Tension: The Second-Act Road Trip

  Once you’ve exhausted your standard settings, consider gathering your characters and sending them into the great outside world for some fresh perspective.

  The road trip at the end of the second act works. Look at The Great Gatsby. Almost all of the main characters arbitrarily jump in cars and drive into Manhattan where the emotional showdown occurs in an overheated suite at the Plaza Hotel. Myrtle isn’t present, but she sees their cars passing. And this tense, drunken scene nicely bookends the earliest dinner party at Tom and Daisy’s house, where Myrtle interjects herself by telephoning. As the group returns from their Plaza foray, Myrtle throws herself in front of Gatsby’s car, triggering the chaos of the third act.

  In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the inmates of the asylum go deep-sea fishing accompanied by two prostitutes. When they return, Billy Bibbit has sex with one and kills himself, triggering the chaos of the third act.

  In my own book Fight Club the narrator goes into the world to hunt for Tyler Durden, only to discover that he himself is Durden. This truth triggers the suicide/murder.

  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.

  Tension: Relief as Humor or Joy

  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. In 1996 when Fight Club was first launched, many book reviewers reported that they’d stopped reading at some point and had thrown the book against a wall—literally—but soon sought it out to see how it would resolve.

  Tension: Explore the Un-Decidable

  There is enormous tension in unresolved social issues. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida proposed that Western culture is binary. Things must be one way or the other. True or false. Alive or dead. Male or female. Anything that doesn’t fall clearly into one category or another drives us to distraction. His favorite example was the zombie, which seems to be both dead and alive. As does the vampire. And in stories about either, the goal is to resolve them as dead.

  This is the reason I depict questionable behavior in my work but refuse to endorse or condemn it. Why preclude the wonderful energy of public debate?

  Often readers respond strongly without grasping why. Film historians speculate that Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein and The Phantom of the Opera became hits because they allowed viewers an approved way to react to the lingering horror of World War I. Advances in medicine saved the lives of many soldiers who never would’ve come home from earlier wars. And these severely mutilated survivors occasionally appeared in public. These horror films gave audiences a scare, but they also allowed them to acclimate to the sight of “monsters.”

  Likewise, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is said to have given readers an approved way to exhaust their fears about wealthy Jews who were emigrating to London in the nineteenth century. Rosemary’s Baby safely pointed out how little control women had over their reproductive health at the time of its release. By couching his story as “horror,” Ira Levin made it less threatening, less real.

  With that in mind, consider other aspects of the culture that aren’t clearly resolved. To me, what first comes to mind is abortion and male circumcision. People will fight forever to defend or denounce them. 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.

  As a writing prompt, consider a story about a man who wants his wife to have an abortion. She agrees, but only if he agrees to be circumcised. She’ll give up a child if he’ll give up a certain amount of himself, and quite likely some of his sexual pleasure. He won’t have to raise another child. She won’t have to bother with the floppy, droopy flap of male skin that’s never quite as fresh smelling as she might like.

  As another writing prompt, consider the canned meat Spam. The writer Doug Coupland tells me that anthropologists have a theory as to why the canned meat is so popular among Pacific Islanders. They speculate that Spam has a taste and consistency close to that of human flesh, and cultures with a distant history of cannibalism crave the product without realizing why. So…a secret dining club hosts ocean cruises where guests are taken miles offshore, into international waters, and pay a huge fee for a banquet of human flesh. The truth is the hosts actually prepare and serve Spam. Is it ethical to charge people—icky people, granted—an exorbitant fee for fake human flesh?

  A final writing prompt: You’re a college professor in physics or chemistry, and your most promising student comes to you with a discovery. She’s found a new molecular property in chocolate. She’s brilliant and naive, but you realize that her discovery could eventually be used to arm the most destructive bomb humankind has ever known. If she’s allowed to publish her findings, sooner or later billions will die as a result. You caution her, but there’s no guarantee she won’t someday share her discovery. Should you kill her? And because you know, also, and might someday suffer dementia and let slip the deadly secret, should you kill yourself as well?

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

  Tension: Stories That Spin into Madness

  This next type of story is among my favorites. They’re short. They have to be short to prevent exhausting the reader. They offer the chaos and illogic of Kafka, but with the humor of satire. I won’t spoil the surprise, but will save you a lifetime of hunting, for they are rare birds, indeed.

  “Dusk in Fierce Pajamas” by E. B. White. A bedridden man, delirious with fever, becomes obsessed with the lives and images of the effortlessly rich celebrities he reads about in the pages of fashion magazines.

  “My Life with R. H. Macy” by Shirley Jackson. A young woman, possibly Jackson herself, becomes a lost, nameless cog as she trains for a job in the faceless bureaucracy of the world’s largest department store. The antidote to her horror story “The Lottery.”

  “And Lead Us Not into Penn Station” by Amy Hempel. A litany of everyday absurdities and insults suffered in New York City.

  “Reference #388475848-5” by Amy Hempel. The funniest attempt to get out of paying a parking ticket by anyone, ever.

  “In Hot Pursuit” by Fran Lebowitz. A very chatty, snotty, gay Sherlock Holmes jets out to Los Angeles in search of an organized ring of pedophiles.

  “Loser” by Chuck Palahniuk. A fraternity pledge takes LSD and is selected from the studio audience to play the game show The Price Is Right.

  “Eleanor” by Chuck Palahniuk. A long string of malapropisms follow a logger as he escapes the deadly tall trees of Oregon only to meet his violent destiny in the stucco subdivisions of Southern California.

  “The Facts of Life” by Chuck Palahniuk. A father attempts to teach the birds and the bees to his seven-year-old son, in a sex education lecture replete with self-immolating genitals and Sally Struthers.

  If you were my student I’d assign you the following writing prompt.

  Write as if you were the collective voice of a film review board that’s been asked to assign an audience rating to a yet-to-be-released movie. Speaking in the collective “we” you cite increasingly absurd inferences the board members believe they are seeing. Clouds that look too phallic for comfort. The maybe-not-accidental way that shadows cast by people and animals combine and interact. Doughnuts being eaten by children in a possibly suggestive manner. In your report to the filmmaker, you cite how individual viewers first recognized each transgression, but when it was pointed out all reviewers seized upon each as a blatant offense. The story should be a snowballing litany of “projection” as the self-righteous viewers protest about subliminal horrors that demonstrate more about the reviewers’ sick imaginations than anything actually depicted in the film.

  Good luck. Keep it short. Go nuts.

  Tension: Create Suspense with Denial

  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 the promise of chaos and disaster.

  A Postcard from the Tour

  The first time it happened I didn’t know it had happened. The room felt warm and crowded with people so no one was too surprised.

  My goal was to match the power of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.” When it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, hundreds of readers canceled their subscriptions. Nowadays the story is taught to children in school. That left me wondering: What would a story have to depict to generate the same level of anxiety today?

  In Jackson’s day I suspect that her story resonated with the military draft. The idea that we all live in peace and security due to the fact that randomly chosen young men are destroyed in the most torturous ways science can devise. Nobody ever says as much. When a book like The Stepford Wives hits big, people react to the surface details. No one dares mention how it keys off the ominous threat of a male backlash against the push for women’s rights.

  “The Lottery” is a classic, and people still ignore how its terror is the terror of millions of young men who hope for high draft numbers in some inevitable lottery. To name the thing, we’d be forced to deal with it.

  Incidentally, I owned a portion of Jackson’s cremated remains. Her daughter Sadie was friends with friends of mine through the San Francisco Cacophony Society. Sadie had been selling the cremains online, branded as “ShirleyBone,” and she sent me a batch when she heard I was a fan of her mother’s work. I opened the box at the kitchen table over the objections of my housemates who were eating breakfast. Ashes and crunched-up bone. Such a relic is too good to hoard so I found two antique boxes, carved wood inlaid with ivory, and divided Shirley between them. One I sent to my agent with a letter of provenance. The other to my editor.

  All the while, I wondered what modern story could match the impact of “The Lottery.”

  Since college I’d carried the story of a good friend who’d tried “sounding”—look it up—with a rod of wax while masturbating. The bills for emergency surgery had ended his academic career. A decade later a drunken friend had told me about buying all the ingredients for a carrot cake, plus Vaseline. He’d ditched the sugar and flour, but had gone home to peg himself with the carrot—look it up—while he masturbated. Two good anecdotes with a common theme, but still not enough to craft a story from.

  Finally, while researching my novel Choke, I met a man who’d almost died while pleasuring himself in a swimming pool. Here was the third element I needed. It took a Vicodin for me to write a draft in one marathon sitting. The first time I read it in our weekly writing workshop my friends laughed. It got a couple of groans, but nobody keeled over. In regard to a line about the dog, Greg Netzer said, “Thanks for the big laugh at the end.”

  The story, I called “Guts.”

  On the surface the story is shocking, but its power lies in how it depicts the alienation we feel as our budding sexuality alienates us from our parents. After it was published in Playboy magazine and in the Guardian newspaper—which lost numerous subscribers for showcasing the story in its Sunday supplement—a man wrote to tell me it was the saddest, most moving story he’d ever read. It’s always heartening when someone looks below the surface.

  Its first public reading took place at Powell’s Books in the top-floor Pearl Room. That was a warm evening. I heard after the fact that a young man at the edge of the crowd had fainted. No one sets out to write a story that makes listeners faint.

  The following night, at a reading in a Tigard, Oregon, Borders bookstore two people dropped where they were standing.

  By Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley I knew what to expect. The auditorium was packed. From the podium I could see the tension on people’s faces, the irked look that comes from being too crowded together. Strangers were pinned shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. Everyone resented one another for the overall discomfort. The heat and dankness and lack of personal space.

  The local publicist, David Golia, had witnessed the faintings in San Francisco bookstores, and he swore they were triggered when I read the words “corn and peanuts.” In Berkeley, when we arrived at corn and peanuts I noticed a young man sitting in the center of the audience. His head flopped to one side, and he slumped against the girl beside him. To judge from her expression they were strangers. Her face snarled in disgust at the physical contact. His torso toppled across her lap, and she cried out as he slid to the floor.

  Her scream brought the focus to her. And I stopped reading as the rows and tiers of people all stood to get a better look. People clutched their hearts and cupped their hands over their faces. Clearly they were all concerned. As far as they knew he was dead. Those immediately around him lifted the man off the floor but there was no room for him except across the lap of the young woman who’d screamed.

  From the podium the scene was a strange pietà. The seemingly dead man lay draped across the young woman’s lap. Also present were elements of the Last Supper as the flanking people and everyone surrounding them, they all reached forward as if to help. Four hundred expressions of despair and empathy.

  I looked at David Golia. We both knew what would happen next.

  The fallen man blinked awake. Finding himself the center of attention, he blushed. People gently helped him to sit upright in his own seat.

  And the crowd…they went nuts. Weeping. Applause. They’d forgotten I was even there. To them they’d just witnessed a death and resurrection. Lazarus. The tension vanished, and in its place was this warm sense of unity. They’d forgotten their resentment of each other and had become a community bonded by the experience. Already, they were telling the story to one another. Their shared horror and relief made them a family.

  With the stricken man’s permission I’d eventually finish reading.

  In city after city, in England and Italy and wherever, it almost always followed that same pattern. Corn and peanuts. I quit counting the fallen when they reached a total of seventy-three, but I continued to read the story. Several times people fainted in line, silently reading it. People told me about fainting on subway platforms while reading. Recently, at the 6th and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, DC, five people passed out and were ministered to by a doctor in the audience. As I reached the end of the story the stained-glass windows were flashing with the red and blue lights of the ambulances that had arrived.

  That’s the story about the story. To date, hundreds have fainted.

  I think Shirley Jackson would approve.

  Process

  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. Once, a friend at my day job said, “I see the way you think things are.” Such a wonderful-sounding sentence, full of echoes and ambiguity. I repeated the sentence at workshop that night and writers fought over who would use it first. On tour in Kansas City with Todd Doughty, beloved Todd, the greatest living publicist, he and I asked the ticket agent to check all of our bags under my name. I had a business-class seat so there would be no extra charge for Todd’s bag. The ticket agent shrugged, cheerfully saying, “I’ve never done it that way. Let’s see what happens.” Again, such a wonderful sentence, so filled with curiosity and anticipation. It became the title of a story in my coloring book Bait, illustrated by the fantastic artist Duncan Fegredo.

  Process: My Method

  In the 1850s the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey produced sketches of the California coastline for the purpose of siting lighthouses. Among the artists they hired to produce copperplate engravings was a young man who routinely doodled small portraits into the margins of his work. These were small studies, showing the effects of lighting people’s faces from different angles. They’re charming, but when they started to appear in official elevations meant to document the Santa Barbara coastline, they got him fired.