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

by Chuck Palahniuk

It’s a common mistake to give away everything in the opening sentence:

Remember, you came to me. You asked my advice on writing, and I’m telling you what I was taught: no dreams.

When they read an active, physical verb like “step” or “kick” or “grabbed,” the verb activates the part of their brain responsible for that movement. Your brain responds as if you’re actually swimming a stroke or sneezing. But when you read any form of the verb “is” or “has,” no corresponding brain activity occurs. Likewise with abstract verbs such as “believe” or “love” or “remember.” No sympathetic cognitive mirroring, or whatever, takes place. Thus a passage like, “Arlene was at the door. She had long, brown hair, her face had a look of shocked surprise. She was taller than he remembered...” is less engaging than, “Arlene stepped into view, framed by the open doorway. With one gloved hand she brushed her long, brown hair away from her face. Her penciled eyebrows arched in surprise...” 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. You may not dictate emotion. Your job is to create the situation that generates the desired emotion in your reader.

So once you’ve established your characters and settings, give your people a glimpse of the outside world. It’s based on Heidegger, sort of, and his idea that escaping from your Dasein or destiny is pointless. The larger world reminds characters of their smallness and mortality, and it prompts them to take disastrous action. Think of the final flashback reveal in Suddenly, Last Summer. Sebastian finally takes action, but he’s already doomed. 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.

If you were my student I’d tell you a joke. I’d ask, “What do you call a black man who flies a plane?” As the answer, I’d shout, “A pilot, you fucking racist!” What we think of as humor comes from the rapid relief of tension. First you think I’m going to say something hateful. And then I don’t. In fact I reverse the accusation and throw it back at you. A classic power reversal.

A laugh or merely a happy ending occurs when you negate tension. The more tension you can create, and the longer you can sustain it without alienating your reader, the more satisfying the ending will seem. And even if you do alienate the reader, there’s a good chance he’ll return to the book out of unresolved curiosity.

As a writer your job isn’t to resolve an issue, but you can depict the situation and make use of the natural tension a topic carries.

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

In old-fashioned literary terms, anytime you broach a subject yet refuse to explore it, that’s called occupatio (in Greek paralipsis). For example, “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.” But the technique also covers statements such as, “You know I’d never kill you, don’t you?” Or, “He told himself not to slap her.” Anytime you deny a possibility you create it at the same time. Such statements introduce the threat they appear to be denying. For instance: This ship is unsinkable. The canned salmon is supposed to be safe. Please don’t mention Daniel’s murder. We’re not going down that road.

As a writer, anytime you want to introduce a threat, assure the reader that it won’t happen. Cross your heart and promise that that terrible, looming, unthinkable event will never take place.

Instantly dismiss the possibility. That seems like a guarantee of safety, but it’s a great way to introduce th...

People ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” Their question should be so much bigger. Sometimes the premise occurs first. Other times, a single sentence or phrase is the genesis of an entire story or book.

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.

build your novel with a number of scenes or chapters that can stand alone as short stories. Magazines and websites can excerpt these, and they make a much better advertisement for your book. Plan for the fact that every medium wants free content.

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.

Or where further research might help. Once the holes are filled, I’ve got a story that will eventually become a plot point in the future book.

This arduous process of creating a complete first draft, Tom calls it “shitting out the lump of coal.” As in, “Relax, you’re still shitting out your lump of coal.”

Over time I’m carrying a full draft of the book. The most important plot points, the original stories, are done. The main structure of the fictional house is built and more or less

watertight. What’s left to do is to tweak the pace and try...

If I were your teacher I’d admit this sounds pretty artless. But if you hold a full-time job, have a family, and have to juggle every other duty in life, this scene-by-scene experimentation will keep you sane.

You see, 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.

The best stories evoke stories. I call this “crowd seeding.” Like the practice of cloud seeding, which produces rain, crowd seeding is a way to take a common, personal experience and test it, and develop it. None of us live such atypical lives that others can’t relate.

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.

Remember, Minimalism means saying the same thing a hundred different ways.

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.

A good writer must gently pass the reader from sentence to sentence, like a fragile egg, without jarring the reader out of the story.

You see, 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. In fact there’s a Buddhist saying told to me by Nora Ephron, the one-and-only time I met her after reading her work since college. At a noisy Random House party in the restaurant Cognac, she said, “If you can’t be happy while washing dishes, you can’t be happy.”

A common joke in Tom’s workshop was that students followed his rules so well that eventually they all sounded like bad imitations of his best work. It’s a joke, but it’s true.

Yes, this is all very pedestrian. But get good task lighting. Develop a system for organizing your books and supplies. You won’t dread handling paper correspondence if you have a stock of boxes, envelopes, a tape gun, and a designated table to work on. You won’t dread tax time if you regularly total and bundle your receipts.

When the creator refuses to sign the five-dollar knockoff, the collector erupts, accusing the creator of being a selfish prick. A rich, miserly jerk who demands big money for his actual work, prices no working-class fan can afford. Perhaps fueled by shame—yes, they’ve been fooled into buying a lousy fake, and they’re embarrassed to have this pointed out by someone they admire—the would-be collector pitches a fit. The creator who’s trying to protect her livelihood as well as the value of the actual work she’s sold to others, she’s accused and shamed and pilloried in person and online. So not only are you confronted by your Batman having oral sex with your Robin, but you’re made out to be the bad guy for not laughing along with the joke and autographing it. No, none of this is a satisfying answer, but it is a comfort.

Without piracy, William Shakespeare might’ve been long forgotten.

In retrospect, he wasn’t unhappy. The copyright loss had kept the film in constant circulation. Between its initial theatrical release and its jump to videotapes, it was always being shown somewhere as a midnight movie. It had made enough money to cover production costs, he told me. And the film’s continuous popularity made Romero a lasting celebrity.

Mapmakers, cartographers, create fake towns on the maps they make. Then if they find a map published by a different source, but featuring the same fake town, they know it’s a copy and can take legal action. With this in mind, you can plant a unique name or phrase that when searched will turn up every site on the web where your work is available. One click, and you’ve found all the illegal copies. The legendary writer Parker Hellbaby advised me of this trick.