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

by Chuck Palahniuk

I love knowing a lot of people, but the downside is that means going to a lot of funerals.

“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.”

Think of a story as a stream of information.

Description: A man walks into a bar. Instruction: Walk into a bar. Exclamation (onomatopoeia): Sigh.

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.

Trapped all day, then could be next walk to toilet, pow-pow, clot knock out brain.”

Everyone should use three types of communication. Three parts description. Two parts instruction. One part onomatopoeia. Mix to taste.

In conversation we switch between first-, second-, and third-person points of view. The constant shift controls the intimacy and authority of our story;

The rub is that using all three POVs means the story must ultimately be told in first person.

If you were my student, I’d tell you to shift as needed between the three POVs. Not constantly, but as appropriate to control authority, intimacy, and pace.

The camera is little voice. The voice-over device is big voice.

Little voice (also called Recording Angel because it seems to hover and watch) depicts the moment-by-moment action. Big voice comments on it. Little voice remains objective, giving us the smells, sounds, flavors, textures, and actions in a scene. Big voice muses.

Little voice gives us the facts. Big voice gives us the meaning—or at least a character’s subjective ...

In my own books, the device for introducing big voice is usually some nonfiction form that emerges from the character’s life.

consider that big voice might not be your strongest way to hook a reader at the beginning of a story.

These days a good story is more likely to begin with a physical scene—people

It’s only in porn that the talky parts work better at the beginning.

And yes, a small amount of big voice goes a long way. It works great for setting a scene. And it works great for underscoring a plot event. If you were my student I’d tell you to keep your big voice philosophizing to a minimum. Each time you shift to big voice you bump your reader out of the fictional dream, so too much commenting can slow the story’s momentum to a crawl. And it can annoy by being too clever or too preachy, dictating how the reader should react.

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

Avoid making your reader feel foolish at all costs!

So use attribution to avoid making your reader feel like a dummy who gets lost in long exchanges of dialogue. Better yet, I’d tell you to never use long exchanges of dialogue, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Third, use physical action as a form of attribution that also underscores or undermines what’s being said. For example: “Coffee?” With her back to the room, she poured the cups full and dropped cyanide in Ellen’s. “I think you’ll like this new French roast.”

The body language transcends Italian or English. Honestly, all the emoticons are there in one painting. In short, dialogue is your weakest storytelling tool. As Tom Spanbauer always taught us, “Language is not our first language.”

If you were my student, I’d make you create a list of all the quick wordless gestures you use every day.

I’d make you list at least fifty hand signals. That way you’d always, always be aware of the variety of gestures you can insert into dialogue.

it’s the two sentences, “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.”

The goal is to create a chorus appropriate to the character.

In that way, a chorus is also a coping mechanism.

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.

Whether you depict cities or meals or boyfriends, keep them brief and compress them together.

As each character meets an obstacle, we jump to a different character. It’s maddening if the reader is invested in just one character, but every jump moves us forward in time.

To add a new texture to any story never hesitate to insert a list.

There the main character pursues a girl through the standing sets of a Hollywood movie studio of the 1920s. Strung together are fake monuments and antiquities, every culture and time period in history crammed cheek-to-jowl, the modern world juxtaposed with dinosaurs. It might be the most perfectly surreal passage in all literature.

Lists break up the page, visually. They force the reader to really read word by word.

My guess is that people haven’t a clue how to get along. They need a structure, rules, and roles to play. Once those are established, people can gather and compare their lives. They can learn from each other.

Once you establish your rules and begin to repeat them, they provide the framework in which characters can feel confident. The characters know how to behave. And they’ll begin to relax and reveal themselves.

It was years before I understood why I wrote these social model books. It wasn’t until I’d been introduced to the work of the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. He suggests that people create “liminoid” events as a kind of social experiment. Each is a short-lived society in which people agree to be equals. Communitas, he called it. If the experiment is a success: if it serves people by providing community, fun, stress relief, self-expression, whatever…then it gradually becomes an institution.

Don’t shy away from inventing rituals in your story. Invent rules and prayers. Give people roles to play and lines to recite. Include some form of communion and confession, a way for people to tell their stories and find connection with others.

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.

Use this template to create three chapters placed equal distances apart in the book.

In this world where so many fraternal organizations and religions are disappearing, if you were my student I’d tell you to use ritual and repetition to invent new ones for your readers.

So whenever you want to undermine what’s being said, paraphrase it. If you want to negate or lessen a character, paraphrase what they say.

May one of your many, many graves always be inside my head.

For quick, powerful proof of a character’s authority, few tactics work as well as allowing her to reel off facts that demonstrate she boasts a depth of technical knowledge no one would’ve expected.

The dead relative is everywhere.

Among hit comedies, the body count is staggering.

“Why is it that so many successful plots begin at the family plot?”

Because for most of us—especially among young people—our worst fear is of losing our parents. If you create a world where one or both parents have died, you’re creating characters that have survived your reader’s worst fears. Your reader will respect them from the get-go.

Someone once told me a secret about the stained-glass windows in cathedrals. He began by telling me how these windows served to teach scripture to the illiterate.

The trick to making a miracle believable was to place it high in the window, far from the lowly viewer.