IGN for Men

IGN For Men: I’ve spent the whole morning going through reams of interviews with you, so hopefully I won’t be repeating any questions you’ve been asked a thousand times before.

Andrew Vachss: That would be so great if I didn’t have to go through that again.

IGN4M: One thing that I didn’t see in any of the interviews I read through was actually how much of you is in your character Burke and vice-versa?

AV: Well, I’m trying to give you a straight answer to that, but except for similar tastes in women and music and automobiles, and somewhat similar politics, I don’t think there’s a great resemblance. Burke is meant to be the prototypical-abused child. I’m not.

IGN4M: You’ve mentioned on numerous occasions that Burke’s religion is revenge and even in one interview you even remarked that it was your religion as well…

AV: Sure, sure. You can call that his politics, to me that covers a way of looking at the world. I think it’s relatively similar. The difference is that Burke is purely reactive individual who’s lookin’ to survive his existence and continuing on a day-to-day basis. He’s not looking to change anything around him. That’s the reason for my existence, so we’re quite separate in that regard.

IGN4M: Based on my limited understanding of the definition of religion, can revenge actually be a religion?

AV: Well, why not? If human sacrifice can be a religion, why can’t revenge be a religion? If mumbling a bunch of talismanic phrases is supposed to alter the cosmos, why can’t revenge be a religion? It’s a belief system that you live, you can call it a religion because it’s a simple, shorthand way of saying it, but since entire religions are based on forgiveness, how can you say none could be based on vengeance.

IGN4M: One of the things I’ve always found interesting is that numerous “critics” are always wondering what is real and what is not in your books. Like for example when you wrote about kiddy porn being transported via modems long before the whole Internet boom …

AV: That’s only because it’s such a classic example.

IGN4M: Right, but the fact that you mentioned how a lot of these “critics” approach your work as works of pure fiction as opposed to fiction with basis in the reality that you are surrounded by in conjunction with your legal work …

AV: Yeah, it’s worse than that, though. I wouldn’t care if they approached it neutrally saying ‘I don’t know anything about this.’ But they approach it from the basis that their reality has been formed by crime fiction and comic books. So whatever deviates from that, therefore, is not realistic. If they came blank, I wouldn’t have a problem.

IGN4M: Well, that’s what I was leading up to. My concept of revenge is obviously based on crime fiction and comic books.

AV: If you have no knowledge of it in your own life then we certainly don’t have a basis for shared communication. You see? Obviously I’m not Batman. I mean those kind of comparisons don’t work. But here’s the clue, there is no Batman …

IGN4M: Oh, I’m well aware of that.

AV: Right. So if you’re well aware of that, then you can’t base anything on that, including your concept of revenge or your concept of honor or your concept of justice. You can’t base that on what somebody fantasized. But all of those things exist in your life. And the extent to which you’ve experienced them is the extent to which you can understand them. But there’s no abused kid who has not gone through the internal dialogue about forgiveness/revenge. It’s just not possible.

IGN4M: And that’s something that I can’t relate to, since I haven’t been in that place in my life.

AV: Sure. That’s one example of many. Nobody’s ever wronged you in your life?

IGN4M: Sure, but not to the point where I want to seek vengeance on them. I mean I’d have to sit down and seriously think about who has wronged me over the years, but off the top of my head there really hasn’t been anyone who’s wronged me so severely as to warrant drastic action against them.

AV: Which is not your taste to do that, right?

IGN4M: Yeah. Let’s put it this way, up to this point in my life, I haven’t been wronged to a point where I want to put aside everything else in my life and dedicate all of my time to righting said wrong.

AV: I can’t know if that’s a function of the life you’ve led or the personality that you have, you see?

IGN4M: Well that would be something else I’d have to sit down and think about. I would think some of it would be due to the life I’ve led. I mean for all intents and purposes I’ve had the classic suburban WASP upbringings more or less, so it’s not like I’ve grown up in an environment where I had to fight to survive …

AV: That’s more comic book crap. Because there’s plenty of … I’ve represented kids from homes so rich that you’d be embarrassed to step on the carpet, who have lives worse than you would have in a POW camp. And suburban kids, to think that they’re different because they don’t say $%&! every other word or because there aren’t a lot of gangbangers running around their school, that their lives can’t be full of pain and pressures, is silly. I don’t have that kind of disrespect for people where I say ‘Only this particular subculture has tension or survival issues or pain.’ That’s not my experience, either.

IGN4M: I think it manifests itself in different ways.

AV: Does it? I don’t. Do you think incest is different if it’s performed in the suburbs?

IGN4M: No.

AV: Then what are we really talking about? You think that kids don’t get into fights in the suburbs? As near as I can remember, Columbine wasn’t an inner city school. But then I’m confused about that, too. Think about that. Most of the school shootings and most of the school suicides [happen in the suburbs].

IGN4M:I guess I’ve just been fortunate.

AV: Well, if you’ve been fortunate, bless you. And that’s great. But I certainly would never, from my experience, look at cultures and say ‘Well, things aren’t happening here.’ That’s a popular thing for people to do, say ‘Middle class environments don’t really test you.’ But that’s silly.

IGN4M: Well it is easier for me to make a brash generalization that the reason I grew up okay is because I’m from a white, suburban, middle-class neighborhood. Obviously there were greater factors at work. My parents never violated me, my teachers never molested me, I’ve never had friends that beat me up. I hate to use the word, but I guess I’ve had pretty normal life …

AV: I wish your life was the norm, actually, but I don’t think it is.

IGN4M: But for me it is normal. I’m going by my own personal experiences on this, of course, which is the only thing I know and as such is the norm to me.

AV: You know, I would be more comfortable with people doing that then getting their norm from third party references like books or comics. If they went by their own norm, at least they would have some valid experience that they could actually look at and check.

IGN4M: Well I don’t take my ‘norm’ from a Batman comic book or a Bruce Willis action flick. My ‘norm’ is growing up in the ‘burbs with mom and dad, building birdhouses, being a Boy Scout …

AV: Plenty of people did Boy Scouts and suffered grievously.

IGN4M: I was lucky on the Boy Scout front, as well.

AV: I’m not really sure that it was luck. I have a theory about that which can’t be as yet field tested, but what I’ve been working on for a long time, I’ve actually stood with predatory pedophiles outside one-way glass in a daycare center while they picked out which kids were vulnerable. No conversation with the kid, they just picked them out watching their interaction with other kids.

IGN4M: Which kids they are most attracted to?

AV: No, which kids would be most vulnerable. They’re attracted equally to all because [to them] humans are objects to them.

IGN4M: So these predatory pedophiles exhibit true predatory traits, much like lions zeroing in on the sick and weak water buffaloes as their targeted prey?

AV: That’s exactly right, but what creates that vulnerability? They spot the unbonded child. The child most at risk for that kind of access is the child not bonded deeply to anything or anybody. Although it’s not perfect, although this is not 100% guaranteed, but those children who are most deeply bonded with parents, parents who are protective, it’s almost like, I don’t know if you’ve seen predatory animals that put a kind of smell on their young to protect them? Okay? I think you “luck” was much more likely due to your parenting than it was to any blind confluence of the planets.

IGN4M: That makes sense. Hell, it’s not like I have conversations like this on a daily basis at my work, though.

AV: Sure enough. Well the people who do this, from their own biogenetic instinct, they protect their young and they make it clear that if you step into that zone there’ll be consequences. They say that to the whole world, they never think about it, they never analyze it. It’s the most natural thing in the world for them to do.

IGN4M: That makes me think about the story I read about your father where the neighboring kid came to your house and asked if he could sleep in your basement because he was being abused by his father. And your dad told him he could sleep in a bed and then he went out and confronted the father in the street. I don’t have any instances of that type of protectiveness in my life …

AV: Well, you gotta remember that that was part protectiveness and part because my father liked to fight. You know one excuse to him was as good as another. I mean he was clearly a protective person and he thought that someone who hurt a child should be hurt. He wasn’t like Oprah, you know? But that kind of thing wasn’t so much an extension of how he felt about me, but just how he felt about the whole world. My father himself was very badly abused when he was a child, physically abused. And the abuse didn’t stop until he got physically strong enough. So he saw the world in those terms. That peace was for the strong, you see? Since children weren’t old enough to enforce peace, he didn’t have a problem doing it.

IGN4M: A word that comes up in regards to your writing is the word ‘propaganda.’ Do you truly see your fiction, such as the Burke novels, as being propaganda?

AV: If propaganda means to try and change people’s perspective, give them information they didn’t have, and hope to influence the way they access material from then on, then that’s what I am, a propagandist.

IGN4M: How come you haven’t made any inroads into Hollywood? I mean I haven’t really heard any buzz about any of your material being given the screenwriting treatment.

AV: Everything I’ve ever written has been optioned by Hollywood or purchased outright. I’ve never not had something under contract to Hollywood, including right now. They’ve hired directors, they’ve commissioned screenplays, they’ve done all that stuff, but they’ve never produced a shooting script that all parties could say “Yeah that’s it.”

IGN4M: So nothing’s ever reached the production phase?

AV: Absolutely not.

IGN4M: That sounds rather like the situation that James Crumley went through. I know he moved to LA and worked on a lot of screenplays, which ended up never getting made …

AV: Well I never went down to LA, nor do I ever intend to. And I’m not sure why it would sound like Crumley because lots and lots of people have had stuff optioned and an adequate screenplay wasn’t produced. I don’t think this is a unique story. I think I’ve been treated really well by Hollywood. Hollywood gave me, specifically New Line Cinema gave me a Victor Salva Clause in my contract before anybody knew there was a Victor Salva.

IGN4M: I must admit that I’m not familiar with what a Victor Salva Clause is.

AV: Well, you wouldn’t be. How about the movie Powder? You know who directed that?

IGN4M: Yeah.

AV: Do you know what he was?

IGN4M: Yeah, he was a convicted child molester.

AV: Okay. Well, his name is Victor Salva. I had a clause in my contract prior to that. It said ‘Nobody ever convicted of a crime against a child could work on the movie in any capacity.’ So New Line was good enough and in-sync enough with what I’m doing to give me that contractual language, you see? They’ve been fine. I am grateful that several scripts that I’ve seen, they were listening to me and not going forward with. So if I just wanted a movie made, I believe that I could have had that done already. I’m really happy they haven’t done that. I’d rather wait and attempt to get it right.

IGN4M: Have you yourself ever written a script treatment of one of you books or short stories?

AV: I wrote a screenplay and the reaction to it was … the Hollywood people got the screenplay and said ‘Oh my God! Andrew, this is just like the book.’ As if that was the worst thing that one could do. I think very often Hollywood buys stuff because of its impact on others, not because of its impact on themselves.

IGN4M: Well the other game is to buy up stuff that is hot, that other production companies are interested in and therefore prevent anyone else from making the movie themselves.

AV: That certainly happens because I’ve had books bought outright, not optioned, where they pay the full purchase price.

IGN4M: Wow.

AV: Yeah, I was surprised myself. And yet they still didn’t make the movie.

IGN4M: Well, you’ve cleared up my Hollywood connection questions. I wrongfully figured that perhaps your relationship in Hollywood was similar to when you first tried to get your inaugural novel Flood published and most of the major houses turned it down, nobody was willing to take the risk because they thought it was so on the edge.

AV: No, it was the opposite, it really was. I had movie offers for the very first book within, I mean, you know, a few hours after it was out and I’ve had them ever since. It was never a problem getting movie offers. The problem is, when you got a lot of horses in the race, you really have to pick the winner. And I have not done that [laughs] to date.

IGN4M: You’ve also said on more than one occasion that roughly 10% of your time is devoted to your writing …

AV: You know, I say that when people are crazy enough to ask me to give ’em numbers. It might be 15% for all I know.

IGN4M: Don’t worry, I’m not gonna ask you ‘How much time to you spend on your writing.’

AV: No, no, I understand. But that’s my point. A small percentage of my total time is devoted to writing, yes.

IGN4M: I also know that you write a lot of your novels in your head. But then do you transcribe them longhand or do you sit down at the computer and spew them out.

AV: That’s the latter.

IGN4M: You don’t take notes or anything?

AV: [laughs]

IGN4M: I mean I’m not a writer at your level in terms of penning a novel, but I do write a lot of my articles in my head, then scribble down rough ideas on napkins, scraps of paper, whatever, thus ending up with several stories strewn about the room.

AV: We’re no different because my initial training was as an investigator, not as a writer. I was an investigator in sexually transmitted diseases with the Public Health Service. You understand how that works? I’ve gotta persuade you to tell me everybody you’ve had sex within a critical period. Sometimes 90 days, sometimes 6 months. I’ve gotta talk you into that. I can’t sit here and take notes. We won’t have the conversation. Then I was caseworker for the Department of Welfare, where you certainly can’t be doing anything like that. Then I ran a maximum-security prison for violent youth. You can’t say ‘Put the knife down Jose, I want to make sure I’ve got you captured here [on paper].’ So I have scraps of paper all over my life, too, although I prefer index cards. But as far as writing a book is concerned, that goes in here [points to his head] and it gets processed and it comes out. I don’t actually need the scraps of paper to help my memory.

IGN4M: I worked for Danielle Steel one summer as her kids’ lifeguard, of all things, anyway, she had an old manual typewriter sitting in a room and it’s what she used to write the initial draft of all her novels. I know a lot of other novelists rely on the trusty manual typewriter, as well. I was wondering are you an old school writer in terms of using a manual typewriter or are you up-to-date with a computer?

AV: I don’t understand the difference actually because the thing doesn’t compute. It’s a typewriter with a screen instead of a piece of paper.

IGN4M: Well, I guess the major difference would be that with a typewriter you are kind of screwed if you make a mistake, whereas on the computer you can save text and then come back and re-write it or rearrange it later on.

AV: Do you know where the term ‘cut-and-paste’ came from?

IGN4M: Well, let’s see, Burroughs was a master of cut-n-paste literary technique and John Cage is universally heralded as the originator of cut-n-paste in terms of rearranging recorded sound, but doesn’t it go back to the early printing days?

AV: It physically came because you laid out your work, take an x-acto knife and a ruler and go [makes cutting motion], take the pieces, paste it up, which is how newspapers were originally put together. So you wouldn’t need a computer to do what you were describing. That’s what cut-n-paste means and that’s the way I learned to do it. And I certainly was writing before computers were common currency.

IGN4M: Every once in a while you see an interview with a popular author who extols the virtues of using a manual typewriter over a computer, usually stating that by saving your work on computer and then coming back to rework it later on ruins the pureness of the material.

AV: Oh please! It’s just manual work, anyone could do it. You think that people who were writing 4000 years before there were computers only could write linearly?

IGN4M: They probably were writing on several different tablets, breaking them up, and rearranging them in the proper order.

AV: Sure, of course they were. And most people do—and I think this may be shocking to anybody who has been raised on computers—most people do drafts of their work.

IGN4M: I still have to print my work out and edit it with a pen, actually.

AV: That’s the way writing is done.

IGN4M: The funny thing is that the people I work with laugh at me when I edit my work that way.

AV: They laugh, but they also … Lemme tell you something. If you want to see one characteristic of the computer generation, it’s people who don’t check their work. It is astounding to me the crap that comes forward as writing to an editor that simply hasn’t been checked. And I’m not talking about sacred spellchecker, which the computer does for you. Checked. It doesn’t happen. When you typed it, when mistakes were really fatal, when it wasn’t to just go like that, you paid more attention.

IGN4M: You took more time before you actually typed it in.

AV: And before you showed it to anybody. My first book was a textbook and it was written on a typewriter, not a computer. Thousands of footnotes. You know, each page, get it right. And it was all cut-n-paste. If you work with footnotes, you understand. That’s what you do all the time.

IGN4M: Oh yeah, I did my share of footnotes on a typewriter in college, so I know what you’re talkin’ about.

AV: The computer just makes it easier.

IGN4M: And that ease contributes to what you said earlier. Now it is easier for people to toss up “writing” whenever they so choose, without regard for checking it over. [something this editor has been guilty of more than a few time since switching from print to the Internet]

AV: It’s just like guns. Guns don’t kill people. But they make it a lot easier.