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

by Chuck Palahniuk

So if you were my student, I’d urge you to cut your narrative like a film editor cuts film. To do this, you can use a repeating chorus: “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about…” Or, “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.” Thus cuing the reader with a sort-of touchstone that indicates: We’re about to jump to something different. Or you can keep the action flowing and increase the momentum of the energy by using a regular series of unlikely conjunctions. If you were my student I’d tell you to listen to a child. Listen to someone who’s terrified of being interrupted and has developed tricks for hogging a listener’s attention nonstop. Granted, their stories might be boring, but you can learn some natural tricks for rolling your own fiction on and on and on.