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

by Chuck Palahniuk

Instruction: Walk into a bar. Exclamation (onomatopoeia): Sigh. Most fiction consists of only description, but good storytelling can mix all three forms. For instance, “A man walks into a bar and orders a margarita. Easy enough. Mix three parts tequila and two parts triple sec with one part lime juice, pour it over ice, and—voilà—that’s a margarita.” 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. Instruction addresses the reader, breaking the fourth wall. The verbs are active and punchy. “Walk this way.” Or, “Look for the red house near Ocean Avenue.” And they imply useful, factual information—thus building your authority. Look at Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, and how she plants recipes within the story. In my own short story “Guts,” I lapse into a long passage of instruction: “...go buy a pack of those lambskin condoms.

Everyone should use three types of communication. Three parts description. Two parts instruction. One part onomatopoeia. Mix to taste.

In conversation we switch between first-, second-, and third-person points of view. The constant shift controls the intimacy and authority of our story; for instance, “I walked” has the authority of first person. Second person addresses the listeners and enlists them: “You walk.” And the shift to third person controls the pace, “No guy wants,” by moving from the specific “I” to the general “guy.” Arguably, first

The rub is that using all three POVs means the story must ultimately be told in first person. But even second and third can be mixed to create a sense of some undeclared narrator.

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.

Little voice (also called Recording Angel because it seems to hover and watch) depicts the moment-by-moment action. Big voice comments on it. Little voice remains objective, giving us the smells, sounds, flavors, textures, and actions in a scene. Big voice muses. Little voice gives us the facts. Big voice gives us the meaning—or at least a character’s subjective interpretation of the events. Not many stories exist without both voices.

At regular intervals a character is going to discuss his life with a therapist. Or she’s going to write a letter or diary entry, but she’s going to rise above the meat-and-potatoes reality of physical verbs. He’s going to ask rhetorical questions on behalf of the reader, à la Carrie Bradshaw’s “Am I the only one who’s not enjoying anal sex?”

That said, consider that big voice might not be your strongest way to hook a reader at the beginning of a story.

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. It mimics the opening “gripper” scenes in movies. As Thom Jones told me, “Action carries its own authority.” The audience will engage with action. An aside: Your overseas translators will adore you for using concrete verbs. Like the action in action movies, verbs in fiction play effectively in other languages.

In the second scene or the second chapter, then you can risk big voice.

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.

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.

Ideally, you should be combining gesture, action, and expression with your dialogue. 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.

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.

Third, use physical action as a form of attribution that also underscores or undermines what’s being said. For example: “Coffee?” With her back to the room, she poured the cups full and dropped cyanide in Ellen’s. “I think you’ll like this new French roast.” 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 con...

In short, dialogue is your weakest storytelling tool.

If you were my student, I’d make you create a list of all the quick wordless gestures you use every day. The thumbs-up. The thumb-and-index finger “okay” sign. Knocking your fist lightly on your forehead to “recall” something. Clutching your heart. The hitchhiker’s thumb, which implies “get lost.” The index finger held vertically against the lips for “hush up.” The hooked “come here” finger. I’d make you list at least fifty hand signals. That way you’d always, always be aware of the variety of gestures you can insert into dialogue.

Whatever the saying, it acknowledges an impasse and creates the permission to introduce a new idea. In my novel Invisible Monsters, it’s the two sentences, “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.” In the original short story that grew to become Fight Club, it’s the repetition of the rules. The goal is to create a chorus appropriate to the character. In a documentary about Andy Warhol, he said that the motto of his life had become “So what?” No matter what happened, good or bad, he could dismiss the event by thinking, So what? For Scarlett O’Hara it was, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” In that way, a chorus is also a coping mechanism. It hides the seams in narrative the way a strip of molding hides the junction where walls and floor meet. And it allows a person to think beyond each new drama, thus moving the story forward and allowing unresolved issues to pile up and increase tension. If

Among my friends in college, our coded insider talk was constant. During meals if someone had a bit of food on his chin, someone else would touch that spot on her own face and say, “You have a gazelle out of the park.” On road trips, if someone needed to find a toilet, he’d say, “I have a turtle’s head poking out.” 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.

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.

Or you can intercut between characters. Think of the various plot threads in John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. As each character meets an obstacle, we jump to a different character. It’s maddening if the reader is invested in just one character, but every jump moves us forward in time.

if we use space breaks to cut between the events in Robert’s day, the story could get monotonous. But if we cut back and forth between Robert and Cynthia and some ancestor of them both in Renaissance Venice, the reader gets time away from each element and can better appreciate it and worry about outcomes. So if you were my student I’d allow you to start out using space breaks to imply the passage of time. But don’t get comfortable. Those training wheels are going to come off sooner rather than later.

To add a new texture to any story never hesitate to insert a list.

Lists break up the page, visually. They force the reader to really read word by word. I loved listing the colors of Ikea furniture in Fight Club, and my dream for Adjustment Day was to write a book of lists that all supported a mythic, unseen list of people to be assassinated. So, lists. Use them.

Do you remember how, as a child, you could throw some boards on the ground and dictate a new reality? “The dirt is lava. The boards are the only safe way across.” Kids can instantly imagine a new setting. They make up the rules. The world becomes what they mutually agree it will be. The tree is safe. The sidewalk is enemy territory. If you were my student I’d tell you a secret that Barry Hannah told me: “Readers love that shit.”

My guess is that people haven’t a clue how to get along. They need a structure, rules, and roles to play. Once those are established, people can gather and compare their lives. They can learn from each other. 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 template to create three chapters placed equal distances apart in the book. In this world where so many fraternal organizations and religions are disappearing, if you were my student I’d tell you to use ritual and repetition to invent new ones for your readers. Give people a model they can replicate and characters to emulate.

whenever you want to undermine what’s being said, paraphrase it. If you want to negate or lessen a character, paraphrase what they say. When you want to showcase a character, put their dialogue in quotation marks. Include attribution. Underscore the speech with a gesture. It’s a subtle effect, but if you were my student I’d tell you it works.

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. Make the incredible seem inevitable.

For quick, powerful proof of a character’s authority, few tactics work as well as allowing her to reel off facts that demonstrate she boasts a depth of technical knowledge no one would’ve expected. Recent politics make this a device useful for female characters, but not so useful for males.

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.

During the filming of Fight Club, I asked director David Fincher if the audience would accept the ultimate reveal that Brad Pitt’s character was imaginary. Fincher’s response was, “If they believe everything up to that point, they’ll believe the plot twist.” 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.

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.

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 earrings he gives you.” Such a well-worded aphorism carries all the authority of Confucius or Oscar Wilde. A wise, intuitive observation can convey more power than all the facts in Wikipedia.

In our world of fake news...this world in which the internet has eroded the credibility of all information...people want to know the context of a story just as much as they want to hear the story itself. 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?”

Another context for storytelling is addiction recovery groups. They really do serve as the new churches where people go to confess their worst selves and to be accepted back by their communities. Even if the stories are lackluster, they’re told by people who have years of practice. Outside of stand-up comedy, there’s not much oral storytelling left in America.

One great aspect of choosing an existing storytelling context is that the context dictates the structure and transitions. A phone sex hotline implies the ever-present ticking clock of credit card charges. The radio show includes commercial breaks. All of your framing devices are there and need no invention.

Among the easiest ways to establish your authority is to steal it. Think

somber black screen with white lettering claims the story was based on actual events (it’s not).

The interviews become the device for transitioning between different points of view and time periods. And all the while, the fact that they’re “reporters” injects the melodramatic story with a gravity and reality that sells it to the audience.

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 silly story seem completely plausible.

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 based on the chaotic layout of the fashion magazines I’d see at the laundromat where I washed my clothes each week.

The graininess of black-and-white security cameras, for instance, adds another texture and a fresh point of view to conventional film. In the film Fight Club director David Fincher cuts to such footage for an “objective” perspective that shows the narrator fighting himself.

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.

not write to be liked. Write to be remembered.