One log truck driver, the last vehicle to slowly crawl past once I’d cleared a path, looked down from his cab window and said, “You lost your first box three miles ago.”

  Most I found. A few I no doubt threw too far, their pink fingers and toes still hiding among the ferns, waiting for a hiker to discover.

  Not intentional, but nothing to joke about, not in those woods where the Green River Killer and the Forest Park Killer had stashed their victims.

  The bulk of limbs I’d gotten home where I sat on the porch and autographed them in the sun with a fat Marks-A-Lot pen. Nothing you’d want to breathe, indoors, hour after hour, neither the smelly rubber arms nor the pen.

  Then off to the UPS Store they’d go, addressed to every bookstore on my next tour. So onstage at the end of each event I could call the bookstore staff up for a round of applause. Always following the applause with the same closing line, “Since you’ve given us such a big hand, we’d like to return the favor…”

  Then the shared gasp of hundreds of people as we’d dump out the packing cases of autographed arms and legs and throw them like so much red meat for jumping readers to catch.

  My answer to people wanting my name on an arm or leg. No more tattoos. In Ann Arbor one man hiked up his pant leg to show me my signature carved into his leg with an X-Acto knife, but he was nice enough, not the maniac you might expect.

  Every tour a well-oiled machine. Every tour another shipping container from China. In each city, “Since you’ve given us such a big hand…”

  Until Miami one year where the book event was held on a waterfront stage owned by the Shake-A-Leg Foundation. Not that I knew that. How could I know? Not until I was introduced to the foundation’s founder, after I’d thrown hundreds of severed legs into the crowd, and the founder turned out to be a handsome man, Harry Horgan, who’d been paralyzed in a car accident. Shake-A-Leg being his way to help others in similar circumstances. What could I do except apologize?

  No offense intended. None taken.

  Disaster averted. I get a lot of practice apologizing.

  That, the only mishap east of the Mississippi. The west side, another story. All my western tour stops were scheduled, by chance, just one day after another writer, a man named Aron Ralston. Despite my labels DO NOT OPEN BEFORE PALAHNIUK BOOK EVENT, most stores were curious and opened the boxes early. Such a stack of mysterious, smelly boxes. They found all the severed arms and thought, This is the most distasteful book promotion we’ve ever seen.

  And still not reading my labels, the booksellers went to Aron when he arrived and told him, “You’ll be happy to know your severed arms arrived safely.” Aron Ralston, the author of Between a Rock and a Hard Place, the book made into the James Franco film 127 Hours. Yes, that Aron Ralston. The man who was compelled to cut off his own arm while hiking. Who then had to politely tell the bookstore staff that they should read the boxes, and that the arms were for Chuck Palahniuk appearing the next night.

  No shit, because in so many stores people had made this same assumption. And then the bookstore people somehow assuming I’d known my events would follow Aron’s and that I was a deranged joker who’d methodically plotted to harass this other author, just out of my sick sense of humor.

  When really, I’d been doing this for a few years. Simply to try and humorously dissuade some people from getting a tattoo. I’m really not a tactless dick, but maybe I ought to start to think more things through.

  Tension

  In real life writers are lousy at dealing with tension. We avoid conflict. We’re writers because we like to deal with things from a distance. But writing still gives us a way to dabble. We create the tension. We manage it, and we resolve it. As writers we get to be the bully. If someone gets cancer, we caused it. Our job is to challenge and confront the reader, but we can’t do any of that if we’re so tension-averse that we can’t create suspense and conflict.

  As Ira Levin saw it, “Great problems, not clever solutions, make great fiction.”

  Ira Levin

  This means being able to tolerate the incomplete thing. Whether it’s the unfinished first draft or the events confronting the characters. In regard to the unfinished draft, Tom Spanbauer used to say, “The longer you can be with the unresolved thing, the more beautifully it will resolve itself.”

  In regard to tormenting your characters, this is tougher than it sounds for many writers. Writers who come from a background of abuse or insecurity might never get the plot off the ground. I’ve seen a lot of characters drink soothing tea while petting a cat and gazing out a window at the rain. And I’ve seen just as many characters exchange tennis-match quips that never rise above being clever. It takes some practice to create, sustain, and increase chaos, and trust that you can also resolve it.

  Consider how the traditional burlesque show alternates strippers with comedians. Sex builds tension. Laughter cuts it. So such a program will keep the audience happy by first arousing people, then exhausting them with the release of laughter. Likewise, girlie magazines are famous for their formula of mixing nude photos with raunchy cartoons. Once more, one element creates tension. The other lessens it.

  If you were my student I’d tell you I understand your unease with tension. But writing fiction allows you to experience escalating conflict, controlled by you. Writing fiction will help you deal with tension and conflict in your real life.

  Tension: The Vertical versus the Horizontal in a Story

  It was a television commercial for Skipper’s Seafood that broke the logjam for me.

  In workshop Tom Spanbauer would always lecture about the horizontal and the vertical of a story. The horizontal refers to the sequence of plot points: The Woodhouse couple moves into a new apartment, Rosemary meets a neighbor, the neighbor jumps from a window one night…etc. The vertical refers to the increase in emotional, physical, and psychological tension over the course of the story. As the plot progresses so should the tension ramp up. Minus the vertical, a story devolves to “and then, and then, and then.”

  One way that Minimalist writing creates the vertical effectively is by limiting the elements within a story. Introducing an element, say a new character or setting, requires descriptive language. Passive language. So by introducing limited elements, and doing so early, the Minimalist writer is free to aggressively move the plot forward. And the limited number of elements—characters, objects, settings—accrue meaning and importance as they’re used repeatedly.

  Tom used an analogy taught to him by his instructor, Gordon Lish. Tom called the themes of a story “the horses.” He’d ask a student, “What are the horses of this?” In his analogy, if you were migrating from Wisconsin to California in a covered wagon, you’d arrive at Stockton with the same set of horses you’d started with in Madison. Another comparison was to a symphony: no matter how elaborate the score became, the original core melody would still be present.

  Call me a slow learner, but I didn’t get it. Not until one night after workshop when I went home and turned on the television. A commercial showed an exterior view of a Skipper’s Seafood restaurant. It cut to a shot of smiling people eating fish with Skipper’s branded soda cups placed prominently on their table. Smiling and skinny, they wiped their beautiful faces with Skipper’s branded napkins. We cut to a smiling employee wearing a Skipper’s branded hat and apron…more Skipper’s packaging…steaming fried fish…just everything Skipper’s, Skipper’s, Skipper’s.

  The commercial never cut to anything like, for instance, a red rose or a horse running on the beach. Here was the same message repeated in as many different forms as they could imagine.

  I got it. That was Minimalism. The horizontal of the commercial told the story of a family going somewhere to eat. The vertical brought you closer and closer to their happiness and the food, quickly engaging your emotions and appetite.

  So if you were my student I’d tell you to limit your elements and make certain each represents one of the horses your story is about. Find a hundred ways to say the same thing.

  For example, the theme in my book Choke is “things that are not what they appear to be.” That includes the clocks that use birdcalls to tell the time, the coded public address announcements, the fake choking man, the historical theme park, the fake doctor “Paige.”

  I’d tell you to watch television commercials. See how they never show you a fat person eating at Domino’s or Burger King? Watch how they ramp up the vertical in only thirty seconds.

  Tension: The Clock versus the Gun

  If your stories tend to amble along, lose momentum, and fizzle out, I’d ask you, “What’s your clock?” And, “Where’s your gun?”

  On book tours in Germany, getting a big crowd in Berlin has always been a crapshoot. The rathaus might be empty five minutes before the event is supposed to start, then—blam—everyone arrives at the last moment. The same goes for Los Angeles. In Berlin the organizers always shrug and say, “Berlin runs by many clocks,” meaning people have many options and they won’t commit to one until the last moment.

  In fiction the clock I’m talking about is anything that limits the story’s length by forcing it to end at a designated time. In so many books a pregnancy is the clock. In Rosemary’s Baby and The Grapes of Wrath and Heartburn, we know the clock will run approximately nine months. When the baby is born, it’s time to wrap things up. It’s natural and organic and the pregnant character adds tension because of her vulnerability and possible harm to the unborn. So much is at stake.

  But a clock can come in many forms. If memory serves, in the movie Bringing Up Baby the clock is the assembly of a dinosaur skeleton. In my novel Survivor, told aboard a jetliner that will eventually run out of fuel and crash, time is marked by each of the four engines flaming out. They mark the end of the first act, the second act, the third act, and the end of the book. Friends of mine hated how the diminishing number of pages betrayed how soon a book would end. And because I couldn’t change that aspect of a book, I chose to accentuate it. By running the page numbers in reverse I made them into another clock, increasing tension by exaggerating the sense of time passing.

  Not all clocks act as countdowns. Some merely mark change. Take Scarlett O’Hara’s waist, for example. As the book begins it’s seventeen inches, the smallest waist in six counties. But as time passes, her waist size grows, becoming the method for measuring time.

  And a clock can run over the full course of a book, or just a single scene. Remember my novel Snuff and the sex doll slowly leaking air? That’s a clock. A kind of air-filled hourglass. The moment the doll becomes a flat, pink ghost…time’s up.

  In the film Se7en the clock is seven days. In the film Session 9 the clock is five days. Each time span is set to heighten tension by assuring the audience the story will not drag on.

  As an aside, Billy Idol gave an interview wherein he commented on why so much punk music sounded the same. The typical punk song started at full throttle, ran for two and one-half minutes, and stopped abruptly. Only when I heard that did I realize how much the punk aesthetic had influenced my writing. This was the reason my best stories began with a jolt, seldom ran over ten pages, and ended by falling off a cliff. In so many ways I’d internalized the punk clock. A form as rigid as haiku.

  In every story about the Titanic, the voyage is the clock. To make this clear to everyone in the audience, some stories place a thumbnail, like a summary or primer, on the front of the story. In the film Titanic, for instance, the oceanographers show a computer model of the ship sinking. They give a blow-by-blow description of what’s about to happen. That distills the horizontal of the plot so the audience won’t be distracted trying to analyze those inevitable events. Likewise in the film Citizen Kane, we see the entire plot summarized in a newsreel that plays in the beginning. We’re told what to expect and how long it will all take. This way the viewer is less distracted by what happens. The analytical mind can relax, and people can engage emotionally.

  In the movie The Ring, we’re told, “You’re going to die in seven days.” And the mysterious videotape gives us the thumbnail summary of the entire discovery process. As the main character moves through the seven days we’re thrilled to recognize each of the visual landmarks we were primed to look out for. All these same summary tricks work in the Sam Raimi films The Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell. Now meta horror films like Scream and Cabin in the Woods use clocks based on the tropes of earlier horror films.

  You’ll see this type of thumbnail introduction used less in fiction, perhaps because it’s so vague and trivializes events. Used well, it can be a good tease, hooking the reader with the promise of things to come. A great example is Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, which opens with a boy doing morning chores while the upcoming plot is summarized in brief references. Another example comes from my book Rant, in the opening where a character summarizes the entire plot in a ridiculous explanation for how to qualify for a reduced-rate “bereavement fare” airline ticket.

  A good clock limits time, thus heightening tension. And it tells us what to expect, thus freeing our minds to indulge in the emotion of the story.

  A gun is a different matter. While a clock is set to run for a specified time period, a gun can be pulled out at any moment to bring the story to a climax. It’s called a gun because of Chekhov’s directive that if a character puts a gun in a drawer in act 1 he or she must pull it out in the final act.

  A classic example is the faulty furnace in The Shining. We’re told early on that it will explode. The story might stagger on until springtime, but for the fact that…the furnace explodes.

  In Fight Club and Choke the gun is the lie told to gain the sympathy of a peer group. The disease support groups or the would-be Heimlich maneuver-ers. When I wanted the story to collapse, I merely had to reveal the main character as a liar, and allow his community to redeem or destroy him.

  Whereas a clock is something obvious and constantly brought to mind, a gun is something you introduce and hide, early, and hope your audience will forget. When you finally reveal it, you want the gun to feel both surprising and inevitable. Like death, or the orgasm at the end of sex.

  Another perfect American gun…In Breakfast at Tiffany’s the gun is Sally Tomato, the gangster in prison whom we meet early and soon forget about. Pages and pages go by without a mention of him. Finally the story is forced to chaos when the female lead is arrested and charged with aiding this organized crime kingpin. To a lesser extent, the story includes the two requisite deaths. First, Golightly’s brother, Fred, who’s killed in a Jeep accident. Second, the miscarriage of her unborn child as a result of the runaway horse incident in Central Park.

  Also consider that the Second Act Sacrifice is a form of gun. It’s the inevitable death of a lesser character that signals the move from comedy to drama. It’s the death of Big Bob in Fight Club. It’s the abortion in Cabaret or the best friend, Hutch, in Rosemary’s Baby.

  In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? the clock is the ever-dwindling number of contestants in the dance marathon. The gun is Red Buttons’s heart attack—it triggers Susannah York’s mental breakdown and the story quickly devolves to chaos. Just for the record, Buttons is the classic good boy character, career military, still wearing his navy uniform, and his death is more or less self-induced. Suicide, in a way. While Jane Fonda is the rebel who must be executed. As in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the witness is also the executioner, and he tells the story in unusual flash-forwards that make little sense until the story’s end.

  But hold up. Don’t let me get ahead of myself, here. We’ll revisit the concept of the good boy, the rebel, and the witness.

  For now if you came to me and said your novel was approaching eight hundred pages with no sign of ending, I’d ask, “What’s your clock?” I’d ask, “Did you plant a gun?”

  I’d tell you to kill your Red Buttons or Big Bob and to bring your fictional world to a messy, noisy, chaotic climax.

  Tension: Use Unconventional Conjunctions

  Consider how an excited child tells a story. The sentences just cascade, one after another with few clear breaks. Such momentum! Almost like music, very much like music, like a song.

  You can mimic this enthusiasm by using unconventional conjunctions to link together run-on sentences. Yes, you could use “and” repeatedly; I do so in my story “Romance.” But there are infinite pseudo-conjunctions waiting to be invented.

  In my story “The Facts of Life” I chose to use the two-word phrases “even if,” “even when,” “even so,” and “even then” to mimic the sound of a drum machine in 1980s New Wave music. Specifically the Psychedelic Furs’ song “Heartbreak Beat.” As the endless sentences tumble forward, there’s the constant regular beat of “even something” to keep time.

  Similarly, in the story “Dad All Over” I insert the word “Dad” just to interrupt sentences. I force the word to become a form of onomatopoeia like “bang!” or “pow.” The word becomes the drumbeat within the song, increasing in frequency to simulate how songs increase pace, also suggesting—I hope—the way a child will call out again and again for an absent parent.

  Every story is an experiment.

  In the story “Let’s See What Happens” I create run-on sentences with increasing momentum by using the words “now,” “next,” and “always” to link verb-driven clauses. The effect is exhausting so I’m careful to alternate these relentless run-on passages with more conventionally written scenes.