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

by Chuck Palahniuk

The shift from moment-to-moment description to an instructional aside creates tension because it cuts away from the action for a beat.

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

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.

Not many stories exist without both voices. On Star Trek it’s the captain’s log. In Flashdance it’s the confessional in the Catholic church. In the film The Social Network, the big voice expository sequences are the legal deposition scenes. At regular intervals a character is going to discuss his life with a therapist. Or she’s going to write a letter or diary entry, but she’s going to rise above the meat-and-potatoes reality of physical verbs.

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.

“Nurse,” he said, “hurry and get me a fresh pancreas.” Use attribution to control the delivery of dialogue, creating the sort of dramatic pause an actor would insert. Otherwise, the reader will race through a line without realizing how it ought to be weighted.

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.”

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

The goal is to create a chorus appropriate to the character. In a documentary about Andy Warhol, he said that the motto of his life had become “So what?” No matter what happened, good or bad, he could dismiss the event by thinking, So what? For Scarlett O’Hara it was, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” 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. When the montage ends we’ll arrive at an actual scene, but with the sense that considerable time has passed. Another method to imply time passing is intercutting. End one scene and jump to a flashback, alternating between the past and present. That way, when you jump back to the present you won’t have to arrive at the moment you left off. Each jump allows you to fudge time, implying it’s passed. Or you can intercut between characters. Think of the various plot threads in John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. As each character meets an obstacle, we jump to a different character.

Or cut between big voice and little voice.

The writer Monica Drake tells of studying under Joy Williams in the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Williams scanned a story submitted to the workshop and sighed, “Ah, white space…the writer’s false friend.”

So if you were my student I’d allow you to start out using space breaks to imply the passage of time. But don’t get comfortable.

Lists break up the page, visually. They force the reader to really read word by word. I loved listing the colors of Ikea furniture in Fight Club, and my dream for Adjustment Day was to write a book of lists that all supported a mythic, unseen list of people to be assassinated. So, lists. Use them.

Tom Spanbauer always said, “Writers write because they weren’t invited to a party.”

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.

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. 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.

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. When you want to showcase a character, put their dialogue in quotation marks. Include attribution. Underscore the speech with a gesture. It’s a subtle effect, but if you were my student I’d tell you it works.

A part of the Ten Commandments of Minimalism: Don’t use Latinate words. Don’t use abstracts. Don’t use received text…And once you establish your authority, you can do anything.

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.

So if you were my student, and you needed to give a character authority—and build your own as the author—introduce the character as simple-minded, then have her or him let rip with a string of esoteric, complicated facts that shock the audience.

To create a story in which the reader never thinks to criticize the characters, kill the mother or father before the first page.

During the filming of Fight Club, I asked director David Fincher if the audience would accept the ultimate reveal that Brad Pitt’s character was imaginary. Fincher’s response was, “If they believe everything up to that point, they’ll believe the plot twist.”

The job of the creative person is to recognize and express things for others. Some haven’t fully grasped their own feelings. Others lack the skill to communicate the feeling or idea. Still others lack the courage to express it.

A wise, intuitive observation can convey more power than all the facts in Wikipedia.

“Who’s telling this? Where are they telling it? And why are they telling it?”

The world is filled with forums in which people tell their stories. These are gold mines where writers can find material. They’re also great settings in which to frame stories.

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.

Now if I were your teacher, 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. Think of Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. By adopting all the conventions of nonfiction newscasts, Welles made a ludicrous story so believable that millions of people panicked.

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.

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. Tastes change over time, public taste as well as personal taste.

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.

All standardized measurements preclude you describing how your character sees the world.

Another part of writing from within a character is using language as only that character would. No two people speak the same.

More important, what consistent language mistakes will he or she make?

So if writing from within a character, you should “burn” the language. Customize it to the speaker. Even when writing in third person, make the language reflect the character’s perspective and experience. To all of Spanbauer’s and Lish’s advice, I’d just add: Make language your bitch.

Beyond that, no abstracts (no inches, miles, minutes, days, decibels, tons, lumens) because the way someone depicts the world should more accurately depict him.

And no perfect newscaster language because the story should not sound fake, as if written by a writer. Lastly, avoid what Spanbauer and Lish call “received text.” Meaning, no clichés.

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.

That’s using what I call “cultural precedent” and moving the reader from a common experience, through several intermediary, escalating examples, and ultimately arriving at an extreme the reader could’ve and would’ve never accepted if you’d presented it from the start.

It’s a useful structure, stringing anecdotes together to illustrate a theme. And it gradually walks the reader from the believable to the incredible.

Use what the reader already knows to gradually move to the fantastic. The tragic. The profound.