Copyright © 2020 by Chuck Palahniuk

  Cover art and design by Tree Abraham

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  grandcentralpublishing.com

  twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  First edition: January 2020

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-1795-0 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-1796-7 (ebook)

  E3-20191210-DA-NF-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Textures

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Establishing Your Authority

  A Postcard from the Tour

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Tension

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Process

  A Postcard from the Tour

  A Couple of Surefire Strategies for Selling Books to Americans

  A Postcard from the Tour

  So Why Bother?

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Reading List: Fiction

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Reading List: Nonfiction

  Another Postcard from the Tour

  Troubleshooting Your Fiction

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Chuck Palahniuk

  To Tom Spanbauer with

  gratitude and respect

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  Author’s Note

  This book contains the best advice and stories of many brilliant people. Most are credited, two are not. Those two are Wes Miller, who edited the manuscript for Grand Central; and Scott Allie, who edited the manuscript a year before Wes saw it, and later arranged for the tattoo illustrations. What works here works with their considerable help.

  A second helping of my appreciation goes out to Sara Reinhart for helping manage the illustrations, and to the artist Toby Linwood at Tattoo 34 in Portland. Don’t just get inked, get Toby.

  Introduction

  For most of my life I haven’t balanced my checkbook. The result was too depressing, to find out how little money I’d saved. What little the years of my life had amounted to.

  So long as my checks cleared, I’d no interest in figuring down to the penny how poor I always was. For the same reason, I’ve put off writing a book on writing. I didn’t want to be faced with how little I could offer on the subject. How stupid I remained after all this time and practice.

  My education consists of a kitchen-table MFA, earned sitting around Andrea Carlisle’s kitchen, then Tom Spanbauer’s kitchen, then Suzy Vitello’s and Chelsea Cain’s. My program began in 1988 and continues to this day. There’s no graduation ceremony and no diploma.

  The first writing workshop I joined was Andrea’s, and it consisted of nice people. After a couple of years Andrea took me aside. That week I’d submitted a scene depicting a young man who struggled to complete sex with a slowly deflating sex doll. A scene I’d eventually use in my novel Snuff, fifteen years later. On behalf of the other writers Andrea told me I wasn’t a good fit for the group. Due to my fiction, no one felt safe around me. As consolation she suggested I study with another writer, Tom Spanbauer. He’d recently moved to Portland from New York.

  Tom. Tom’s workshop was different. We met in a condemned house he’d bought with plans for renovation. We felt like outlaws just by violating the yellow UNSAFE DO NOT ENTER notice stapled to the door. The previous owner had been a recluse who’d lined the interior with sheets of clear plastic and kept the air constantly warm and misted so he could grow a vast collection of orchids. The house had rotted from the inside out, leaving only a few floorboards that could still support a person’s weight. The writer Monica Drake recalls the first time she arrived for a class there and found that all the porches had collapsed. She wandered around the outside, stumped as to how to reach any of the doors that hung high above the junky, overgrown yard. For Monica that impossible leap over broken glass and rusted nails has always stood for the challenge of becoming a professional writer.

  About the yard, Tom told us that cutting the blackberry canes and carting away the heaps of garbage would bond us as a team. It wasn’t enough to arrive with manuscripts for review. We should also spend our weekends digging up the jagged soup cans and dead cats and carting all of these to a landfill. What did we know? As twenty-somethings we played along, and Tom made us soggy tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. His actual workshop sessions were more conventional, but just slightly. If we found ourselves stuck creatively he might break out the I Ching coins or refer us to his favorite psychic in Seattle. He brought in writers, among them Peter Christopher and Karen Karbo, who could teach us what he could not. What took place was less a class than it was a dialogue. And that’s what I’d like this book to be: a dialogue. This isn’t just me telling you this. To give credit where it’s due, this is my teachers and their teachers’ teachers, going back to the caveman days. These are lessons that daisy-chain into the past and the future. They should be organized and curated, by me or by someone.

  Still, I’m torn.

  One factor pushing me to write this book is a memory of The Worst Writing Workshop Ever. It was taught by a West Coast editor who solicits students by mail. His glossy pamphlets tout him as a sort of Editor to the Stars, listing the legendary dead writers he claims to have groomed from sows’ ears into silk purses.

  The grooming costs each aspiring student several thousand dollars, payable weeks in advance. The Editor to the Stars swans into the host city for a three-day weekend, staying in a luxury hotel and teaching in a hotel conference room. Needless to say, the only people who can afford his rates are wealthy. Mostly they’re the wives of wealthy men, with a couple of tenured college professors thrown into the mix—and me. At each of our three sessions students assembled, read their work, and waited. Everyone looked to the Editor to the Stars, who would sigh deeply and ask us to comment on the work in question.

  This strategy allowed the other students to feel smart while it ran out the clock. Opinions flew, but not much practical advice. Usually no practical advice. Opinions collided, and the cross talk ate up more time. During this heated gabfest, the Editor to the Stars was updating his own mailing lists, glancing at messages on his phone, nodding sagely.

  In the final moments of debate, the Editor would weigh in with some variation of, “This amusing piece shows a great deal of sensitivity, you should expand it into a novel.” Or, “Your work is as promising as [insert some dead writer the Editor claims to have discovered and nurtured to greatness: Hemingway, Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe]. Please keep at it.”

  Lots of hand-holding. Loads of flattery. By Sunday afternoon each of his twenty-five students had gotten a nice pat on the head but no useful information. And the Editor to the Stars left town forty thousand dollars richer.

  After witnessing that racket I’d resolved to write a book. Someday. A tough-love manual with more practical information than a dozen price-gouging writing gurus would typically provide. Still, I’m conflicted.

  Holding me back are the dead people. As I take stock of the people who’ve helped me, the booksellers and fellow writers, I find so many have died. I love knowing a lot of people, but the downside is that means going to a lot of funerals. To write this book would be to pay a debt to those people. But it would be a sad task.

  Another reason not to move forward is my best teacher. At this writing, Tom Spanbauer has given up teaching. He tells me that he feels like a fraud. For three decades he’s held out the idea that regular people, people with daytime jobs, people from blue-collar families, could write stories that would reach the world. Many of his students have succeeded, including Monica Drake, Stevan Allred, Joanna Rose, Jennifer Lauck, and myself. But Tom’s own career has languished, and to him the fiction-teaching routine has begun to look like a scam.

  There’s more to it. Tom’s health isn’t the best. But that’s too personal to tackle here.

  Tom teaches students practical, effective techniques that instantly make their work better. Many of these he learned from the famous editor and writer Gordon Lish. Tom steers readers toward the best writers to emulate. He helps connect his students with age
nts and editors. And he did this in his own condemned home, every week, since 1990, when he charged each of his students twenty dollars each session. Yet he’s honest enough to worry about their chances for success in the bookselling world.

  Contrast that with the Editor to the Stars who charges thousands. Ignores his students’ work. Knows them for three days. Tells them they’re brilliant and that the publishing world is their oyster, then skips town, never to be seen again.

  If I’m going to write this book, I want to err on the side of pessimism.

  If you’re dedicated to becoming an author, nothing I can say here will stop you. But if you’re not, nothing I can say will make you one.

  That said, if you came to me and asked me to teach you everything I’m able, I’d tell you that the publishing industry is on life support. Bret Easton Ellis tells me the novel is no longer even a blip in the culture. You’re too late. Piracy has destroyed the profits. Readers have all moved on to watching films and playing computer games. I’d say, “Kid, go home!”

  No one is born to do this job. Storytelling, yes. But when you become an author you seek out other authors the way an Anne Rice vampire seeks vampires as mentors. I was lucky. My first book was endorsed by four great writers: Robert Stone, Katherine Dunn, Thom Jones, and Barry Hannah. Under the pretense of thanking them, I stalked them. Stone came to Portland as part of a panel discussion about Zelda Fitzgerald. When I met him at the Heathman Hotel he told me, “For anything to endure it must be made of either granite or words.”

  Robert Stone

  This book is, in a way, a scrapbook of my writing life. From shopping the cathedral flea market in Barcelona with David Sedaris to having drinks at Cognac with Nora Ephron just months before she died. To the years of sporadic correspondence I had with Thom Jones and Ira Levin. I’ve stalked my share of mentors, asking for advice.

  Therefore, if you came back another day and asked me to teach you, I’d tell you that becoming an author involves more than talent and skill. I’ve known fantastic writers who never finished a project. And writers who launched incredible ideas, then never fully executed them. And 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 then I’d tell you, “Now get off my porch.”

  But if you came back to me a third time, I’d say, “Kid…” I’d say, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Bob Maull scared the crap out of me. He stood maybe chest high to most people and had a mop of white-gray hair and a walrus mustache. He owned 23rd Avenue Books in Portland, Oregon, and had founded the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Once you’re published and trying to scratch out a living you’ll find these regional bookseller associations are a great ally. In August 1996 when Fight Club was published in hardcover I signed copies at his shop. He took me aside and said, “Kid…”

  I was thirty-four and still working full-time at Freightliner Trucks. On the truck assembly line, where I’d started the swing shift in 1986, vendor reps—from Rockwell, Cummins Diesel, Jacobs Engine Brakes—would bring us doughnuts. To curry goodwill, they’d set out suitcase-size pink boxes packed with Bavarian crème doughnuts, jelly doughnuts, everything filled and covered with jimmies and shredded coconut. A favorite prank among my friends was to insert the nozzle of a grease gun and fill certain doughnuts with axle grease. Then to watch from behind the wire-mesh parts bins and wait for someone to bite into a doctored one. It never got old.

  I’d graduated with a degree in journalism in 1986, and so many of my fellow assembly-line workers had the same degree that we used to joke that the University of Oregon School of Journalism ought to teach welding. Line workers who could weld got an extra three-dollar welding differential for every hour on the clock.

  After my first book tour I’d given up any dream of escaping that factory. Two people had attended my event at the Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle. In San Francisco, where I was driven two hours to a Barnes & Noble in Livermore, no one attended my reading. For that I’d squandered my annual week’s vacation, and then it was back to Portland and Freightliner Trucks.

  At 23rd Avenue Books, Bob said, “If you want to make a career out of this you’ll need to bring out a new book every year. Never go longer than sixteen months without something new because after sixteen months people quit coming in that door and asking me if you have another book yet.”

  A book every year, I got it. The die was cast.

  Bob knew his business, and being an author is nothing if not a small business. Requiring a license and…everything. The city once contacted me to request an inventory of my existing stock. I explained I was a writer, and my stock was ideas. The city asked if I had any pens or pencils on my desk. Yeah, I told them. They said I needed to count any pens and pencils lying around and file an annual report listing them as current inventory. They weren’t joking. Neither am I. Neither was Bob.

  “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.”

  Bob retired and moved to Cape Cod, he followed the Red Sox fanatically, and he died.

  Twenty-Third Avenue Books closed.

  Bless you, Bob Maull. May one of your many, many graves always be inside my head.

  Textures

  Let’s get started.

  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.

  If you were my student I’d want you to be aware of the many different “textures” of information at your disposal. These are best defined by the examples that follow.

  When telling a story, consider mixing any or all of the following.

  Textures: The Three Types of Communication

  Description: A man walks into a bar.

  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. 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.