I never know what to make of Bill Branon. He comes on like granite teddy bear—the tough hide of an old Navy man wrapping a large heart and a sharp mind. He's funny and friendly as hell and can reference quantum physics or philosophy as easily as current events. But then he casually drops dark hints about his past—improbable stuff about secret missions and the sort of black-budget deeds no congressional oversight committee would authorize. You want to be skeptical, but he has an unnerving sincerity. Those qualities—chilling stories told with total assurance—mark his novels, mostly thrillers. His writing is brawny, manly stuff, built for speed but always willing to brake for a talking coyote musing about the afterlife. He's published four novels: Let Us Prey, about radical discontents who blow up IRS buildings (which garnered him a lot of attention—much of it unwanted—in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing); Devils Hole, about an assassin; Spider Snatch, about a woman imprisoned by drug dealers on a remote island; and Timesong, a touching and lyrical meditation on time and the afterlife featuring the aforementioned talking coyote. He's recently completed another book, one that makes him a little nervous: Variously titled The Fourth Ventricle and, now, Xenogenesis, it's a nonfiction account of his experiences in a government program researching mind control—and, to hear him describe it, it opens a window onto the secret history of the 20th century, an X-Files universe of black ops, huge conspiracies, secret influences and more. Key to it, he says, is his dissociative disorder—a sort of multiple-personality condition (in which the "primary" personality is unaware of the others) that allowed his government handlers to exploit one of his "alternates" as, shall we say, an asset. (Aspects of dissociative behavior were strong elements in his fictions, too.) Writing this book—which he initially framed as a novel, then, after throwing away about 1,600 pages, recast as memoir—allowed him to explore questions he's long worried about, he says. "How did I get here? Why do I have a bullet hole in my back that I don't remember getting?" He's convinced that publishing it will shake up a lot of powerful people with consequences you can guess at. Is he for real? Full of shit? Finally, I can't say for sure, except to say what I already have—that I don't know what to make of him but enjoy his writing, the general subject of the conversation excerpted below.
ON THE DIFFICULTY OF TRASH-CANNING 1,600 MANUSCRIPT PAGES
It's like throwing away three years of your life.
I threw away 300 pages, then I threw away 200 pages, then I threw away 1100 pages, and I started over on January 3 of 2003.
In my opinion, it's very hard for talented writers to do that. My first drafts are approximately the level of a fourth-grade student of English—and I mean fourth-grade in elementary school. I desperately have to rewrite, and I'm so embarrassed about how they read. I mean, I'll write a first draft, and I'll think it's the cat's nuts, and then I read it the next day, and I say, Oh my God. So for me, I come at writing with a very healthy suspicion of my lack of talent. Because I never did take a writing course, ever. I majored in English lit at college, but that meant at Harvard you had to take four courses.
ON HIS OPUS
This is actually the end book of the four novels that went before it. I had no idea what the others were going toward, but as I started this, I realized finally what those other four books were about. It was one of the "alternates" trying to get out.
I went through this black hole business, where I had weeks where I'd just black out. That's scary. I woke up one day and I'm halfway up to Wendover in my car. And I don't remember driving. All the sudden I'm there. I'm doing 65 miles per hour. I'm doing fine. I'm not all over the road, I'm not drunk. But I had no idea how I got there.
I'm trying like hell to pull the reins in on this sonofabitch; it's already over 700 pages, and a lot of those are single-space things I just jammed in there because I feel guilty about killing trees.
ON SUCCESS
I was lucky enough to make the money right out of the gate, and now I write for myself.
ON WRITING SEX
Writing sex is refreshingly simple. There are so few variables and it's so easy to do. As long as you're willing to realize that your mom's not looking over your shoulder—and my mom's in a box of ashes downstairs. I mean, what is sex? Three holes and a pole! It's not like writing great psychological things, hunting whales in the Pacific with Indian harpoonists.
ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WRITING FICTION AND NONFICTION
Writing nonfiction is like a self-biopsy, but a novelist—other than a formula boy, that's like doing a self-autopsy. And that's the difference. And I can see it in the books now. I was literally taking myself apart.
Like Tom Clancy told Larry King one night, the difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction has to be believable.
ON HUMOR
Humor is so easy to me that I don't do it enough.
ON TELLING HIS MAGNUM OPUS AS NONFICTION INSTEAD OF FICTION
It's basically autobiography.
I've been told by people who should know better that I'm a good novelist. So I figured I had to write a novel, and I'd weave the real shit into it. But I realized after a thousand pages that the reader couldn't separate fact from fiction. So I finally threw up my hands and said I'm gonna write it nonfiction, even though if I publish it, it'll change our lives immeasurably. It goes all the way to Dealy Plaza. It's not bullshit.
There are names in there; there are names. So for me to publish that now, that'd be the last straw. [My wife has] only read 70 percent of it, and she walked around here with that deer-in-the-headlights look for about a week, and said, "You live with someone all you life and you just don't know."
So there's only one way this story cold be written and that's as nonfiction. There's just no other way I could do it.
ON TAKING A BREAK
Right now I write these little novellettes—there's one up there called Lalli and the Tigers, which I think is one of my better works, which started as a break from the big book, just to get away from it for 30 days. I tried to capture the rhythms of Hemingway—it was really a style exercise, the way he goes on without commas, you know: "She walked out to the fence and she looked out and the sun settled on the mountains and the fish jumped"—that sort of thing. It's almost like you're looking at waves going by. Four pages into it, all of a sudden, wham, it became a story.
I write these things, and I make about 10 copies and give 'em to my friends. It almost seems to me like it means more when you do that than to write something you really like for a nation of apathetic f--ksticks.
ON THE REASON WE WON'T SEE TOM CRUISE WEARING A PROSTHETIC BELLY TO PLAY BILL BRANON
In that cabinet is a contract to make [Xenogenesis] a movie. ... I couldn't do it. I realized that they basically wanted to compress the story into about six or seven years, so they wouldn't have to put a potbelly on Tom Cruise if he played the part. My story basically runs from 1953 to today, and it's not over yet. And I'm so glad I walked.
ON SPEAKING TO WRITING STUDENTS
Sometimes I go talk to these writer classes at the colleges, usually as the last lecture—mainly because they've been telling them keep your day job, then they trot me in and say, if this asshole can do it and look at him—don't lose hope.
ON REWRITING
The rewrite is so critically important, and that's why I can throw the pages away. I know when they're not working. That sonofabitch manuscript right there is a great example [points to someone else's book he's editing]. The guy does an 800-page manuscript to learn one thing: That you can't put 23 characters in the first 27 pages. I learned that right away.
You get 80 percent of the way through something and you realize it's shit. And it's not because it's not well-written, it's because the start was shit. So many writers make that mistake. They get an idea at a cocktail party, think about it for an hour, run home and start working on it, and it's gonna take a year and they don't realize there's something wrong with the goddamn premise.
ON WHERE HIS STORIES COME FROM
Some people say, I get a character in mind or I get a storyline in mind. What's more important, plot or character? I think I have a unique take on that. With me it's two things: a person and a place. Not a person and a story; it's got to be a person and a place. Strongest thing in Spider Snatch, in my opinion, are the Cuna Indians and the archipelago. Devils Hole, the desert. Let Us Prey, I think Las Vegas had a lot to do with the story—the ebb and flow of fortunes and people and blackmail.
ON THE EXCITEMENT OF WRITING
Shit, I can't wait to get out of bed to see what happens next, here in this room. And I can't wait to get back to bed and start dreaming.
What really gets you is that one sentence that did what you wanted it to do. And sometimes I go back a year later and reread some of this stuff, and I know some of it's shit, but then I hit that one little section that I know is right, I feel really proud—which is another word for egotistical—because it's one thing I did right. It might only be six words, but at least I did it right.
You write because you know you're good at it. And I'm not saying this from on the top of the mountain of ego, I'm saying you do it because you can do it and you're pretty good. I know that with every swinging dick in the business it's the same thing. I think that's really what it comes down to. Yeah, you gotta have a day job. Yeah, you gotta pay the bills. And yeah, it's a nightmare. I mean, I've seen John L. Smiths cry. He tells me, my 750-word column, people don't know it's 1,500 words.
ON BEING INTERVIEWED DURING BOOK TOURS
To meet a TV host who's read anything other than—if they've even read the flaps, that's a plus. Usually they use the Larry King theory of interviewing: Don't read the book, don't read anything, and therefore I can ask the questions the average person would ask. Well, f--k you.
I was on a set in Boston, on TV, and I grabbed at moth that kept flying by. I watched this moth go by, because of the lights, so I grabbed it and I was looking at it, and I looked up and the interviewer—who'd actually read the book, which is very rare in TV—she's got her clipboard and she's doing like this [pantomimes a look-at-me motion]; the thing is live. Look at me, don't look at the moth; this is an interview! So I let the moth go. She was dying, because they're used to intellectuals and professionals. [Laughs.]
ON HIS WRITING REGIMEN
It used to be a business. It used to be the new stuff would start coming out at 1 o'clock in the morning. I used to write from 1 to about 6 in the morning. Then I'd sleep for about three hours, get up and read not what I wrote the night before, but what I wrote the night before the night before. And then I'd get some more sleep, and come back around 4 and review what I wrote the night before. In other words, two nights back would get two quick rewrites.
And they say that's not the way to do it. I've got books up here—once I wrote Let Us Prey I started thinking I should take a writing course—and they say that's not important, write the bones, and you race through it and get it all down …
But I keep thinking I'll be dead the next day. Honest to God, this sounds stupid, but I don't want to leave my terrible first drafts lying around where some innocent person can see them.
I have two CDs I listen to. One is the original Irish tenors thing, which I can't get through without a tear. And the other is Miss Saigon.
Now I wait for the idea. Now I write just spontaneously. I just wait until it happens. And because I have no constrains on me as far as having to go to work and have to earn a decent living. And I have a relatively tolerant wife, who when she sees me start to glow, she just stays out of the way.
I've gone away from that formal hours of writing and rewriting that worked pretty good for a few years. But I like it better this way, because now I write when I'm at the top and not because it's 2 o'clock. And a lot of it's private and a lot of it I only give to my friends.
ON USING IMPROMPTU FOCUS GROUPS
I use waitresses. Macaroni Grill is one of my best. They're all young gals, and my gal stuff, I give it to 'em to read. I don't give 'em any notice, just read this and tell me what you think of it. If they knew I was doing this, they'd probably want a hundred f--king dollars to do it.
ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ART AND LIFE
When you discover in your writing that incredible connection with reality that you didn't know when you were writing, it's scary shit. And that is why writing is so valuable. It's not a cliché to say writing is a journey of self-discovery.