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

by Chuck Palahniuk

I’ve seen writers who sold a single book and became so disillusioned by the process that they never wrote another. I’d paraphrase the writer Joy Williams, who says that writers must be smart enough to hatch a brilliant idea—but dull enough to research it, keyboard it, edit and re-edit it, market the manuscript, revise it, revise it, re-revise it, review the copy edit, proofread the typeset galleys, slog through the interviews and write the essays to promote it, and finally to show up in a dozen cities and autograph copies for thousands or tens of thousands of people...

“And another thing,” he cautioned me, “don’t use a lot of commas. People hate sentences with lots of commas. Keep your sentences short. Readers like short sentences.”

Think of a story as a stream of information. At best it’s an ever-changing series of rhythms. Now think of yourself, the writer, as a DJ mixing tracks. The more music you have to sample from—the more records you have to spin—the more likely you’ll keep your audience dancing. You’ll have more tricks to control the mood. To calm it down to a lull. Then to raise it to a crescendo. But to always keep changing, varying, evolving the stream of information so it seems fresh and immediate and keeps the reader hooked.

Using all three forms of communication creates a natural, conversational style. Description combined with occasional instruction, and punctuated with sound effects or exclamations: It’s how people talk.

In my own short story “Guts,” I lapse into a long passage of instruction: “...go buy a pack of those lambskin condoms. Take one out and unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly. Then try to tear it. Try to pull it in half.” The shift from moment-to-moment description to an instructional aside creates tension because it cuts away from the action for a beat. Then, boom, we’re back in the description of events.

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.

You’ve seen this in a zillion stories. Every time Carrie Bradshaw hunches over her laptop to write her Sex and the City newspaper column...Every time Jane Fonda spills her guts to her psychiatrist in Klute...a story lapses into big voice. The camera is little voice. The voice-over device is big voice. Little voice (also called Recording Angel because it seems to hover and watch) depicts the moment-by-moment action. Big voice comments on it.

They ask us to care about the narrator’s regret and lost innocence. Only then do they go into flashback and specific detail to demonstrate how that heart was broken.

These days a good story is more likely to begin with a physical scene—people finding a dead body or being menaced by zombies. Little voice, not big voice. Blame this on movies.

In the second scene or the second chapter, then you can risk big voice. Remember: First we see Indiana Jones rob a tomb and fight to escape past poisonous snakes and rotting corpses. Snakes, skeletons, and poison darts trigger our physical reaction. Once we’re flooded with adrenaline, then we see him giving a boring lecture in the classroom. It’s only in porn that the talky parts work better at the beginning.

And yes, a small amount of big voice goes a long way. It works great for setting a scene. And it works great for underscoring a plot event. 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.

However, switching to big voice for short stretches will allow you to imply time passing. And it can also buffer between scenes in which lots of physical action takes place. And it allows you to briefly summarize preceding action and deliver a witty or wise meme about life.

By attribution I mean those little signposts inserted in dialogue that tell us who said what. For example: “Don’t make me stop this car,” she said.

First, use attribution to avoid confusing your reader. Avoid making your reader feel foolish at all costs! You want to make your reader feel smart, smarter than the main character. That way the reader will sympathize and want to root for the character.

Scarlett O’Hara is charming and smart and can convince men she’s beautiful. We have every reason to hate and resent her, but she’s too dumb to recognize that Rhett Butler is her soul mate. So we’re hooked. We feel superior and in our patronizing, condescending, voyeuristic way, we want her to smarten up. In a way, we “adopt” her.

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.

Or: “Vampires?” Declan smirked, but his hand flew to his chest, to where he’d worn a crucifix as a child. “You’re talking nonsense.” Create tension by pitting your character’s gestures against his or her words. Your characters have arms and legs and faces. Use them. Use attribution. Control the delivery of dialogue. Support it with actions, or negate it with actions. Above all, do not confuse your reader by leaving it unclear who’s saying what.

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

You’ve been there. You’re having dinner with friends, talking up a storm. After a laugh or a sigh, the conversation falls to silence. You’ve exhausted a topic. The silence feels awkward, and no one puts forward a new topic. How do you tolerate that moment of nothing? In my childhood, people filled that pause by saying, “It must be seven minutes past the hour.” Superstition held that Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ had both died at seven minutes past the hour, so humanity would always also fall silent to honor them at that moment. I’m told that Jewish people fill that silence by saying, “A Jewish baby has been born.”

My point is that these sayings reinforce our group identity. They reinforce our chosen method for coping with impasse. And they can carry the reader between shifts in prose just as easily as jump cuts carry a viewer through a film. 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.

In my novel Beautiful You I used space breaks instead of chapter breaks because I wanted to mimic the appearance of mass-market pornographic paperback books.

Tom Spanbauer always said, “Writers write because they weren’t invited to a party.” So bear in mind that the reader is also alone. A reader is more likely to feel socially awkward and crave a story that offers a way to be in the company of others. The reader, alone in bed or alone in an airport crowded with strangers, will respond to the party scenes at Jay Gatsby’s mansion.

Once you establish your rules and begin to repeat them, they provide the framework in which characters can feel confident. The characters know how to behave. And they’ll begin to relax and reveal themselves.

The linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath has said that a book will only become a classic if it binds together a community of readers.

So recognize that reading is a lonely pastime. 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 ...

When you want to showcase a character, put their dialogue in quotation marks. Include attribution. Underscore the speech with a gesture.

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.

To that I’d add the Thom Jones advice: Action carries its own authority. If you move through each scene with clear, physical verbs—taking steps, touching objects—your reader’s mind will follow as closely as a dog’s eyes track a squirrel.

If you were my student I’d ask you to consider the following methods for building authority within a story. Make the reader believe you...

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.

Because for most of us—especially among young people—our worst fear is of losing our parents. If you create a world where one or both parents have died, you’re creating characters that have survived your reader’s worst fears. Your reader will respect them from the get-go. Even though the surviving offspring might be children or teenagers, their unspoken pain and loss will cast them as adults in the reader’s mind. Plus, from the first page, anything that happens will be survivable because the characters have already survived the worst. A dead parent bonds the surviving family in ways your reader would like to be bonded with his or her family.

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

With that in mind, if you were my student I’d tell you to focus on breaking down a gesture and describing it so effectively that the reader unconsciously mimics it. Not everything, but the crucial objects and actions should be unpacked.

In Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” note how she lingers on the box from which the papers are drawn. She describes where it’s stored, how it was crafted, what it replaced. All of this attention lavished on a plain wooden box helps us accept the horrible purpose for it. If we believe in the box, we’ll believe the ritual murder it facilitates.

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.

Whatever the case, we recognize the truth when we read it. The best writers seem to read our minds, and they nail exactly what we’ve never been able to put into words.

In her novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron wrote, “When you’re single you date other singles. And when you’re a couple you date other couples.” Reading those words, I was willing to believe anything she put on the page after that. The same goes for Amy Hempel, who wrote, “What dogs want is for no one to ever leave.” Fran Lebowitz once wrote, “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.” Armistead Maupin invented Mona’s Law. It states that of a great lover, a great job, and a great apartment, in life you can have one. At most you can have two of the three. But you will never, ever have all three at the same time. Truman Capote wrote, “You can tell what a man really thinks of you by the earri...

Context and source are more important now than they’ve ever been. So if you were my student, I’d ask you, “Who’s telling this? Where are they telling it? And why are they telling it?”

Stand-up comedy versus sit-down tragedy. It goes without saying that no one’s confidence should be betrayed—but you can learn effective storytelling tactics. Better skills—for free and with free coffee—than you can learn in many MFA programs. And what about a story in which someone does steal a story from Alcoholics Anonymous and turns it into a hugely successful movie...? Imagine the rage, envy, revenge that act would engender while still keeping the reader’s sympathy.

Hemingway’s first writing job was as a reporter covering the crime beat on the Kansas City Star. He took to heart the paper’s in-house style guide, which demanded short, choppy sentences filled with active verbs. And for the rest of his career he wrote terse prose based on that same highly readable newspaper style.

Likewise, Fitzgerald’s first writing job was to crank out advertisement copy. Forever after,

his fiction was filled with images of advertising, brand names, and the seductive lyrical sen...

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 ...

In so many of my own novels I’ve used nonfiction forms. In Choke the form is the fourth step of the 12-step recovery program, a written summation of the addict’s life. In Rant it’s the form of an oral history, numerous interviews intercut to tell the story of someone now absent. Among my models for that book was Jean Stein’s Edie: An American Biography, the story of Edith Sedgwick. And much of the structure of my Invisible Monsters was b...

My Pygmy appears to be a series of “dispatches” sent by a spy reporting on his progress during a secret mission. It was Chelsea Cain, in workshop, who suggested that I used black blocks to occlude certain details and make the “document” seem redacted. The effect worked so well I wished I’d used it more. Consequently I did, by placing “real” rose petals and pills on the pages of Fight Club 2, to hide characters’ faces and thereby undermine the sincerity of what they might say. Or to hide their dialogue and negate its cleverness. Thank you, Chelsea.

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.