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.

  Authority: Get the Small Stuff Right

  Someone once told me a secret about the stained-glass windows in cathedrals. He began by telling me how these windows served to teach scripture to the illiterate. They were the dazzling CinemaScope Cecil B. DeMille epics of their time. The summer blockbusters, these towering depictions of Jonah inside the whale, the parting of the Red Sea, the Ascension of Christ.

  The trick to making a miracle believable was to place it high in the window, far from the lowly viewer. All the truly meticulous work went into creating the details people would see first, along the lower edge.

  If the viewers could believe the details at their own level—the plants on the ground, the sandals, the folds in the hem of a garment—they would believe the miracle depicted higher up in the window. Manna could fall from Heaven. Halos could hover above heads and angels could fly among the clouds.

  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. In Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” note how she lingers on the box from which the papers are drawn. She describes where it’s stored, how it was crafted, what it replaced. All of this attention lavished on a plain wooden box helps us accept the horrible purpose for it. If we believe in the box, we’ll believe the ritual murder it facilitates.

  Get the smallest item wrong at your own peril…On tour for my book Beautiful You I met a young woman who said I consistently botched the details of my young female protagonist. I asked her to give an example, to tell me the most unrealistic quality I’d given Penny Harrigan—a girl from Nebraska who masturbates with the mummified finger of her dead sex coach and is erotically tormented by remote-controlled tiny robots implanted in her by the world’s richest man who seeks to genetically reengineer his long-dead wife…

  “Your most unrealistic detail about Penny?” asked the reader.

  Yes, I wanted to know the biggest thing I’d gotten wrong.

  She thought for a moment. “That’s easy. You say her favorite ice cream is butter brickle.” She shook her head at my stupidity. “That’s an old-man flavor.”

  I asked what Penny’s favorite flavor should’ve been.

  “Chocolate,” she said. “Anything chocolate.”

  Case closed. The smallest mistake can destroy all believability.

  Authority: The Authority of Truisms

  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.

  In her novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron wrote, “When you’re single you date other singles. And when you’re a couple you date other couples.” Reading those words, I was willing to believe anything she put on the page after that.

  The same goes for Amy Hempel, who wrote, “What dogs want is for no one to ever leave.”

  Amy Hempel

  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.

  Authority: Your Storytelling Context

  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?”

  Look around. The world is filled with forums in which people tell their stories. These are gold mines where writers can find material. They’re also great settings in which to frame stories. While researching my books Choke and Invisible Monsters, I loved to call telephone sex chat lines. Here was channel after channel of people telling their stories. If one got boring, I’d just transfer to another. And if a story maybe wasn’t plotted so well I’d listen for the verbal tricks and tics that reinforced its truth. Rainy afternoons, I’d sit and jot notes holding the phone to my ear. These spoken anecdotes were wonderful and raw, and I’d look for similar patterns or themes that might allow me to cobble several together into a short story or a series of scenes. Who knows, someday I might set a story in the context of a 976 sex hotline. It would be especially poignant to hear a tragic story told over a tawdry phone sex line. Or even better, to hear a tale of redemption in the low-culture context of people talking dirty talk.

  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. But it’s thriving in 12-step support groups. Stand-up comedy versus sit-down tragedy. It goes without saying that no one’s confidence should be betrayed—but you can learn effective storytelling tactics. Better skills—for free and with free coffee—than you can learn in many MFA programs. And what about a story in which someone does steal a story from Alcoholics Anonymous and turns it into a hugely successful movie…? Imagine the rage, envy, revenge that act would engender while still keeping the reader’s sympathy.

  Another excellent storytelling context is late-night radio. All that talk about Bigfoot, black helicopters, restless ghosts, Martians…it serves as a bedtime story for adults. The strange and fantastic plumbs the subconscious like a fairy tale does. The radio’s voice evokes dreamlike images that guide us into our nightmares. Listeners call and contribute their own anecdotes that support the general theme of the evening. It’s Scheherazade telling her endless stories in the Arabian Nights.

  Yet another albeit unlikely context for stories is any of the cable television shopping channels. Any product will do, but my preference is for the jewelry channels where goofy folks with relatable down-home accents offer up pearl necklaces while spinning yarns about how your friends and family will admire and envy you for owning such a necklace. It’s like a guided meditation. “Just picture how the ladies at your church will flock to ooh and aah over this emerald ring! Why, you’ll be the center of attention. Everyone will turn green with jealousy!” And if status doesn’t hook you, they pitch you with love. “Your baby granddaughter will treasure this pinkie ring for the rest of her life, and every time she wears it she’ll remember you…”

  So if you were my student I’d task you with writing a story in the persona of a customer phoning the channel and telling a story related to a recent purchase.

  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.

  As a final example of a context, here’s a favorite. Some of the toughest men I know, former fire jumpers, active military, they love those antiques appraisal shows. Antiques Roadshow on public television, in particular. People bring in family heirlooms, and an expert examines the items. The owner tells the item’s history, usually linked to the family’s ancestry. And the expert either confirms or denies that story. Often the owner is publically devastated to find his dead relations were fools or liars. The item is not what it has always been supposed to be. Sometimes the item is appraised at a small fortune, but often it’s dismissed as junk.

  In one quick public ritual, we’re presented with an emotionally fraught saga and the object that supports it. In the next moment the saga is disproved. The family’s idea of itself is dealt a serious blow, and all of this takes place on camera. The constant threat of ritual humiliation is why tough men love this show. The mighty are brought low. The prideful, shamed.

  Even if the antique in question proves to be authentic and worth big money, there’s still a loss. All of its epic, magical power, the heroic tale of Great-Uncle Who’s It charging into battle with this sword or whatnot held high…it’s still reduced to a dollars-and-cents amount. Its power now limited by what the market will pay for it.

  It’s the Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe–type anthology, updated.

  Now if I were your teacher, I’d tell you to write a story in which a jaded on-air appraiser is asked to confirm the value of a cursed monkey’s paw…a shrunken head…the Holy Grail.

  Authority: Cribbing Authenticity from a Nonfiction Form

  Among the easiest ways to establish your authority is to steal it. Think of Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. By adopting all the conventions of nonfiction newscasts, Welles made a ludicrous story so believable that millions of people panicked. They fled their homes. They called their loved ones and bid them goodbye.

  Think of the film The Blair Witch Project. Simply by saying that the story consists of documentary footage recovered after a team of investigators went missing, the film was able to rise above its rough edges and to frighten people. Likewise, the film Fargo risked being another slapstick crime caper like Raising Arizona until the Coen Brothers thought to add a single card statement on the front. A somber black screen with white lettering claims the story was based on actual events (it’s not).

  Think of Citizen Kane, which used the device of a newsreel to summarize the plot at the start of the film, then used faceless journalists to tie together the subsequent scenes. 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.

  Nonfiction forms have shaped our most famous authors. Hemingway’s first writing job was as a reporter covering the crime beat on the Kansas City Star. He took to heart the paper’s in-house style guide, which demanded short, choppy sentences filled with active verbs. And for the rest of his career he wrote terse prose based on that same highly readable newspaper style. Likewise, Fitzgerald’s first writing job was to crank out advertisement copy. Forever after, his fiction was filled with images of advertising, brand names, and the seductive lyrical sentences that still charm us.

  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.

  Besides lending fiction a greater sense of reality, a nonfiction form dictates the structure of the work and the ways to transition between scenes. In fashion magazines, for instance, articles simply “jump” to a designated page elsewhere in the issue. In oral histories each new speaker is designated by his name and a colon placed before his statement.

  My Pygmy appears to be a series of “dispatches” sent by a spy reporting on his progress during a secret mission. It was Chelsea Cain, in workshop, who suggested that I used black blocks to occlude certain details and make the “document” seem redacted. The effect worked so well I wished I’d used it more. Consequently I did, by placing “real” rose petals and pills on the pages of Fight Club 2, to hide characters’ faces and thereby undermine the sincerity of what they might say. Or to hide their dialogue and negate its cleverness. Thank you, Chelsea.

  Any aspect of the nonfiction form that seems like an innate flaw—the jerky camerawork in Cloverfield and over-the-top acting—becomes an asset when you mimic it while using that form for fiction. 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.

  Authority: Forget Being Likable

  Welcome to America, our never-ending, great popularity contest. And to capitalism, where likability trumps everything else.

  If you were my student, I’d tell you to forget about being liked. Tastes change over time, public taste as well as personal taste. Your work might not be immediately celebrated, but if it remains lodged in someone’s memory you have a good chance of being embraced over time. The first time I read the books foisted on me in college—Jane Eyre, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Caucasian Chalk Circle—I hated them. But over time I’ve gone back to reread them, and they’ve become my favorites.

  Witness the movies that premiered to damning reviews. The Night of the Living Dead. Harold and Maude. Blade Runner. They found a place in public memory, and time has made them classics. So do not write to be liked. Write to be remembered.

  Authority: Write from Within

  the Point of View

  This next skill might be the most difficult part of writing you’ll ever tackle. But once you get the knack of it, it will make writing easier and more fun than you ever could’ve imagined.

  Instead of writing about a character, write from within the character.

  This means that every way the character describes the world must describe the character’s experience. You and I never walk into the same room as each other. We each see the room through the lens of our own life. A plumber enters a very different room than a painter enters.

  This means you can’t use abstract measurements. No more six-foot-tall men. Instead you must describe a man’s size based on how your character or narrator perceives a man whose height is seventy-two inches. A character might say “a man too tall to kiss” or “a man her dad’s size when he’s kneeling in church.” You may not describe the temperature as being one hundred degrees. Or trips as being fifty miles long. All standardized measurements preclude you describing how your character sees the world.

  So no more five-year-old girls. No more seven o’clock. No two-ton trucks.

  Yes, it’s a pain, having to break down the details and translate them through a character’s point of view. But only at first. With a little practice you’ll begin to see the world via the character’s experience and the descriptions will come naturally.

  Eventually, it will even be fun.

  Getting inside a character might seem like a vacation from being you. But face it, you’re never not you. No matter what world you create you’re always dealing with your own shit. Same shit, different mask. You’ve chosen to explore a certain character because something about it resonates with you. Don’t pretend for a moment that writing as a different person is evading reality. If anything it allows you a greater freedom to explore parts of yourself you wouldn’t dare consciously examine.

  Another part of writing from within a character is using language as only that character would. No two people speak the same. Each has her own little wardrobe of phrases and slang. Each misuses words differently. For instance, I’ve noticed that people from larger families always use a clause to seize attention before they say anything.

  They’ll say, “Get this. It’s going to freeze tonight.”

  Short aside: While researching for my book Rant I attended a seminar for used car salespeople. In it the instructor explained that people are usually one of three types: the visual, the auditory, or the tactile. The visual will preface each statement with visual terms. “Look here…” or “I see, but…” The auditory will use terms based on hearing: “Listen up…” or “I hear what you’re saying.” The tactile will use physical, active terms: “I catch your drift,” or, “I can’t wrap my mind around it.” Bullshit or not, it’s a good place to start. Which way will your character skew?