June 23, 2008
Interview with the Author: Frank Anthony Polito
Here's the first in what will hopefully become a series of interview with some contemporary authors. For the debut interview, we have Frank Anthony Polito, author of Band Fags!
Band Fags!began life as the play, John R, and your background is heavily in writing for the stage. What challenges did you face in adapting your own play into a novel? As a writer, is your creative process different for different mediums? Is one type of writing easier for you? More rewarding?
I won’t say adapting Band Fags! from a play into a novel was “easy,” but it was niceto have a jumping off point since I already had an outline via the script. One of the challenges came from the fact that the play only featured two characters (Jack and Brad) in one setting (Jack’s bedroom). In the play version, the boys spent a lot of time TALKING about other people and offstage events. In the novel, I had to flesh these out, which was part of the fun. It also took the most time. In a play, the writer is primarily responsible for the dialogue and the director decides what the actors do on stage. In writing the novel, I got to tell the story EXACTLY the way I envisioned it. The creative process is pretty much the same. In writing Band Fags! the novel, I tried to take what I learned about dramatic structure and apply it to each chapter. As opposed to writing in chronological order, for instance, I’ll start a scene in the middle, then “flashback” to let the reader know how we got to where we are now, and once we’ve caught up, continue on. I find both types of writing to be rewarding for different reasons. Plays are meant to be PERFORMED for many, novels to be READ by one. I hope Band Fags! can be both.
Can you describe your writing process a bit? For instance, do you write at a certain time of day, have to have complete silence or music in the background? Any rituals before starting?
Out of necessity, I usually write during the daytime when my partner is at work and I’m home alone. I’ll try to begin around 10 am, but I MUST check my email and take care of all that “business” before I canfully concentrate on the task at hand. Normally I don’t listen to music. I find it too distracting, especially when working on a play. I need to listen to the characters conversing with each other. Contrary to this, sometimes I WILL go to my favorite local Starbucks. Especially when I’m in editing mode. (I’ll write a chapter, print it out, then edit with penbefore retyping.) This allows me to escape the distractions of theinternet as I’m too cheap to pay for a T-mobile HotSpot account!
In other interviews and discussions, you’ve said thatyou drew heavily from your own life in writing Band Fags! Considering the subject matter and that a lot ofthe characters are loosely based on people from your own life, did you find yourself ever wanting to self-censor what you were writing? If so, how did you overcome that impulse?
Even though Band Fags! is marked “fiction” on the spine, the story IS “based on” a lot of events and people from my past. Some characters I consciously veiled more than others. (“To protect the guilty,” I always say!) Early on I tried to be truthful in my portrayal of certain characters because I wanted to tell the best story that I could. Then inevitably, I’d get in contact with someone I was basing a character on and I’d feel guilty if I said something “bad” about them. For the most part I would remind myself that Jack’s feelings about so-and-so don’t necessarily reflect MY feelings. And again, it’s fiction!
How have some of the people—in the book—responded to it?
As of this moment, only a few of the people I’ve based characters on have finished reading the book. My best friend since 7thgrade saw the play version in 2001. His comment was “We weren’t REALLY that gay, were we?” He was one of the first to read the book and he wasn’t surprised by much of it. I’d warned him early on about the “dramatic license” I’d taken. One of the girls chided me for calling her “a bigger girl.” I explained that clearly Jack has some serious issues! For the most part, I hope everyone will take any similarities with a grain of salt and keep in mind the book is NOT a “memoir.”
The setting—Hazeltucky and the rest of the Detroit area--in Band Fags! is practically acharacter, and you definitely spend a lot of time as a writer really drawing the reader into this world. Why do you think setting/place plays such animportant role for you as a writer?
The book that has made the biggest impact on my life isMichael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I first read it the summer I was out of undergrad. It wasn’t until almost a decade later that I first visited Pittsburgh (I went to grad school at Carnegie Mellon). The minute I got off the bus on Forbes Avenue and saw the Hillman Library and the Cathedral of Learning, I felt I’d already been there thanks to Chabon’s vivid portrait of the Steel City. When it came to writing Band Fags!, I wanted anyone who grew up in Detroit to be able to say, “I know EXACTLY where that is!” And anyone who hasn’t, to get a sense of Life in Hazeltucky during the 1980s as I knew it.
Music naturally plays a huge role in the book--especially with each chapter being titled after a song. If the book was too have a soundtrack beyond the chapter titles, what other tunes might be included in it?
Truthfully, I don’t think there would be ANY other songs on a soundtrack, only because each chapter title was chosen specifically based on the time period in which the chapter takes place, with the lyrics reflecting the situation in the story. A few songs, I took liberties with. “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” for example, came out in 1983, but I use it as the title of a December 1984 chapter, only because it’s a perennial song. I will say that I’m currently writing the “companion piece” to Band Fags! (tentatively titled Drama Queers!), which takes place from September ’87-June ’88 and features such songs as “True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper, “The Final Countdown” by Europe, and “Faded Flowers” by Shriekback.
What can you share about Drama Queers!?
The story focuses on the secondary character from Band Fags!, Brad Dayton, who, for the most part has accepted the fact that he’s gay and wants to make the best of his life. During senior year, Brad and Jack become estranged and Brad finds himself immersed in the world of the Drama Queers. His plan is to move to New York City, attend Juilliard, and become a famous actor someday. He’s got it all figured out… Until he meets a cute boy named Richie Tyler, who steals his heart. Because this story overlaps in time period with the final section of Band Fags!, readers will get to see certain parts of the SAME story told from Brad’s perspective,which I hope will be fun to read and will fill in any blanks.
Posted by Drew on June 23 at 11:13 AM