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

by Chuck Palahniuk

“If they believe everything up to that point, they’ll believe the plot twist.”

I’d tell you to focus on breaking down a gesture and describing it so effectively that the reader unconsciously mimics it.

The job of the creative person is to recognize and express things for others.

we recognize the truth when we read it.

Fran Lebowitz once wrote, “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”

So if you were my student, I’d ask you, “Who’s telling this? Where are they telling it? And why are they telling it?”

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.

Another excellent storytelling context is late-night radio.

The strange and fantastic plumbs the subconscious like a fairy tale does. The radio’s voice evokes dreamlike images that guide us into our nightmares.

Yet another albeit unlikely context for stories is any of the cable television shopping channels.

So if you were my student I’d task you with writing a story in the persona of a customer phoning the channel and telling a story related to a recent purchase.

I’d tell you to write a story in which a jaded on-air appraiser is asked to confirm the value of a cursed monkey’s paw…a shrunken head…the Holy Grail.

Among the easiest ways to establish your authority is to steal it.

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. Likewise, Fitzgerald’s first writing job was to crank out advertisement copy. Forever after, his fiction was filled with images of advertising, brand names, and the seductive lyrical sentences that still charm us.

a nonfiction form will allow you to make even the most fantastic, the most maudlin, the most silly story seem completely plausible.

Any aspect of the nonfiction form that seems like an innate flaw—the

becomes an asset when you mimic it while using that form for fiction.

So if I were your teacher, I’d tell you to study how each nonfiction form isn’t perfect. Find its flaws and use those to make your fiction seem more real and less polished and writerly.

If you were my student, I’d tell you to forget about being liked.

So do not write to be liked. Write to be remembered.

Instead of writing about a character, write from within the character.

This means you can’t use abstract measurements. No more six-foot-tall men. Instead you must describe a man’s size based on how your character or narrator perceives a man whose height is seventy-two inches. A character might say “a man too tall to kiss” or “a man her dad’s size when he’s kneeling in church.” You may not describe the temperature as being one hundred degrees. Or trips as being fifty miles long. All standardized measurements preclude you describing how your character sees the world.

With a little practice you’ll begin to see the world via the character’s experience and the descriptions will come naturally.

In it the instructor explained that people are usually one of three types: the visual, the auditory, or the tactile. The visual will preface each statement with visual terms. “Look here…” or “I see, but…” The auditory will use terms based on hearing: “Listen up…” or “I hear what you’re saying.” The tactile will use physical, active terms: “I catch your drift,” or, “I can’t wrap my mind around it.”

Stories have greater authority if they’re delivered with the same passion and flawed language that an actual person would use telling the emotion-laden truth.

it’s a great trick to subvert reader expectation by writing a long, elegant passage that ends flatly on exactly the wrong word.

If you were my student I’d tell you to write the most outlandish, challenging, provocative stories.

The first gets laughs. The second anecdote gets laughs but ends badly. The third gets a lot of laughs, so much laughter that I’m forced to stop reading aloud until the laughter subsides, but by then the audience has been charmed beyond the point of no return. That third anecdote takes a sudden turn and barrels full-speed into horror.

If you were my student I’d tell you to read the story “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever. Then read “Call Guy” by Alec Wilkinson in The New Yorker. Then imagine some kid ordering the typical X-ray specs from an ad in the back of a comic book.

The precedent exists for the omniscient device. The eyeglasses actually do allow the kid to see through clothing. The ring of familiarity will allow your reader to buy it. Only instead of sexy nakedness, the kid sees scars, bruises, the hidden proof of tragedy and suffering. His favorite teacher has a swastika tattooed on his chest. His best friend, the toughest boy in school, has a vagina…

readers value surprise above all else in a story.

If you were my student I’d tell you to create a clear scene. Render the setting and physical actions without judgment or summary. Use simple Recording Angel as if you were a camera. Allow your reader to determine the meaning of the events.

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.

So never dictate meaning to your reader. If need be, misdirect him. But always allow him to realize the truth before you state it outright. Trust your readers’ intelligence and intuition, and they will return the favor.

It never dawned on me that maybe people in New York loved the book for the same reason that skinny white people love the film Precious. Because it makes them feel superior.

Always keep your camera pointed elsewhere, describing other characters. Strictly limit a narrator’s reference to self.

If Playgirl bought my story and ninety-nine more, I could afford a ritzy condo. My point is that people measure stuff—money, strength, time, weight—in very personal ways. A city isn’t so many miles from another city, it’s so many songs on the radio. Two hundred pounds isn’t two hundred pounds, it’s that dumbbell at the gym that no one touched and that seemed like a sword-in-the-stone joke until the day a stranger took it off the rack and started doing single-arm rows with it.

The song described a girlfriend who was stealing food from her hungry boyfriend as he gradually starved to death.

You’re forced to realize your identity was a choice, and then to choose another. 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. And you know it, too, will likely fade.

What strategy has your character chosen for success in life? What education or experiences does he or she bring? What priorities? Will they be able to adopt a new dream and a new strategy? Every detail they notice in the world will depend on your answers to the above questions.

And the million eyeballs, those eyeballs would feel great.

To heighten that physical element of a story, it helps to depict characters using drugs, or suffering illness. Depict sex and violence, or medical procedures.

to prompt the reader to have a sympathetic physical reaction.

“When you don’t know what comes next, describe the interior of the narrator’s mouth.”

If you were my student I’d tell you to watch what people do unconsciously. Collect the stories they tell to explain their behavior.

You could go inside and feel safe and collect your thoughts. Now only shops keep such hours so it’s no surprise that shopping has become our comforting pastime.

My body knew something my mind didn’t, and I wanted to understand its secret.

That weekend I knew I had to explore my fear of and attraction to conflict.

If you were my student, I’d push you to create an epiphany. You’d have to dredge up or dream up the moment I realized why the tailor at Brooks Brothers had provided me with more comfort than a fortune spent on Jungian analysis.