For further examples, see the section that follows.

  Authority: Breakfast at

  Brooks Brothers

  When my mother died I asked around until someone recommended a Jungian analyst. My aim was to tackle this mourning thing head-on.

  Jungian because Carl Jung’s storytelling approach appealed to me, dreams and all that, like keeping a dream log. And every Thursday morning before any of the downtown shops had opened I met this man in his high-rise office. He made me a cup of tea, and we talked about whatever frustrated me that week. I paid him three $50 bills and left vibrating with shame about talking too much and saying nothing significant while resenting how he’d said almost nothing.

  His dog was old, he told me. He’d talk about saving its shed fur. A company on the internet would spin the dog fur into yarn and knit him a sweater he’d have to comfort him once the dog had died. A charming idea, still not worth the kind of money I was paying. This went on from around daffodil time until the first tulips bloomed, roughly from the Super Bowl until taxes were due.

  Whatever an analyst does, he did it, if that includes watching the birds on the window ledge and occasionally asking if I’d had any dreams. I hadn’t. The silence seemed like a waste of $150 so I kept filling it. An hour would go by, and I’d find myself waiting for the elevator, my throat aching from so much talk about nothing. The walk to my car took me past Brooks Brothers where one morning a sign in the window announced a sale.

  Yeah, I had money to throw away on small talk and urban bird-watching, but Brooks Brothers? Some invisible force field kept me walking.

  By then I’d talked out most of what I’d known about my parents, both dead. And maybe that was the strategy: to talk until the emotional attachment was exhausted. He’d sneak looks at the clock I knew stood on the bookshelf behind me. The sale signs still filled the window at Brooks Brothers. One morning I went in. At the clearance rack I found a brown tweed blazer and the salesman stood behind me and slipped it onto my shoulders. The sale price was $150. A tailor with a Russian accent waved me into the fitting area and said to step up on a low platform.

  “Not like that,” he said, “stand naturally.”

  Not like a military cadet, he meant. I stood with my shoulders back, my chest thrust forward, and my stomach sucked flat.

  He meant: relax. His lips pursed tight to hold a row of straight pins, he chalked the cuffs and pinned the extra fabric between my shoulder blades. To borrow from Craig Clevenger, I felt as if I’d taken a Vicodin. My body felt warm. I relaxed into nothing less than a Holly Golightly trance. Whatever he was doing, this Russian tailor, pinching the shoulder padding. Patting the front to see if the buttons needed to be relocated. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this safe. It felt as if nothing bad could happen, not here with the polished wood paneling and houndstooth check, the madras golf shorts and Shetland sweaters.

  An aside—in my childhood I marveled at how churches were left unlocked all day. Some, all day and night. Our church, St. Patrick’s, had no lock on the front door until I was a teenager. You could go inside and feel safe and collect your thoughts. Now only shops keep such hours so it’s no surprise that shopping has become our comforting pastime. The twenty-four-hour supermarket has replaced the twenty-four-hour sanctuary.

  The alterations would be done in a week, he said, and carefully slipped the jacket, bristling with pins, off my back. When I went to collect it, I bought a pair of slacks. They, too, needed to be pinned and chalked. The tailor was just walking in, apparently, undoing a chinstrap and taking off a black motorcycle helmet. I stood on the platform and he knelt to pinch and chalk. My analyst wanted to move our sessions to Wednesday morning, but I said I couldn’t make Wednesdays. My therapy, such as it was, had ended. I wasn’t cured, but I was free.

  The next Thursday I bought another jacket, this one gray with a faint blue plaid. It was the one that fit the worst. Requiring three return trips for letting out and taking in. That early in the morning I was the only customer. The tailor would arrive in his helmet. Sometimes I’d see him shucking a black leather motorcycle jacket. He’d assess the new issue: the vent in back hung wrong, or the lapels wouldn’t lie exactly flat against my chest. It was always something. And when it wasn’t, and the jacket fit…then I bought another jacket that didn’t fit.

  My body knew something my mind didn’t, and I wanted to understand its secret. Why did these straight pins, this greasy smell of tailor’s chalk, and the sort-of yoga of standing stock-still, why did it flood me with this bona fide, genuine bliss?

  Not then, but years later I’d be in Milan. My dentist had sold me on this ultrasonic toothbrush, saying it would be as good as the flossing I refused to do. Every thirty seconds the brush beeped to prompt me to move it to a new area of my mouth, and after two minutes it automatically shut off. Taking an electrical anything to Europe is a pain so I took my old toothbrush to Italy. There, the first morning I started to brush and brush, brush and brush. My mouth foamed red and I continued to brush. Rubbed raw, my gums bled. Still the toothbrush would not shut off. I took it from my mouth and looked at this, my old-school manual toothbrush, just a plastic stick with bristles at one end, and I told myself, “This thing must be broken!”

  More recently I put my fingertip to a paper page of student work. I slid my finger down the margin thinking, Why won’t this scroll?

  Because it’s paper! Because my electric toothbrush was back home! This is the autopilot manner in which we live our lives. Another time, a darker time, friends had rented a beach house, and we shared it for a weekend. Drinking, playing board games. During Trivial Pursuit, the wife half of a husband-and-wife team ventured a wrong answer and her spouse jumped to his feet, shouting, “Damn you! This is just like you, Cindi!”

  The young couple flew at each other, cursing. Faces red, teeth bared. Recounting every past injury or mistake. The rest of the players froze and shrank into themselves, avoiding eye contact with each other as the storm raged across the table.

  As the shouts subsided, I found I’d risen from my chair. I’d leaned into the fracas. Not to argue or participate, but to…bask. It felt as if this fight were a blazing yuletide hearth or a Thomas Kinkade “Painter of Light” comfort-porn landscape of some perfect thatched cottage in a twilight rose garden. My body responded, yearning, drawn forward by some dark nostalgia that the rest of me had forgotten.

  The shouting, the curses. This fight wasn’t one of my parents’ many fights, but my body didn’t know that.

  That weekend I knew I had to explore my fear of and attraction to conflict. The vacation house hadn’t enough beds so I’d been sleeping in the back of someone’s car. And it was there, that weekend, I began to write Fight Club.

  Do you see what I’ve done here?

  If you were my student, I’d push you to create an epiphany. You’d have to dredge up or dream up the moment I realized why the tailor at Brooks Brothers had provided me with more comfort than a fortune spent on Jungian analysis. Me, I can’t recall just one revelation so I’ve redirected you to other examples of physical memory. The toothbrush. The paper page that wouldn’t scroll.

  Did I tell you that my mother sewed our family’s clothes? I’d forgotten that. But if my mind had forgotten it, my body had remembered.

  Throughout my early childhood my mother had sewn clothes for my two sisters, my brother, and me. Every evening she’d call one of us upstairs from the basement television so she could measure and pin. First with the tissue-paper pattern pieces, then with the cut cloth. The standing still seemed to take forever, making each of us miss some ABC Movie of the Week (Killdozer! starring Clint Walker) or McMillan & Wife, Columbo starring Peter Falk, Starsky & Hutch starring David Soul, or The Wonderful World of Disney.

  Her lips clamped tight around a bunch of pins, she’d stretch one corner of her pincushion mouth to say, “Hold still!”

  My skin recognized the quick blunt slash of tailor’s chalk. The peril of sharp pins. This Russian tailor with his motorcycle and black leather gear, he wasn’t my mother, but my body didn’t know the difference.

  By then, by then clothes stuffed my closet. I had one cream-colored blazer, shot through with fine pink and blue lines, perfect for wearing with any of my dozens of Brooks Brothers pink or blue dress shirts. It looked great on the Tavis Smiley program. I had seersucker sport coats. A heather plaid I wore onstage at Carnegie Hall. Portland is not a place where men dress up so most of my coats and slacks went on tour, making their debut on television in Germany or Spain.

  My pin-striped Brooks Brothers pajamas, so Dagwood Bumstead from the Blondie comic strip, I wore those for two years of touring with fellow writers Chelsea Cain, Monica Drake, and Lidia Yuknavitch doing our evening of “Adult Bedtime Stories.” At the Ritz-Carlton in Houston and the Four Seasons in Baltimore, we’d drink in the hotel bar after each show, me in my snazzy pajamas and the women in gauzy negligees trimmed with hazy egret feathers. Our chests glittered with huge rhinestone brooches I’d found in Wichita, in an antiques store run by two ninety-year-old drag queens who were aging out of the drag queen business. Lidia and Monica and Chelsea wore retired drag queen necklaces that fanned as wide as peacock tails. At The Peninsula in Chicago, a diamond-studded and tuxedoed elderly couple, fresh from the opera, stood and glared. Loud, for our benefit and for the entire bar to savor, the man declared, “That is not appropriate attire for The Peninsula!”

  If you were my student I’d tell you about the first writing exercise Tom Spanbauer typically assigned his writers. He’d tell them, “Write about something you can hardly remember.” They’d start with a scent. A taste. One tangible physical detail would elicit another. It was as if their bodies were recording devices far more effective than their minds.

  To repeat: Your body is a recording device more effective than your mind.

  After I recognized the magic of the fitting room, it seemed less powerful. The tailor went back to being a guy with a cloth tape measure looped over his shoulders. From here my brain took over. The reason I’d always avoided buying clothes, even after I could afford to shop at places like Brooks Brothers and Barneys, was because it felt like an insult to wear anything nicer than what our mother could sew. Late nights, she’d baste and hem, calling a kid upstairs to test the size of a waistband. But despite her efforts—one night she fainted from heatstroke and our father found her sprawled between the ironing board and the Singer sewing machine—our clothes looked homemade. The fabric had been on sale because it was garish. The buttons had been recycled from a wedding gown or whatever. But to wear anything nicer we risked hurting her feelings.

  So my clothes, even after my success, came from thrift stores.

  So did my language. Store-bought clothes and ten-dollar words felt pretentious and show-offy so we bought what we could find secondhand, my siblings and I, and we talked about the weather.

  And realizing that autopilot tendency set me free. My mother was dead. I could dress up a little. My ideas could grow because my vocabulary could.

  So if you were my student, I’d tell you to listen to your body as you write. Take note how your hand knows how much coffee is left by the weight of the cup. Tell your stories not simply through your readers’ eyes and minds, but through their skin, their noses, their guts, the bottoms of their feet.

  Authority: Hew to Your Archetype

  Chelsea Cain and I both have huge suitcases we only use for long book tours. When I’d retrieve mine from storage the sight of it would make my dogs begin to cry. Chelsea’s dogs, as she opened the suitcase across a bed and began to pack it, her dogs would climb into it and fall asleep among her folded clothes.

  This prompted a story idea. In so many families a parent is compelled to make long work-related trips…so, what about a story where the family cat climbed into the suitcase? The departing traveler boarded an overnight flight to Europe, and when he landed he found a text or voicemail from his spouse saying the cat was missing. Dread mounts. He gets to his hotel and can’t bring himself to open the suitcase. Most likely, the beloved cat is inside. He doesn’t want to find out if it’s alive or dead.

  The story resonated with me because it demonstrates the philosophical paradox of Schrödinger’s cat. Look it up.

  The cat story could be the entire story—ending with the man weeping beside a locked suitcase. Or pressing his ear to the side. Or forlornly petting the side of the suitcase. Or, being merciful, he finds the dead cat and phones his wife to say the cat’s not there therefore it must be in the home, still. Or…?

  Or the cat isn’t a cat. Their toddler loves her daddy so much that she climbs into the suitcase. The man is oblivious and disconnected while flying to Europe. In London he’s met by the police who demand to look in his suitcase. Or he finds a frantic voicemail from his wife—their child is missing.

  Whether it’s a cat or a baby inside the suitcase, whether it’s dead or alive, the story is still a depiction of the Schrödinger’s cat paradox. That’s the archetype. And that’s why readers will readily engage with it.

  The lesson is: if you can identify the archetype your story depicts, you can more effectively fulfill the unconscious expectations of the reader.

  In the story “Phoenix,” I create the circumstance where a mother demands a father hurt their child to prove his love for her. She’s away on a business trip and their daughter refuses to speak to her over the phone. Fearing the child is actually dead, she demands her husband hurt the girl because a cry of pain would prove the girl is still alive. Ludicrous and horrible as it sounds, the story works because it’s a retelling of the story of Isaac and Abraham from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament.

  But instead of God demanding Abraham prove his love by stabbing Isaac with a knife, it’s a distraught mom pressuring a dad to stick their kid with a needle.

  It’s similar to using cultural precedent to move the reader from the known to the unknown, but somehow deeper.

  If you can identify the core legend that your story is telling, you can best fulfill the expectation of the legend’s ending.

  Authority: Get Something Wrong

  Among the easiest ways to gain the reader’s trust is to get something wrong.

  To my way of thinking, there are two forms of authority. The first I call “head authority,” where the writer demonstrates a wisdom or knowledge beyond the reader’s. This can be something basic and earthy, like the passages in The Grapes of Wrath where characters use thin brass wire to compress piston rings while reassembling an engine. Or something less savory, like the mother in my book Choke who switches the largely identical bottles between boxes of hair dye, knowing the buyers will get hair some color they never expected. Head authority is based on knowledge, used for evil or otherwise.

  The second type of authority is “heart authority,” gained when a character tells an emotional truth or commits an act that shows great vulnerability. The character shows an emotional wisdom and bravery despite enormous pain. Often it involves killing an animal, such as the scene in my book Rant where a character must kill his pug dog when it manifests full rabies. Or the scene in Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete where the narrator must kill an aged, crippled racehorse. In the Denis Johnson short story “Dirty Wedding,” the narrator is waiting while his girlfriend undergoes an abortion. A nurse approaches to say the girlfriend, Michelle, is fine. The narrator asks, “Is she dead?”

  Stunned, the nurse says, “No.”

  To which the narrator responds, “I kind of wish she was.”

  At that the reader is stunned, but “heart authority” is created. We know the writer isn’t afraid to tell an awful truth. The writer might not be smarter than us. But the writer is braver and more honest. That’s “heart authority.”

  This occurs in my story “Romance” as the girlfriend’s behavior becomes more and more erratic, and the narrator is forced into such denial that he must reject his friends and family. “…and after all that there’s a lot less people at our wedding than you might think.”

  Emotional authority also comes through doing something horrible but necessary for a noble reason. It’s the main character, Rynn, in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane who is forced to kill those who want to molest her. Or it’s Dolores Claiborne in Stephen King’s book of the same name, who tries to kill her suffering, suicidal employer.

  A character’s mistake or misdeeds allow the reader to feel smarter. The reader becomes the caretaker or parent of the character and wants the character to survive and succeed.

  Another way to create heart authority is to depict a character talking about herself in the third person. Think of the scene in Fight Club where paramedics are arriving to rescue a suicidal Marla Singer. As she’s fleeing the scene, she tells her would-be saviors not to bother and calls herself irredeemable infectious human waste. In the play Suddenly, Last Summer the character Catherine Holly says, “Suddenly, last winter I began to write my diary in the third person…” In either case, the shift to third person implies self-loathing or disassociation or both.

  So if you were my student, I’d tell you to establish emotional authority by depicting an imperfect character making a mistake.

  A Postcard from the Tour

  The arms started because of the tattoos. The ones the readers got. During my first book tours people would ask me, and I’d autograph their arms or legs. A year later we’d meet again. Another book, another tour, and they’d show me my signature made permanent in their skin.

  My solution? To order wholesale. Arms, legs, hands, feet. By the cardboard caseload from slave labor factories in China. By the shipping container, in time. Gross after gross, if you’ll forgive the pun. These are realistic, fake severed arms with gelatinous red blood and a yellowed stump of shattered bone where you’d expect. Jaundiced skin. In my Toyota Tacoma pickup I’d haul them home from the post office, a longish drive out twisting, two-lane Highway 14 through the woods. The one time, my first trip, I didn’t think to tie down the stacked boxes. Two miles shy of my driveway a box disappeared from the rearview mirror, then another was gone. Where I could pull over, I looked back to the busted-open cardboard. The highway littered with bloody limbs. Cars and trucks backed up to the horizon. Nobody honking, they’re so stunned to see me dashing around, throwing gory arms and legs onto the road’s shoulder.