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.

  Or cut between big voice and little voice. With this in mind, think of the varied chapters in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. At times we’re with the Joad family as little-voice narration depicts them on their journey. Other times we’re reading a big-voice passage that looks down in a generalized way to comment about the drought, the stream of displaced migrants, or the wary landowners and lawmen in California. Then we cut back to the Joads farther along their route. Then we cut to a big-voice chapter about the weather and the rising floods. Then we cut back to the family.

  If you were my student I’d hem and haw but eventually tell you about using the space break to imply time passing. You just end a scene or passage and allow a wide margin of blank page before you begin a new scene. I’m told that early pulp novels used no chapter breaks. They just used smaller space breaks so publishers could avoid the blank page or page and a half that might be wasted between chapters. This saved a few pages of newsprint in each book, and that helped the profit margin.

  In my novel Beautiful You I used space breaks instead of chapter breaks because I wanted to mimic the appearance of mass-market pornographic paperback books. In 1984 Orwell mentions pornographic novels written by machine for the proletariat—that and the raunchy, absurd genre of “Slash” fiction inspired me to mimic their use of white space for transitions.

  The writer Monica Drake tells of studying under Joy Williams in the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Williams scanned a story submitted to the workshop and sighed, “Ah, white space…the writer’s false friend.”

  Perhaps it’s because a space break—without cutting to something different, a different time period or character or voice—can allow the writer to revisit the same elements without creating tension. For example, 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.

  Textures: Lists

  To add a new texture to any story never hesitate to insert a list. Look at the guest list inserted so beautifully at the beginning of chapter 4 in The Great Gatsby. Bret Easton Ellis once told me that Fitzgerald’s list inspired the guest list in Glamorama. Also look at Tim O’Brien’s lists in The Things They Carried. A favorite is chapter 18 from Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. There the main character pursues a girl through the standing sets of a Hollywood movie studio of the 1920s. Strung together are fake monuments and antiquities, every culture and time period in history crammed cheek-to-jowl, the modern world juxtaposed with dinosaurs. It might be the most perfectly surreal passage in all literature.

  If you were my student I’d tell you to read it, chapter 18, then to read the sequence in Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon where an earthquake causes a flood at a similar Hollywood studio and the main character looks on as a long parade of fake monuments and antiquities goes floating past. Note how West has us moving through his litany of objects while Fitzgerald fixes us in one place as the objects move.

  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.

  Textures: Depict a Social Model through Repetition

  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.”

  Barry Hannah

  Just look at the successful novels that dictate how people should behave in a group. Novels like How to Make an American Quilt and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and The Joy Luck Club. These are groups bound by the rules and rituals they’ve agreed upon. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is another of the many books that model a way for women to come together and share their stories. For men, there are fewer examples. The only ones that come to mind are The Dead Poets Society and, of course, Fight Club.

  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.

  That’s the reason so many of my books depict a social model, be it the Party Crashing game in Rant or tightly structured movie-set protocol in Snuff. 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.

  It was years before I understood why I wrote these social model books. It wasn’t until I’d been introduced to the work of the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. He suggests that people create “liminoid” events as a kind of social experiment. Each is a short-lived society in which people agree to be equals. Communitas, he called it. If the experiment is a success: if it serves people by providing community, fun, stress relief, self-expression, whatever…then it gradually becomes an institution. The best recent example is Burning Man, the festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Another example is Santa Rampage, the gatherings of revelers all dressed as Santa Claus and all going by the name Santa Claus. Both have passed from being spontaneous fringe happenings to becoming beloved traditions.

  It’s possible no one is as lonely as writers. Experts have made the case that Ken Kesey based the lunatics in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on the workshop he attended at Stanford. Likewise, Toni Morrison most likely based the plantation in Beloved on her own writing workshop, and Robert Olen Butler based the bus passengers in his novel Mr. Spaceman on his writing workshop.

  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.

  Textures: Paraphrasing versus Quoting

  Consider that when you put a character’s dialogue in quotes you give the character greater reality. Conversely when you paraphrase someone you distance and diminish them.

  For example, paraphrased dialogue: I told them to put the box in the corner.

  Versus: I told them, “Put the box in the corner.”

  In Fight Club I chose to put everyone’s dialogue in quotes—except for the narrator’s. Even Tyler occurs as more real because his words are quoted. So 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.

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Kim Ricketts told me the Stephen King story. We’d gone to Belltown after an event at the University of Washington bookstore. Over beers, she told me she was branching out, beginning to plan speaker events for corporations like Microsoft and Starbucks. I needed a ride back to my hotel, but Kim was smart and funny, and before the Stephen King story she told me the Al Franken story, which is why the University of Washington now required people attending an author appearance to actually buy the book. Because Al Franken had filled all eight-hundred-plus seats in Kane Hall, and the students had laughed at everything Franken had said. Attendance cost the audience members nothing, but by the end of the night Franken had sold a whopping eight books.

  As per the new policy, book purchase would henceforth be required.

  To snag a Stephen King event, Kim said she’d had to agree to his standard terms. She’d had to hire bodyguards and find a venue that would hold five thousand people. Each person could bring three items to have autographed by Mr. King. The event would last some eight hours, and someone would have to stand beside the signing table and hold an ice pack to the author’s shoulder for the duration.

  The day arrived, and Kim held the ice pack to the shoulder in question. The venue, Town Hall, a deconsecrated church on Capitol Hill, has a jaw-dropping view of downtown Seattle. It was filled with the five thousand mostly young people, all ready to wait hours for their three signatures.

  King sat and began to sign autographs. Kim stood holding the ice pack to his pesky shoulder. Not a hundred books into the eventual fifteen thousand, Kim said that King looked up at her and asked, “Can you get me some bandages?”

  He showed her his signing hand, how the skin along the thumb and index finger had fossilized into a thick callus from a lifetime of marathon book signings. These calluses are the writer’s equivalent of a wrestler’s cauliflower ear. Thick as the armor on the hide of a stegosaurus, the calluses had begun to crack.

  “I’m bleeding on the stock,” King said. He showed fresh blood smudged on his pen and a partial fingerprint of blood on the title page of a book belonging to a waiting young man who didn’t appear the least bit distressed to see his property stained by the vital fluids of the great wordsmith and teller of tales.

  Kim started to step away, but it was too late. The next person in line had overheard the exchange and shouted, “No fair!” He shouted, “If Mr. King bleeds in his books then he has to bleed in mine!”

  This, everyone in the building heard. Shrieks of indignation filled the cavernous hall as five thousand horror fans each demanded their own ration of celebrity blood. Echoes of rage boomed off the vaulted ceiling. Kim could scarcely hear as King asked, “Can you help me out?”

  Still pressing the ice pack against him, she said, “They’re your readers…I’ll do what you decide.”

  King went back to signing. Signing and bleeding. Kim stayed beside him, and as the crowd saw that no bandages were forthcoming, the protest gradually subsided. Five thousand people. Each with three items. Kim told me that it took eight hours, but King managed to sign his name and smear a trace of his blood in every book. By the end of the event he was so weak the bodyguards had to carry him under the armpits to his Lincoln Town Car.

  Even then, as the car pulled out to deliver him to his hotel, the disaster wasn’t over.

  A group of people who’d been shut out of the event because of overcrowding jumped into their own car and chased King’s. These book lovers rammed and totaled the Lincoln—all for the opportunity to meet their favorite author.

  In that tavern, Kim and I sat looking out the window at the empty street. Pondering the night.

  Her dream had been to open a bookstore in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, a store that sold only cookbooks. She’d die of amyloidosis in 2011. Kim Ricketts’s dream bookstore, Book Larder, is still open.

  But that night it was just Kim and me in an otherwise deserted bar. A little drunk, but not much. Shaking my head over her Stephen King story, I asked, “So that’s the big fame we’re all striving for?”

  Kim sighed. “Them’s be the big leagues.”

  Bless you, Kim Ricketts. May one of your many, many graves always be inside my head.

  Establishing Your Authority

  Establish your authority,” Tom Spanbauer used to tell us, “and you can do anything.” As his students we made lapel buttons printed with this dictum and wore them the way members of a religion would wear crucifixes and the like. It was our creed. A part of the Ten Commandments of Minimalism: Don’t use Latinate words. Don’t use abstracts. Don’t use received text…And once you establish your authority, you can do anything.

  To that I’d add the Thom Jones advice: Action carries its own authority. If you move through each scene with clear, physical verbs—taking steps, touching objects—your reader’s mind will follow as closely as a dog’s eyes track a squirrel.

  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.

  Authority: The Authority Speech

  You’ve seen the typical authority speech given in many movies. In My Cousin Vinny it’s near the end of the courtroom trial when Marisa Tomei seizes the moment and gives her passionate lecture about the 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air with a 327-cubic-inch engine and a four-barrel carburetor.

  In The Devil Wears Prada it’s the recent history of the color cerulean blue used in fashion, a speech delivered in minute detail by Meryl Streep as she assembles clothing for a model.

  The film Legally Blonde contains two such speeches. The first occurs in a Rodeo Drive clothing store, where Reese Witherspoon upbraids a salesclerk by delivering a boatload of facts that expose the clerk as a liar. The second speech occurs late in the trial sequence when Witherspoon lectures on the chemistry of permanent waves, using facts that decimate the testimony of a prosecution witness.

  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. First because there has to be an expectation that the character is vapid. The surprise comes when a seemingly dim-witted character demonstrates a deep understanding of something crucial. Consider the dream sequence in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion where Lisa Kudrow recites the process for making glue. And alas, the airhead character is more likely to be a female.

  These days such a speech delivered by a male character would come across as tedious mansplaining, at best. At worst, as Asperger’s syndrome. Still, there are male examples. Just watch Good Will Hunting for the scenes where Matt Damon spouts erudition to dominate would-be geniuses in university taverns.

  Another aside: Wes, the editor in the background—always there, never noticed—suggests that an authority speech makes a character more likable. I find the whole concept of “likability” to be problematic. We’ll revisit this, but I’d rather respect a character. Frankly I don’t even like likable people.

  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.

  Authority: The Dead Parent

  Scratch the surface of any comedy and you’ll find a dead mother or father. It’s the unresolved, irresolvable hurt that generates all the wisecracking and antics.

  Even in dramas, it’s the background tragedy that makes the foreground dramas bearable.

  The dead relative is everywhere.

  In the Earl Hamner television series The Waltons, it’s John Walton’s dead brother, killed in World War I, the never-mentioned ghost that the young Ben Walton is named for. In The Big Valley the patriarch, Tom Barkley, has died, leaving Barbara Stanwyck to run the ranch. In Bonanza the matriarch is dead. In Julia, starring Diahann Carroll, the patriarch has died flying a helicopter in Vietnam. In The Courtship of Eddie’s Father the mother is dead. In The Ghost and Mrs. Muir the father is dead. In Nanny and the Professor the mother is dead. In Ellery Queen, mother dead.

  Among hit comedies, the body count is staggering. The Andy Griffith Show, mother dead. The Beverly Hillbillies, mother dead. My Three Sons, dead mother. One Day at a Time, dead father. Alice, dead father. Phyllis, dead father. The Partridge Family, dead father. Family Affair, both parents dead. The Brady Bunch, two parents dead. Party of Five, parents dead.

  If you were my student I’d ask: “Why is it that so many successful plots begin at the family plot?”