Anne Bannon and Mickey Spillian on Writing...and telling stories

Ever read something that just...sings to you? Where you think - yes, that. That's how I feel.
That articulates exactly how I think at a certain moment or time?

Read this fantastic quote by Anne Bannon. Anne Bannon is the pen name for one of the most popular and highly regarded writers of lesbian pulp fiction - most of her novels published between 1957 and 1962. She was married at the time and a mother. After her marriage ended she went on to get a PHd in linguistics and languages and served as a dean of a California State School - during a time when being a lesbian would have ended her academic career. I must admit - I've never heard of Anne Bannon and outside of the writer of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit -- not read any lesbian fiction. Dorothy Allison - author of Bastard Out of Carolina -writes about Bannon as follows: "When I was young, Bannon's books let me imagine myself into her New York City neighborhoods of short-haired, dark-eyed butch women and stubborn, tightlipped secretaries with hearts ready to be broken. I would have dated Beebo, no question."

Here's the quote - which resonated for me, it isn't really just about sexual orientation, at all - it is about well...it is about telling stories and being different.

I've had a lifelong conviction you live between your ears, that that's where all the fun stuff is.

Terry Gross: You mean in your imagination?

Anne: "Exactly. I think that may be the key to a lot of creative work that people do, that somehow there's a life up there that's so private it's hard to articulate, or hard to share. In that case you find another way to express it. Sometimes it comes out as a long narrative in your head. I would retreat to my own internal storytelling when life got a little overwhelming, which it frequently did."

This. When I was a child, alone on the playground, I'd retreat inside my head, weaving wonderous tales with numerous characters. As I grew - I wrote them in notebooks, and then typewriters, and finally computer keyboards (which were the least difficult). I told them aloud.
And inside my head. I drew them in pictures. Haven't been able to do it as much now, my head is so crowded with work noise. And I miss the stories. Not that I don't still tell them...I do, here and there. When the noise is less loud and I'm not trying to focus too hard. Also, as I've grown older - the stories have admittedly become racier than they were when I was young.
Stories make me happy. They give me peace. Without them I feel as if I'm drowing or more aptly slowly sinking into the murk.

And then this:

I think what I did to myself in my long-term marriage and long-term career , was to learn to live so well in my own fantasy that I never truly got out of it. That's not to say I haven't reached out and tried. I have. It just never has taken. I have friends who laughingly call me the Ice Queen. I'm not the Ice Queen. I'm just someone who may have hurt herself or limited herself, by being so tremendously good at creating a life internally. I do it wonderfully, if I may say so myself. It's satisfying to me. I live by myself, I have loads of wonderful friends, straight and gay, I love them all; I depend on them all. But I don't have a gift for partnership in the real world, or I just haven't found the partner. I don't know.

And now, Mickey Spillian - the creator of Mike Hammer - a pulp fiction novelist who gave noire it's edgy punch. After being shot, Terry Gross asks him if this helped inform his writing.

Spillian: "No. No. You're better off if you use your imagination. You can do things with fiction that nobody would ever believe. Words are great. You can say things that you've never experienced and make them sound real."

Also: "I like to say a writer of fiction is really a professional liar. You write these things and people believe it."