What Can Be Learned from Chuck Palahniuk?
I’ve written about Chuck Palahniuk before on this blog. He’s an enormously talented writer who has had a profound impact on my personal and professional life. He just published a new book, Not Forever, But For Now, and is currently on what is sure to be one hell of a book tour. What can I say? I love the man.
As a result, I subscribe to his Substack. Let me tell you, it is a treasure trove of information for a writer.
Dangerous Writing?The latest Palahniuk newsletter is all about “dangerous writing,” a term his mentor, Tom Spanbauer, coined. It’s also the name of Spanbauer’s ongoing weekly critique group.
Palahniuk begins with an anecdote about a conversation he’d had with Max Brooks about his best-selling novel, World War Z. Palahniuk rightly inferred the novel wasn’t entirely about zombies, but about the author’s mother’s battle with cancer.
… a writer had to explore an unresolved personal issue that couldn’t be resolved. A death, for instance. Something that seemed personally dangerous to delve into.
Chuck Palahniuk
Palahniuk offers another example: Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice. Rice wrote the bestseller while her young daughter was being treated for juvenile leukemia. Their day-to-day lives were consumed by blood: blood tests, blood draws, blood counts. Faced with the horror of the situation, Rice wrote through it by using vampires as a metaphor. This is dangerous writing.
Palahniuk explains the metaphor is perfect because not only does it allow others into a writer’s story without a grisly, traumatic prerequisite, but it also prevents the writer from fully facing the uncomfortable, tragic, personal issue. He explains, “By doing so the writer could exaggerate and vent and eventually exhaust the pain or fear around the issue, and that gradual relief would keep the writer coming back to work on the project despite no promise of a book contract or money or a readership.”
As a writer, I’ve dealt with this notion before. I had hard and fast rules to avoid dangerous writing. However, working on my fourth manuscript and attempting to gain literary representation for my third manuscript, I’ve come to this realization: dangerous writing is unavoidable. The pain finds its way in. Re-reading Moody Blue, I realize it’s really about a heartbreak from which I’d never recover, a heartbreak I vowed never to write about again — but there it is, all the same.
In true Palahniuk fashion, he continues the metaphor of painful, dangerous writing to an extreme and unpleasant image (in his defense, Spanbauer started it). When a writer consciously sets about dangerous writing with clear intention, writing a first draft is like “Shitting out the lump of coal.” Palahniuk further explains the first draft is slow and painful. “Even using the best metaphor in the world, Dangerous Writing requires long chunks of isolation. The isolation is the least of it. But at least when the draft is done you feel relief. It’s your shit. Since we’re on the subject, everyone’s shit smells good to them because it’s the smell of relief. Proof the pain is gone.”
It’s the unresolvable pain that brings you back to the task of writing. And it’s not important that anyone ever recognize your secret pain.
Chuck Palahniuk
I’ve written about writing as a therapeutic outlet before, but after reading Palahniuk’s latest Substack, I believe that if you write long enough, intention becomes inconsequential. It’s such a personal act that no matter how hard a writer may try, they’ll be all over the manuscript. Their personal defeats and unfulfilled desires and regrets will be in every carefully chosen word. It can be cleverly hidden and disguised as metaphor, but that doesn’t mean the “unresolvable pain” isn’t there.
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