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

by Chuck Palahniuk

In short, dialogue is your weakest storytelling tool. As Tom Spanbauer always taught us, “Language is not our first language.”

Scratch the surface of any comedy and you’ll find a dead mother or father. It’s the unresolved, irresolvable hurt that generates all the wisecracking and antics.

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.

Write to be remembered.

Getting inside a character might seem like a vacation from being you. But face it, you’re never not you. No matter what world you create you’re always dealing with your own shit. Same shit, different mask. You’ve chosen to explore a certain character because something about it resonates with you. Don’t pretend for a moment that writing as a different person is evading reality. If anything it allows you a greater freedom to explore parts of yourself you wouldn’t dare consciously examine.

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. To not take advantage of that freedom is to waste the one chief strength of the medium.

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 were I your teacher, I’d tell you to write in the first person, but to weed out almost all of your pesky “I”s.

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.

“No two people ever walk into the same room.”

I’d ask you: 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.

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

If you were my student, I’d push you to create an epiphany.

Your body is a recording device more effective than your mind.

So if you were my student, I’d tell you to listen to your body as you write. Take note how your hand knows how much coffee is left by the weight of the cup. Tell your stories not simply through your readers’ eyes and minds, but through their skin, their noses, their guts, the bottoms of their feet.

If you can identify the core legend that your story is telling, you can best fulfill the expectation of the legend’s ending.

So if you were my student, I’d tell you to establish emotional authority by depicting an imperfect character making a mistake.

In real life writers are lousy at dealing with tension. We avoid conflict. We’re writers because we like to deal with things from a distance.

If you were my student I’d tell you I understand your unease with tension. But writing fiction allows you to experience escalating conflict, controlled by you. Writing fiction will help you deal with tension and conflict in your real life.

So if you were my student I’d tell you to limit your elements and make certain each represents one of the horses your story is about. Find a hundred ways to say the same thing.

In Berlin the organizers always shrug and say, “Berlin runs by many clocks,” meaning people have many options and they won’t commit to one until the last moment.

Friends of mine hated how the diminishing number of pages betrayed how soon a book would end. And because I couldn’t change that aspect of a book, I chose to accentuate it. By running the page numbers in reverse I made them into another clock, increasing tension by exaggerating the sense of time passing.

if you were my student, I’d urge you to cut your narrative like a film editor cuts film.

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.

So, my student, today’s lesson is to recycle your objects. Introduce them, then hide them. Rediscover them, then hide them. Each time you bring them back, make them carry greater importance and emotion.

So unpack the big stuff. Do not deliver important information via dialogue.

As Tom explained this, Gordon Lish forbid depicting dreams in fiction. His thinking, as I understood it, was that dream sequences are a cheat. Reality can be just as surreal.

With that in mind, I’d tell you to avoid “is” and “has” in any form. And avoid abstract verbs in favor of creating the circumstances that allow your reader to do the remembering, the believing, and the loving.

So once you’ve established your characters and settings, give your people a glimpse of the outside world.

If you were my student, I’d urge you to find some unresolvable issue that will instantly guarantee tension and debate over your work.

Anytime you deny a possibility you create it at the same time.

Ira Levin’s point being: don’t overthink your creative process. But if you were my student, and you asked, here’s what I’d tell you. First, I work best in boring places with little stimulation but with other people present. These places include airports. Car dealerships. Hospital emergency room waiting areas.

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.

The best stories evoke stories.

Writing isn’t about looking good. The point is to give people permission to tell their own stories and exhaust their emotional attachment and reaction.

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.

So if you were my student, I’d tell you to go to parties. Share the awkward, unflattering parts of your life. Allow other people to share theirs, and look for a pattern to emerge.

Through our lives, our relationships are based on proximity. We attend the same school. We work at the same company or live in the same neighborhood. And when those circumstances change, our friendships dissolve.

The first is that the classic American bestseller tends to depict three main characters. One character follows orders, is shy and agreeable, a general all-round good girl or boy. The second character is largely the opposite: a rebel who bullies and breaks the rules, always brashly hogging the spotlight. And the third is quiet, thoughtful, and acts as the narrator, relating the story to the reader. The passive character commits suicide in some way. The rebel is executed in some way. And the thoughtful witness leaves the circumstances of the story, wiser for having seen the fate of the other two characters, and is ready to relay this cautionary tale to the world. Don’t laugh. Arguably the bestselling American books of the twentieth century have followed this formula.

Important Note: To sell an extra hundred thousand books, depict a white person teaching a black person how to read. White people who love to read think everyone should love to read. Plus it flatters readers to show them a character who can’t read. It’s the ultimate way to make your reader feel superior and thus to sympathize with a character. Best of all, it validates reading as a pastime.

So if you were my student I’d tell you to make a sympathetic character suffer, then suffer more, then suffer worse, never make the reader feel complicit with the tormenters, then—the end. No redemption. People love those books.

Above all, I’d tell you, do not use death to resolve your story. Your reader must get out of bed tomorrow and go to work. Killing your main character—we’re not talking about a second-act sacrifice—is the cheapest form of resolution.

“Write about the moment after which everything is different.”

The problem with loving so many people is that you lose so many.

So if you were my student I’d tell you, yes, someday you can go back to using “is” and “has” verbs, as well as abstract measurements and “thought” verbs. You can occasionally use passive voice and summaries. Eventually you can use the received text of clichés, if appropriate. But first I want you not to. For the next couple of years, at least, I want you to follow the rules of this book. By doing so you’ll be forced to invent new ways of telling a story. You’ll learn to stay within a scene and move your characters through their world in a physical way. Above all, you’ll grow beyond the easy “default” ways of writing that rob your work of its power. Writing is nothing if not problem solving. These rules that hobble you now