A Cheater's Thrill

Pulse Pounding Effects On Demand

What Was the Last Item You Shoplifted?

Yesterday in a junk store I saw mine: An oval picture frame circa 1975. It was nothing the 13-year-old me wanted — faux Victorian, faux Goth, heavy as a cinder block — but stealing it was a challenge, like Jon Krakauer climbing the Devil’s Thumb. Consider Andy Warhol’s dictum: “Art is what you can get away with.” The level of risk heightens your level of engagement. The frame was huge, and the very instant it was mine I threw it away. The thrill was in the act. As it should be in writing.

Consider Nora Ephron’s advice: “Sex is sex, but sex plus guilt is Good Sex.”

Now, how can you turn up the heat on your own process? Shame? Danger? Self-destruction?

Do It at Work

Examples abound. Picture Jane Austen writing surreptitiously at home and constantly compelled to hide each on-going draft under documents and needlepoint and other “approved” pastimes. Picture me at Freightliner, living in fear that I’d leave a page of some story in a company photocopy machine — a possibility that many of my friends tell stories about.¹

You might think that being Forbidden to Write is a deterrent. On the contrary, being told not to increases the appeal of writing. Monica Drake always told of a concentration-camp prisoner who wrote in secret on scraps of toilet paper, then lost his “manuscript” and instantly began writing it over. We all should check into a labor camp or retreat where writing is punishable by death. THEN we’d get our books completed.

So go ahead, risk your job. Risk your home life.

Write About a Secret You Never Intend to Tell

Only amateurs think that Great Literature is about telling some Great Truth. Again, I beg to differ. Great stories, I’d argue, are about touching on some unspoken topic, and eventually going to the grave with the real meaning of your work. Think of Rosemary’s Baby. During my correspondence with the writer, Ira Levin, I often asked if his story was actually about the drug Thalidomide. In the ’50s and ’60s, pregnant woman were prescribed Thalidomide as a sedative, and it caused a generation of babies to be born with claw-like hands and feet similar to those of the baby Rosemary Woodhouse bore for the devil.

Levin’s book and the Roman Polanski film version struck such a vein of shock and horror because the overall culture had never addressed the sadness left behind by Thalidomide. Levin hemmed and hawed, but he never told me an outright “no” about his novel’s secret meaning. More importantly, he never told me an outright “yes.” He took the secret to his grave. He never decoded his own secret’s power.

Likewise, consider Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery. Readers suspected that Jackson was actually writing about the national draft lottery — that process in which a select few are brutally murdered so the great many can continue to live secure lives. Whatever the case, Jackson never told. Good for her.

Need a third example? Among Stephen King experts, his story The Body is believed to be about a childhood event: King went to play with a close friend, King came home speechless and stunned, and the friend was later found to have been killed by a train on nearby tracks. Whether or not Stephen King saw his friend killed, and decades later wrote of the experience, he’s never confirmed or denied.²

Another example might be Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. In real life, his brother helped invent cloud seeding. An early test of the process produced massive floods in England with a high death count. Vonnegut never confirmed that he was actually writing about the guilt and remorse surrounding his brother’s invention. Instead he created “Ice-nine.” Secret kept.

For almost thirty years people have been asking me the secret meaning and messaging of Fight Club, and I’ll never tell. There’s a vast energy that comes from keeping such a secret. Like shoplifting. Like writing at work, or in church, or in a Gulag. Doing or saying the forbidden thing — in code — feels glorious.

What I Will Tell You

In college I had an affair with a slightly older guy.³ What made it memorable was that he volunteered on the local public-access Homework Hotline television program. Wednesday nights in Eugene, Oregon — home of the University of Oregon — I could turn on my crappy TV and see this remarkably handsome guy sitting elbow to elbow with other local do-gooders as they fielded homework questions from high school students in real time.

My Alfred Hitchcock game was to call in and ask a question about polynomials or vectors. My secret guy was the go-to tutor for mathematics so my call would be routed to him. On live television, I’d fake being a confused high schooler, and my voice would be broadcast on air. As he recognized the voice, the look in his eyes was a mix of rage and fear, hate and affection.⁴ To keep up appearances he’d play it cool as he tensely walked me through tortured equations. Math and algebra were never so exciting. Every discussion about perpendicular bisectors was a flirtation freighted with secret meaning — conducted on television before an audience of strangers. Such dangerous foreplay

I’d call each week and give a fake name. I’d feign difficulty with my quadratic equations. He’d stare poker-faced into the camera and tell me:

Week after week these exchanges were unbelievably sexy. Even after he confessed to having a wife and kids, he still wanted me to phone in and ask questions about the Pythagorean Theorem.⁵

My point is, the secret, the covert, the shameful, the forbidden thing conducted in public creates an addictive energy. Things that we’re forced to tell in code are sacred. The whispered stuff. Perhaps that explains my aversion to memoir — I only what to hear the things you Don’t Want to Tell Me.

Fear is a tonic to your writing. The fear or shame that goes into your writing process will bleed into your story and make it great. Once it’s sold to the world you can deny all allegations about it, like Ira Levin or Shirley Jackson. You can die with that great merry secret.

Do Something Illegal or Shameful or Impossible

If your project has lost steam, chances are you’re not putting enough at stake. Maybe you do need to risk your job or parent’s love or marriage. Ask yourself: Could I be put in prison for this story? If the answer is “no” then you’re playing a pretty small game.

If nothing else, at your next party, ask people about the biggest thing they’ve ever shoplifted. It’s a great opening line. Few people won’t bite. People are proud of their crimes.

And the next time you watch Homework Hotline, don’t assume that every dimwit question about Chaucer is coming from a ninth grader. Listen for the secret that’s being explored in full sight.

1. Colton’s is the best: It involves running from floor to floor in a huge building, trying to find which machine printed what he’d sent remotely. Leaux’s is good, too, but it only involves breaking into a building during off hours to retrieve the left-behind evidence.

2. To my knowledge.

3. I was twenty-two to his twenty-nine or thirty.

4. The secret recipe for good sex.

5. Yeah, this whole almost-Lolita relationship should’ve ended in my murder, but it was fun.