Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different

by Chuck Palahniuk

“And another thing,” he cautioned me, “don’t use a lot of commas. People hate sentences with lots of commas. Keep your sentences short. Readers like short sentences.”

Now think of yourself, the writer, as a DJ mixing tracks. The more music you have to sample from—the more records you have to spin—the more likely you’ll keep your audience dancing.

Using all three forms of communication creates a natural, conversational style. Description combined with occasional instruction, and punctuated with sound effects or exclamations: It’s how people talk.

Ideally, you should be combining gesture, action, and expression with your dialogue.

If you were my student I’d tell you to make a list of such placeholders. Find them in your own life. And find them in other languages, and among people in other cultures. Use them in your fiction. Cut fiction like film.

To heighten this ritual effect, consider creating a “template” chapter. Using one existing chapter, change minor details and make it arrive at a fresh epiphany. Chances are the reader won’t realize what you’ve done, but will unconsciously recognize the repeated structure. Use this template to create three chapters placed equal distances apart in the book.

Outside of stand-up comedy, there’s not much oral storytelling left in America. But it’s thriving in 12-step support groups. Stand-up comedy versus sit-down tragedy. It

One great aspect of choosing an existing storytelling context is that the context dictates the structure and transitions. A phone sex hotline implies the ever-present ticking clock of credit card charges. The radio show includes commercial breaks. All of your framing devices are there and need no invention.

Nonfiction forms have shaped our most famous authors. Hemingway’s first writing job was as a reporter covering the crime beat on the Kansas City Star. He took to heart the paper’s in-house style guide, which demanded short, choppy sentences filled with active verbs. And for the rest of his career he wrote terse prose based on that same highly readable newspaper style.

So if you were my student I’d tell you that a nonfiction form will allow you to make even the most fantastic, the most maudlin, the most silly story seem completely plausible.

The graininess of black-and-white security cameras, for instance, adds another texture and a fresh point of view to conventional film.

If you were my student I’d tell you to write the most outlandish, challenging, provocative stories. Take full advantage of the complete freedom books provide. To not take advantage of that freedom is to waste the one chief strength of the medium.

Always, always, if you were my student, I’d tell you to allow the epiphany to occur in the reader’s mind before it’s stated on the page.

If all else fails among the literati, always claim the language is beautiful.

The trouble is that readers recoil from the pronoun “I” because it constantly reminds them that they, themselves, are not experiencing the plot events.

So were I your teacher, I’d tell you to write in the first person, but to weed out almost all of your pesky “I”s.

A Hall and Oates song? It didn’t ring a bell so I asked him to sing a line. Over the phone he sang, “Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you…”

My point is that our past distorts and colors how we perceive the world. If I hadn’t said something, this man would’ve heard “meat” instead of “me” for the rest of his life.

But you know this next strategy will never have the same passion as the one you’d chosen as a child. Now you’re especially aware that it’s a choice.

Most stories engage the reader’s mind or heart, his intellect or emotions, but few also pull in the reader’s entire body. Stories that do elicit a physical reaction—horror, pornography—are seen as low culture. But if you were my student I’d ask, Why can’t a high-culture story engage the mind, the heart, and the body?

In my story “Loser” a college student tripping on LSD participates in a television game show, and in struggling through he realizes that the competition to amass huge amounts of consumer goods is insane.

Take note how your hand knows how much coffee is left by the weight of the cup. Tell your stories not simply through your readers’ eyes and minds, but through their skin, their noses, their guts, the bottoms of their feet.

“Great problems, not clever solutions, make great fiction.”

The horizontal refers to the sequence of plot points: The Woodhouse couple moves into a new apartment, Rosemary meets a neighbor, the neighbor jumps from a window one night…etc. The vertical refers to the increase in emotional, physical, and psychological tension over the course of the story. As the plot progresses so should the tension ramp up. Minus the vertical, a story devolves to “and then, and then, and then.”

If your stories tend to amble along, lose momentum, and fizzle out, I’d ask you, “What’s your clock?” And, “Where’s your gun?”

A gun is a different matter. While a clock is set to run for a specified time period, a gun can be pulled out at any moment to bring the story to a climax. It’s called a gun because of Chekhov’s directive that if a character puts a gun in a drawer in act 1 he or she must pull it out in the final act.

Instead, if you were my student I’d tell you to never resolve an issue until you introduce a bigger one. For example: Wendy snuck a glance at him. “Do you have herpes?” Brandon looked away. Gradually, his gaze came back to meet hers. “I bought those place cards you wanted.”

dream sequences are a cheat. Reality can be just as surreal. Look at anything by Nathanael West.

Arbitrary as it might sound, nobody wants to hear about your dream from last night. Not even Carl Jung, unless you’re paying him $150 an hour, and even then he’s faking his interest. Dreams are fake, and fake stuff creates no tension. Fiction is already fake stuff so you don’t need to water it down with faker stuff.

But when you read any form of the verb “is” or “has,” no corresponding brain activity occurs. Likewise with abstract verbs such as “believe”

Thus a passage like, “Arlene was at the door. She had long, brown hair, her face had a look of shocked surprise. She was taller than he remembered…” is less engaging than, “Arlene stepped into view, framed by the open doorway. With one gloved hand she brushed her long, brown hair away from her face. Her penciled eyebrows arched in surprise…”

do the remembering, the believing, and the loving. You may not dictate emotion. Your job is to create the situation that generates the desired emotion in your reader.

you were my student I’d tell you a joke. I’d ask, “What do you call a black man who flies a plane?” As the answer, I’d shout, “A pilot, you fucking racist!” What we think of as humor comes from the rapid relief of tension.

Likewise, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is said to have given readers an approved way to exhaust their fears about wealthy Jews who were emigrating to London in the nineteenth century. Rosemary’s Baby safely pointed out how little control women had over their reproductive health at the time of its release.

professor in physics or chemistry, and your most promising student comes to you with a discovery. She’s found a new molecular property in chocolate. She’s brilliant and naive, but you realize that her discovery could eventually be used to arm the most destructive bomb humankind has ever known. If she’s allowed to publish her findings, sooner or later billions will die as a result. You caution her, but there’s no guarantee she won’t someday share her discovery. Should you kill her? And because you know, also, and might someday suffer dementia and let slip the deadly secret, should you kill yourself as well?

Write as if you were the collective voice of a film review board that’s been asked to assign an audience rating to a yet-to-be-released movie.

Anytime you deny a possibility you create it at the same time. Such statements introduce the threat they appear to be denying.

As a writer, anytime you want to introduce a threat, assure the reader that it won’t happen. Cross your heart and promise that that terrible, looming, unthinkable event will never take

On the surface the story is shocking, but its power lies in how it depicts the alienation we feel as our budding sexuality alienates us from our parents. After it was published in Playboy magazine and in the Guardian newspaper—which lost numerous subscribers for showcasing the story in its Sunday supplement—a man wrote to tell me it was the saddest, most moving story he’d ever read. It’s always heartening when someone looks below the surface.

I think of myself as a conduit. I am the disposable thing trying to identify the eternal thing. Experience enters and product exits.

They’d drunk wine, and the group had congratulated him roundly on his entry into the program. And at some point someone had given him a glass of wine doctored with a sedative. Because this is the tradition. He’d fallen asleep, and they’d removed his clothes and trundled his naked, sleeping body into a fetal position. Then they’d carefully, meticulously tucked him and stitched him into the gutted belly of a newly dead horse. “When you wake,” he told me, “you have no idea where you are at.” Your head pounds from the sedative. You’re shivering with cold. It’s dark and stinks so horribly you can’t take a deep breath. You’re compressed so tightly you can’t move, and you want to vomit but there’s not even space for that. Still, you can hear voices. Beyond this dark, cramped space your professors and advisers are still having their party, and the moment they see you move inside the tight skin of the horse they begin to shout.

“So, you think it’s so easy to be one of us!” they shout. They taunt, “You can’t just fill out some papers and become a veterinarian!” From all around you, unseen, they shout, “You’ve got to fight to join our profession!” As they demand you fight, calling, “Fight! Fight!” you begin to struggle and push against whatever is binding you. And as you claw a hole in the tough, dead hide you feel someone press a glass of wine into your bloody hand. Slowly, you’re forced to birth yourself, naked and bloody, from this dead animal. And once you’re out your companions cheer you and accept you with genuine warmth, and you continue, naked and bloody, to celebrate, having earned your place in their ranks.

And for me writing fiction is about identifying patterns common to many, many lives.

So if you were my student, I’d tell you to go to parties. Share the awkward, unflattering parts of your life. Allow other people to share theirs, and look for a pattern to emerge.

To create this community, give readers more than they can handle alone. Give them so much humor or pathos or idea or profundity that they’re compelled to push the book on others if only to have peers with whom they can discuss it. Give them a book so strong, or a performance so big, that it becomes a story they tell. It’s their story about experiencing the story.

Again, my core theory is that we digest our experience by turning it into stories. Repeating the story—good or bad—allows us to exhaust the unresolved emotion of it.

“If you can’t be happy while washing dishes, you can’t be happy.”

Tom would tell you that if you’re writing “in order to” achieve anything else, then you should not be writing. So if you’re writing in order to buy that big house, or win your father’s respect, or convince Zelda Sayre to marry you, forget it. There are easier, faster ways to achieve your real goal. But if you want to write because you love to read and write, consider the following payoffs.

This is another reason to bother collecting stories. Because our existence is a constant flow of the impossible, the implausible, the coincidental. And what we see on television and in films must always be diluted to make it “believable.” We’re trained to live in constant denial of the miraculous. And it’s only by telling our stories that we get any sense of how extraordinary human existence actually can be.

she deemed too fantastic for the reader to accept. I’d urge you not to use fiction as a vehicle for social engineering. Readers don’t need to be fixed or repaired. Instead, I’d remind you of Tom Spanbauer’s directive: Write about the moment after which everything was different.