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

by Chuck Palahniuk

Tom said he was amazed, wondering, Is he really going to go there? Is this guy actually going to describe a kid giving an old man a blow job? And Williams did. He didn’t redirect to something safer, for example having the narrator distract himself with the comforting childhood memory of eating a nice hot dog on July 4. Nor did he jump ahead to a future scene and recount the sex using dialogue or tasteful snippets of memory. Nope, the writer unpacked the details and read them in public to a crowd. Tom admired him for having the courage to write the tough stuff. And to read it. And if you were my student I’d tell you that that is your job.