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

by Chuck Palahniuk

Does it instantly hook them and resonate with their lives? Does it call to mind anecdotes they’d all but forgotten? And does it give them permission to relate stories they’d never dared?

So if you were my student, I’d tell you to go to parties. Share the awkward, unflattering parts of your life.

that 99 percent of what any workshop does is give people permission to write. It legitimizes an activity that most of the world sees as pointless.

Consider that some form of visual art will complement your writing.

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.

Mapmakers, cartographers, create fake towns on the maps they make. Then if they find a map published by a different source, but featuring the same fake town, they know it’s a copy and can take legal action. With this in mind, you can plant a unique name or phrase that when searched will turn up every site on the web where your work is available. One click, and you’ve found all the illegal copies.

People forget that writing books is my job, not autographing thousands of penises.

Americans are nothing if not voyeuristic. A nation of peeping Toms, we particularly love seeing the misery of other people. Especially if our ogling makes us think we’re doing a good deed. And we need to believe that our increased awareness isn’t just turning human misery into entertainment, but actually improving the lot of humankind.

If you were my student I’d tell you to reject the “believable” and go looking for the actual wonders that surround you. I’d tell you to read “The Harvest” by Amy Hempel and discover all the truth she deemed too fantastic for the reader to accept.

Tales about rednecks in Idaho who sat trackside and used rifles to blow out the windows of Cadillacs being shipped to Seattle on open-sided car carriers.

May one of his many, many graves always be in my head.

The moment after which everything is different.

We’d watched a man die. He was dead in our minds, and then he wasn’t.