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

by Chuck Palahniuk

A gun is a different matter. While a clock is set to run for a specified time period, a gun can be pulled out at any moment to bring the story to a climax. It’s called a gun because of Chekhov’s directive that if a character puts a gun in a drawer in act 1 he or she must pull it out in the final act.

Whereas a clock is something obvious and constantly brought to mind, a gun is something you introduce and hide, early, and hope your audience will forget. When you finally reveal it, you want the gun to feel both surprising and inevitable. Like death, or the orgasm at the end of sex.

Consider how an excited child tells a story. The sentences just cascade, one after another with few clear breaks. Such momentum! Almost like music, very much like music, like a song. You can mimic this enthusiasm by using unconventional conjunctions to link together run-on sentences.

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.

If you were my student, I’d tell you to recycle your objects. This means introducing and concealing the same object throughout the story. Each time it reappears, the object carries a new, stronger meaning. Each reappearance marks an evolution in the characters.

If a plot point is worth including, it’s worth depicting in a scene. Don’t deliver it in dialogue. You’re not Shakespeare limited to the stage at the Globe Theatre and the endurance of the groundlings’ legs. You have the budget and the time.

To quote Joy Williams, “You don’t write to make friends.”

Imagine a stripper walking out onstage, shucking his or her pants, and saying, “This is my junk. Any questions?” Whether it was Channing Tatum or Jenna Jameson, you’d feel cheated. As readers or exotic dance enthusiasts, we want tension. We want a gradual discovery process. The outcome is more or less predictable: genitals. So we want sustained arousal and engagement.

Perhaps this is why people dream of traveling a lot at retirement. Seeing the world and recognizing one’s own insignificance makes it okay to come home and to die.

consider the canned meat Spam. The writer Doug Coupland tells me that anthropologists have a theory as to why the canned meat is so popular among Pacific Islanders. They speculate that Spam has a taste and consistency close to that of human flesh, and cultures with a distant history of cannibalism crave the product without realizing why. So…a secret dining club hosts ocean cruises where guests are taken miles offshore, into international waters, and pay a huge fee for a banquet of human flesh. The truth is the hosts actually prepare and serve Spam. Is it ethical to charge people—icky people, granted—an exorbitant fee for fake human flesh?

find some unresolvable issue that will instantly guarantee tension and debate over your work.

You never know when you’ll encounter the remarkable idea, image, remark.

A painter once told me that any artist must manage her life to create large blocks of time for creative work. By making ongoing notes throughout my day, when I finally do sit down to “write” I have a pile of ideas. I’m not wasting any of my valuable creative time by starting from zero.

a good story might leave everyone in awed silence. But a great story evokes similar stories and unites people. It creates community by reminding us that our lives are more similar than they are different.

Perhaps the best aspect of crowd seeding is that it allows a writer to work among people. So much of this job is done in isolation, whether alone with a pen or keyboard, or alone on a stage, or alone in a hotel room. It’s always a joy to just introduce an idea and listen as other people perform. My degree is in journalism. I lack imagination, but I am a good listener, and my memory is decent. And for me writing fiction is about identifying patterns common to many, many lives.

Tom always said 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.

There is no more honest feedback than laughter or groans or the motionless silence that genuine tension creates.

If you’re going to be a good writer, don’t be afraid to also be a bad artist.

Consider that some form of visual art will complement your writing. To recover from the colorless, limited world of abstract language, spend some time working with colors and tactile shapes.

the secret is to trick yourself into having a great time. Whether you’re on a twenty-city book tour or washing dishes, find some way to love the task.

Being a writer consists of more than writing. The next great inspiration will come along, but until it does…clean up your desk. Recycle the old paper stuff. Make room for the new arrival in your head.

had dinner with Neil Gaiman, his daughter was just graduating from a college program there. He seemed resigned but hopeful on the topic: Gaiman proposed that if someone loves a writer’s work, really loves it, that person will eventually buy it. He speculated that in the countries where such piracy was rampant the economies were terrible. As those economies improved and people had more disposable income, they’d someday begin to buy the actual books they enjoyed. Gaiman likened a free, pirated book to the first no-cost shot of heroin that, with luck, will create a lifelong addiction. He advised patience. The loss to piracy was just a cost of doing business.

Mapmakers, cartographers, create fake towns on the maps they make.

Tom would tell you that if you’re writing “in order to” achieve anything else, then you should not be writing. So if you’re writing in order to buy that big house, or win your father’s respect, or convince Zelda Sayre to marry you, forget it. There are easier, faster ways to achieve your real goal. But if you want to write because you love to read and write, consider the following payoffs.

Once you use a story or novel to explore and exaggerate and exhaust a personal issue, the issue itself seems to vanish.

This is another reason to bother collecting stories. Because our existence is a constant flow of the impossible, the implausible, the coincidental. And what we see on television and in films must always be diluted to make it “believable.” We’re trained to live in constant denial of the miraculous. And it’s only by telling our stories that we get any sense of how extraordinary human existence actually can be.

I’d urge you not to use fiction as a vehicle for social engineering. Readers don’t need to be fixed or repaired. Instead, I’d remind you of Tom Spanbauer’s directive: Write about the moment after which everything was different.

Airships by Barry Hannah Campfires of the Dead by Peter Christopher Cathedral by Raymond Carver Drown by Junot Díaz Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland Heartburn by Nora Ephron Honored Guest: Stories by Joy Williams Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz The Acid House by Irvine Welsh The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel The Folly of Loving Life by Monica Drake The Ice at the Bottom of the World: Stories by Mark Richard The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis The Night in Question: Stories by Tobias Wolff The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Thom Jones Through the Safety Net: Stories by Charles Baxter

Fuck me. I was stupid. I showed full belly, something no one onstage is supposed to do. Instead of making the emotion occur in my audience I got myself choked up. With all this talk about the suffering of poor beasts, I’d gotten misty-eyed and tight throated. A self-indulgent, cardinal no-no for the writer of Fight Club.

It can occur as a tragedy, to meet a writer. Physical proof of the author means you’ll never meet the characters you’ve come to accept as friends or heroes. I’ve experienced this so many times that I avoid meeting people whose work I enjoy. And understanding this disappointment, I try to control the damage.

Writing is nothing if not problem solving. These rules that hobble you now will ultimately strengthen your work.

Paper cameras and wristwatches and copies of The Celestine Prophecy, how could things of such vital importance just evaporate the way they did? That entire world of dot-matrix printers and pulling the tracking strips off the edges of continuous-feed printer paper—gone.

Eventually every writer becomes another writer’s story.

What if all of our anger and fear is unwarranted? What if world events are unfolding in perfect order to deliver us to a distant joy we can’t conceive of at this time? Please consider that the next ending will be the happy one.