these whip-marks, though. I've had to forego wearing bikinis.

ME: You write erotically in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts. Do you have to place yourself into a different mindset for these differing scenarios?

VB: Do I? I don't know. In every instance, I am trying to sit inside the character's head and see out through his, her eyes. I don't know quite what that chameleon quality is, or how I acquired it. When I write with a female protagonist, I seem to become that woman in my mind, and women have read those books and been astonished afterward to learn that I was male; so, I must do it well. But, I am still a guy, and I write guy POV also, and I think I do that well, too. I think some heterosexual males might be uncomfortable with the idea, but, gay men and straight men aren't much different sexually. You have this, and you do that with it, and such and such is the result. Only so many ways to move it, you know.

ME: In Angel Land, what was the most emotionally difficult thing you found yourself writing?

VB: I always have to struggle with "man's inhumanity with man," and there were passages in that novel that were very much a struggle for me. And then, I confess, I am the world's worst crybaby; when I wrote the next to last scene, on the bridge – I don't want to give too much away here – but, I was in tears; still am, whenever I read it. I'm a sucker for romance.

ME: Likewise, in Deadly Nightshade, was there something you found difficult to get onto the page for one reason or another?

VB: Oh, I'm going to surprise you: in general, I really don't like writing the erotic content, which is important these days if you're writing gay fiction; heck, I think if you're writing women's romances. The stuff that sells generally has plenty of bada-boom. Sometimes, for me, it just springs so naturally out of the characters or the situation that it kind of creates itself. But, I am inherently prudish, I think. When I read books with sexy passages, I tend to skim over them, or skip them altogether. It embarrasses me. My old friend and editor, Earl Kemp – we did tons of sexy paperbacks together at Greenleaf Classics – have laughed often at what an odd pair of alleged pornographers we were. I didn't say damn aloud till I was 30, and when he took over that editing job, Earl had to practice saying the f word in front of a mirror for days until he could say it without blushing. But, they sent him off to prison, and tried to send me too. Mind you, I could have written reams about someone chopping people up with axes without a peep out of the Feds. But, boy, let a couple of women get excited together, and you were in trouble.

ME: Who are the authors who you admire most, who inspire you, whose writing you think is most beautiful, moving, exciting?

VB: Not so many of today's writers, but I'm sure there are plenty I've never discovered. I like P.D. James for a good old fashioned whodunit, and Annie Proulx can be beautiful to read. And le Carre. I like Forester and Maugham and Graham Green; and there's a woman from the 50s and 60s, Mary Stewart, who wrote these deliciously romantic suspense novels; she also had, I think, the best sense of place of anyone I ever read. I go back from time to time to reread some of her books, just to see how she did that. In my own genre, I like William Maltese a lot, and Laura Baumbaugh, and Josh Lanyon. I know I'm going to get in trouble for forgetting names. And my friend Lori. And although he does not write fiction, Wayne Gunn is someone I admire for his scholarly works. He's currently editing a collection of essays on the gay writing revolution of the 60s and 70s, and that's going to be a major contribution to the literature. And, let me add, there are a lot of good short story writers around too, as one can see right here in Mysterical-e. Marian Allen springs to mind, and Earl Staggs. Too many for me to list them all here. But one could just read the rest of this issue and see what I mean.

ME: Do you have a favorite quote from any of them?

VB: I love the quote game; I could play that one all day. Mr. Maugham said, I'm not sure this is verbatim, "the man who will eat anything rarely goes hungry." I have often observed that in the sexual behavior of some of my fellow males.

ME: What is it about the plots of your favorite novels (mysteries, etc.) that you admire most?

VB: I admire and envy those mystery writers who can weave those wonderfully elaborate plots – Agatha Christie, say. I am a competent plotter, I know the elements, but it is not my strong suit. My writing is mostly about character, and I tend to let the characters run the show. I ran across a post on a writers group recently asking about "your favorite complex characters," and I thought, what a great question; but when I went to the blog site, it was all about characters like Hellboy. See, I was thinking Anna Karenina, or Max de Winter. Or Leslie, in The Letter.

ME: How do you approach plotting a mystery or a thriller – what stymies you most, what do you find easiest?

VB: Well, again, I approach everything pretty much the same. I get frustrated because I can't build that elaborate structure that the really good mystery writers can; what I have to do is seduce the reader to the point where he doesn't notice. Of course, if you get him hooked on your characters, he will be more interested in what's happening with them than where the story is going. Eudora Welty said the story is not about the things that happen, it's about the people they happen to.

ME: What advice can you give on plotting a mystery?

VB: I'm probably not the best one to be answering this question. But, the rules remain the same. Your protagonist has a problem that he must solve, and seemingly can't. He tries, and his efforts make things worse. Finally, through his own efforts (and that is really important), he finds a resolution. There's an old Scott Meredith book, Writing to Sell, which is the best primer I ever found on plotting. I suspect there are some devoted specifically to plotting mysteries, but I don't really know. I got into this subject in Spine Intact, Some Creases (which I've been serializing on my website: http://www.vjbanis.com Click on blog. The excerpts are in reverse order, though.

ME: Does the world you create in your novels continue to live in your mind after you've completed the novel? What implications does that have in terms of wanting to do a series in the same setting?

VB: Yes, it does. The characters remain with me forever. But I'm not really keen on sequels. When I've written the first book, I've pretty much said everything I had to say about these people, these situations. Now, Deadly Nightshade was the first in a proposed trilogy (Deadly Wrong and Deadly Dreams follow it) but in my mind, I saw them all as one big project, and the story is ongoing from first through third. Whether I will feel inspired to go beyond the three, I don't know. The story I wanted to tell about these two guys is complete. But, every now and again I get an inkling…The "Writer's Disease" – what if…?

ME: Of all your works, which is the setting that you find yourself unable to forget? Why?

VB: I never forget any of them. I can close my eyes at any minute and go back to the farm fields in Kenny's Back, or Atlantis in Blow The Man Down, or post civil war Texas , in Longhorns. It's like this vast universe inside my head. I don't know why people in the 60s thought they had to take acid to expand their consciousness; any writer worth his salt has a consciousness beyond limit. You can get lost in it. I always fear one of these days I won't find my way back.

ME: Which setting would you most like to transport yourself into and stay for a while? Why?

VB: I've always tried to live where and when I am. It's when I'm writing that I transport myself, but I'm content to come back to my armchair.

ME: What were and are your goals as a writer?

VB: I just like to keep writing, and hoping I'm getting better. I worry that one of these days I will have gone past my cut off date, and write something that I'm really sorry to see in print. So far, so good. Nobody is always at his best, of course – well, except the mediocre artist. But every artist deserves to be judged by his best work. I've done some crap, but at my best – and at this age and point in my life, I'd have to be pretty dense not to know it – I'm a very good writer. I'm content with that; but never so content that I don't keep trying to get better. And there's that Muse (or maybe the neighbor lady) nagging me incessantly.

ME: What piece of advice is given to beginning writers that you feel is total hogwash?

VB: I don't know about a single piece of hogwash advice, but I've always wondered about all those people who sit in coffee shops "writing." Or, I think, trying to play the part of writers. I always want to say, "for crap's sake, go home and write." It seems to me that writing is something you do alone. I don't know how you'd hear the voice of the muse in such milieu. But, maybe those people know something I don't. Maybe their hearing is better. Wasn't it Johnathon Kellerman who said – or, he has a character say, "When someone tells me they want to be a writer, I know there is no hope for them; but when they say, 'I want to write,' then I know there is at least a little hope." I always have the sense that those people in the coffee houses fall into the first category.

ME: If you could invite any five authors (living or not) to dinner (all together or one at a time) who would they be? And why?

VB: Well, I met the food writer, James Beard, and found him delightful, and maybe I could coax him to fix the dinner, so he's a sure bet; Most really funny writers aren't funny as people (I suppose the same is true of comedians) but I'd love to chat with Carl Hiassen, because he has such a bizarre take on the world; Jane Austen must have been delightful to spend some time with. Dorothy Parker was a bitch, but you could count on a couple of devastatingly funny remarks, and that always make a dinner party move along; and Mister Maugham, because the old guy had a really great sense of what made people tick, and hopefully I could pry a few tips out of him. But, here's the thing, I would never be content with just five. I am the ultimate writers groupie. I love writers, even the ones I hate. I have never met a dull writer. Can't say that about any other group I can think of (don't get me started on movie actors)

ME: If you had to cast Angel Land as a movie – who would you choose to play your characters?

VB: Not a clue. I see so few movies when they're released, I'm just not up on the current crop of actors. I don't get TV, and it's been a couple of years since I went to a movie theater.

ME: What sparked the idea for your most recent book? How long had you had this idea before starting to write?

VB: The most recent out was Deadly Nightshade, and the most recently finished – well, I'm finishing it up now – is Deadly Dreams. So, Nightshade – Reviewer and gay scholar Drewy Wayne Gunn suggested to me that I write a detective novel – and then an editor asked me about doing a gay mystery, so it seemed like I was being steered in that direction - but where the specific plot came from, I don't recall. I wrote the opening scene, a murder; and then, as usual, the last, and then I just filled in the blanks.

ME: Did you feel compelled to write this book? About this subject?

VB: I think I'm always compelled, once the characters get into my head. I didn't, for instance, want to write Lola Dances. I thought the idea was intriguing but it's about a cross dresser, and I know next to nothing about cross dressing, so I was sure I was not the one to write it – but there was this character, and the next thing you know I had this scene in my head, and there you are.

ME: How did you approach the planning and writing? Did you prepare an outline?

VB: The only preparation I did was to spend time getting to know the main character.

ME: How long did it take to complete it? What was your least favorite part in the writing of the book?

VB: Deadly Nightshade took me a while, because I hadn't done a mystery since the 60s, so I had to kind of feel my way. Two, three months, maybe. Bearing in mind, I don't write as fast as I used to. I don't do anything as fast as I used to. Some of it I don't even try to do anymore. I get short of breath washing the dishes.

ME: What do you like best about it? Which are your favorite characters and why? Which are your favorite moments in the story?

VB: Well, this isn't going to win the Pulitzer. I think it's a fun read, and Stanley is little and feisty, which appeals to me. There's a scene on the Golden Gate Bridge , very romantic, maybe a bit too much so, but I like that – and a scene in a nightclub. I liked my killer, in fact: Tanya. I generally feel sympathy for my villains. Nobody sits down as a child and decides he wants to grow up to be a monster. Things happen. As a writer, I want to know what things.

ME: Is the publication of each book as thrilling as that first one?

VB: Amazingly, yes. I still don't know any thrill as great as opening that box from the publisher and holding my new book in my hands. I hope I never outgrow that.

ME: What of your older works remains most popular? Do you have some idea why this is the case?

VB: The books in the C.A.M.P. series still sell more than 40 years later – not in big numbers, but steadily. I find that astonishing; but, they are historically significant to gay people and – this is the best part – they are still pretty funny to read. When I was going through them, preparing them for reissue, I found myself laughing out loud a time or two. Now, bear in mind, it was a very young man, whom I barely remember, who wrote them, a long time ago.

ME: Tell a bit about The Man from C.A.M.P. and why you wrote that series.

VB: I'd had a big success with my first gay novel, The Why Not, with Greenleaf Classics, and the editor, Earl Kemp, wanted something else from me. This was the mid 60s, and I had become this rabble rouser for, well, for just about everything: civil rights and woman's lib and, especially, gay rights, and I wanted to write something different from the doom and gloom that permeated most gay fiction in those early days. So, I wrote a funny series about a super secret agent who was openly gay and proud of it – who always got his man in the end, so to speak. Really, the bottom line is, I was having a great deal of fun writing them, and the cherry on the sundae was that someone was actually paying me money to do it.

ME: Can you elaborate on the differences in the world for writers during the days of the pulp novel and now?

VB: Oh, it is a different world. In some ways, it was easier to get published in those days. Certainly after I came along, easier for glbt writers; and in those days, a gay novel would normally sell 50,000 or more copies. Some of mine sold in the hundreds of thousands. Today, a good sales figure for a gay novel is 5,000 copies. But, I think it's harder for writers in general to get published today. The big publishing houses have made a whore out of the muse, in my opinion. I'm fortunate, because my name opens doors for me, and people come to me to ask me to write for them. I can't even keep up with it all. At the moment I can think of maybe four or five publishers who have asked to see something from me that I just can't get around to. But, for a beginning writer today, the challenges are heartbreaking. I was lucky. Or, somebody upstairs was very good to me. Probably the latter, though I can't think why. I am about as unlikely a candidate for sainthood as you could find.

ME: How many projects do you work on at the same time?

VB: I may bounce back and forth between a half a dozen projects, but usually, once I get into one, I stay with that, if only because I can't get it out of my head. As I've said, they take over.

ME: What kinds of fan reactions do you get for your various works?

VB: It astonishes me that I still get fan mail all the time, and not just from the US of A, either. I hear from readers in Australia and New Zealand and Great Britain and Canada , and I have fans in Italy . I don't get the prizes and awards, and what we call the pink mafia in NYC shuns me like the plague. But I write for myself and for my readers, who I think are much like me. They are not the intelligentsia, for the most part, just men and women who like to read a good story, and they write often to tell me how much they enjoyed mine. It's a good feeling. It's funny, there are a number of heterosexual women here in West Virginia – I don't mean bawdy types, either, they're mostly church women – who read everything I write. It amazes and amuses me. People are the ultimate mystery, aren't they?