A long time ago I remember him saying he often uses doctors offices, office buildings, airports and whatnot as settings because everyone knows the look/feel of these places. Maybe he could revisit or expand on that sometime.
Will do. Be aware that setting is a low priority for me. As is dialog. Any time I consider a story idea I ask myself, "Is going to be just architecture and dialog?" The action is infinitely more important.
I like that these “realistic” small details can seem so inconsequential but that they can also offer so much to a story without being implicitly apparent.
For example, say you’re writing a war story and you have the main character walk past the corpse of an enemy sniper. You have the main character notice dozens upon dozens of tally marks engraved in the wooden stock of the sniper’s gun. This detail alone hints at a past that entwines both the deceased and the weapon/object in a somewhat ambiguous and grim backstory.
Exactly. In Portland many of my students recently attended an anatomy lab that's since become a scandal. The dead man had not given permission for his corpse to be used for a money-raising event held in a Marriott Hotel ballroom. But during the lecture the students were shown the man's history as demonstrated by his organs -- pace maker, no gall bladder, etc..
They were invited to lift and hold various organs. The organizers claimed to have no knowledge of the man's cause of death. Turns out it was covid. My students aren't amused.
Is watching an anatomy some kind of unspoken rite of passage for writers? Seems to be a more common occurrence than one might think. An up close and personal confrontation with death being the seemingly through line reason as to why.
Consider that by writing writers are looking for a safe way to explore themes they personally find threatening. An anatomy lab is a structured glimpse at mortality.
Recently, after years of writing about murders, my co-teacher Chelsea Cain witnessed a murder and watched the victim die at her feet. She was devastated, despite having depicted far more violent deaths in her thriller novels.
In the example of Rosemary's Baby it really is meaningful description in that it helps provoke the reader to think more about the item and even question the significance of it. And as you mentioned... tell about the character. All in very few words.
Oh man I just started reading "Ice at the Bottom of the World" (per your recommendation) and I noticed that his descriptions were consistently and subtly engrossing. I wasn't sure why and you just verbalized it. Great stuff!
What comes first? The audience, the atmosphere, the action, or the…. whatever else I dunno I’m trying to sound smart.
Ok take two: I think it terms of worlds and prose that embody the essence of Da Vinci’s quote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
How would you take the art of balancing an inquisitive (albeit black / white) hypothetical mind, vs. the romantic one? If the “half-eaten apple” paints a picture as one that is self-evident to the definition of the words, how would you describe the apple in a way to curate the character, looking at the half-eaten apple with a perspective take?
My bias is the habit of over-exaggerated stories, as in, hyperbolic ones, emphasized to the Nth degree. My upbringing has been around a series of over-expressions of individual perspectives, and like I said, my bias towards simplicity is, the ultimate sophistication to me. I can get pretty tuned out pretty fast by the descriptive genius, but truly have encountered a truth of myself, hence my question, that PERSPECTIVE is everything. I am aspiring to write myself well, and definitely have to work on balancing these perspectives in my writing.
My two cents worth: Action comes first. What's the little machine that will run faster and faster and eventually break down? Voice comes second. We accept that songs are a distortion of language that often breaks down into squeals, howls, chaos at its height. Similarly, good writing should distort language in a unique way. That said, I endorse your exaggeration of story/voice/perspective. Audience is never a consideration, unless I'm testing an idea aloud on friends or fellow writers.
Writing 'Invisible Monsters' in that hybrid Vogue Magazine-slash-drag queen voice was a revelation to me.
This made me think of the first moments in the movie Rounders. Mike grabs his roll and for a second we pick up a worn out Poker Book. Not any worn out Poker book, no, It's the painfully boring ultra-important Mike Caro's Book of Tells. A small detail that I've only realised it's significance until now. Chuck, you should charge money for this stuff.. ALL of it.
Love this entry! Now that I’ve also read one of your co-teacher’s novels (One Kick, which was, naturally, thrilling) I find myself falling finding the obvious example in her work (Scrabble tile, again). Along with the incomplete/unique angle, it also brings questions. I’m beginning to see writing somewhat as sowing a field of questions/misdirections with the goal being a degree of clarity at the end. Really never thought that way before. Thanks for broadening the horizon!
In Alan Bennett's diaries he makes a very interesting point - he references seeing something in the street (if my memory serves it's a group of nuns carrying balloons) and points out how something like that would never happen in a book or film unless it's specifically part of the plot or has a point. Reality throws up these strange things all the time as you walk around life. I wonder if it's possible to incorporate this aspect of life without derailing plot?
Consider that humans always assign meaning and look for patterns in even unrelated, random things. So you could depict such things, but your character would automatically look for a way to make those events significant. Of course the "pattern" is bias confirmation, but it says loads about the character.
Goodness. I think I left that open-ended. It's undecided whether the victim was born female or had had surgery. It's that wiggle room that gives stories like 'The Haunting of Hill House' a long life. Is the house haunted, or is Eleanor just insane?
Thanks for emphasizing that tension doesn’t have to be some grand murder-mystery. I think that this is something that’s easy to misunderstand, and I misunderstood it a lot at first. One thing that I’ve done (similar to your suggested exercises of writing lists of physical gestures and transitional phrases) is to think through things that create tension and stress in my own life.
Bosses who won’t acknowledge questions that they don’t want to answer, opposing family members who press politics or religion, talking to neighbors when there is some sort of impending issue that must come to a head, waiting on blood work to come back from a wound that isn’t healing, etc. These examples are somewhat broad, but what I do is I think about the specific actions and circumstances that made that situation stressful.
For example, the massive dying oak in my backyard is leaning over everyone’s power lines and also covers half of my neighbor’s yard. Not only that, but it is continually shedding branches onto her property and she’s elderly and low income. She keeps dealing with these branches, but neither of us have talked about it. I can save significant money if I have the power company take it out (free), but then there would be more coordination with having to pay for a separate company to remove the branches in both yards. All of this stress because I don’t know if she’ll understand or what she’ll say. Or I could just wing it and wait for it to fall and pray that it doesn’t take out both of our fences in the process of pulling down the power lines (won’t be doing that).
Yes, homeowners insurance. If it takes out the main line going to houses, then that is the responsibility of the home owner(s) rather than the power company. Both of us also have two dogs that roam our yards. The idea of fences getting taken out plus dogs and downed power lines... Man. The more I think about this I definitely need to get it dealt with. Also, now I think I am going to work this into my new story. Could be a great clock.
Such is the secret formula of plotting: Keep as much in suspension as possible, then as quickly as possible resolve it all. The enormous relief occurs are joy. In the 80s there was a procrastinating behavior called "brinksmanship" in which people postponed doing a lot of needed tasks until the last moment (the brink). By resolving everything quickly, at the point of disaster, they created drama and victory in their lives. The behavior drove their peers crazy.
I really enjoy when a story implies history. I always think of the opening to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indy is sitting at the table trying to make a deal and it's implied that one of the bad guys had visited him the night before trying to steal the item. It shows the guy's hand bandage. It's such a small moment but It always stirs my imagination wondering what had happened. Like in Aliens or Annihilation. The characters show up after the fact and you know some crazy shit went down.
Thanks for this. Question: you said, “You want to pile up small incomplete issues. Incomplete objects or lies or half-eaten food or unanswered questions. Make your reader carry the burden of unresolved stuff. That’s tension.”
Are you required to resolve all of these at some point in the story?
As I am typing this I think maybe it is a stupid question, but I am going to click post anyhow…
Is it just me or does the descriptor "amazing" set anyone else off into a low key rage? Everyone uses it now and why? Everyone has a thesaurus in their back pocket. It's the Karen of descriptors.
Nice tidbit tip, thank you CP. Looking forward to digging into all your posts as my novel starts brewing and I maintain the confidence to stick with it. Just finished Consider This and have been reading you for 25 years. My biggest problem: how do i write something that doesn't feel like a Chuck knock off.
Ok I think I did the assignment correctly. Here goes... I had a dream about you last night Mr. Palahniuk. Let me explain. You didn’t do anything humiliating. You were teaching me how to fight. You said “Candice, you’re far too small and old to be going toe-to-toe with anyone besides a 10 year old and even then it will probably be a wash. You need to always carry around one of the large, heavy, glass ashtrays that your mother used to smoke with all day and use that to wail on anyone coming at you.”
A long time ago I remember him saying he often uses doctors offices, office buildings, airports and whatnot as settings because everyone knows the look/feel of these places. Maybe he could revisit or expand on that sometime.
Bing, bing, bing. Exactly.
Will do. Be aware that setting is a low priority for me. As is dialog. Any time I consider a story idea I ask myself, "Is going to be just architecture and dialog?" The action is infinitely more important.
Agreed 100%. As classic as they are, Blood Meridian and The Road could have been around 10% shorter in my (ADD-riddled) opinion.
"A crass, cheap devil worshiper." I feel called out. Nice.
If the shoe fits....
I like that these “realistic” small details can seem so inconsequential but that they can also offer so much to a story without being implicitly apparent.
For example, say you’re writing a war story and you have the main character walk past the corpse of an enemy sniper. You have the main character notice dozens upon dozens of tally marks engraved in the wooden stock of the sniper’s gun. This detail alone hints at a past that entwines both the deceased and the weapon/object in a somewhat ambiguous and grim backstory.
Exactly. In Portland many of my students recently attended an anatomy lab that's since become a scandal. The dead man had not given permission for his corpse to be used for a money-raising event held in a Marriott Hotel ballroom. But during the lecture the students were shown the man's history as demonstrated by his organs -- pace maker, no gall bladder, etc..
They were invited to lift and hold various organs. The organizers claimed to have no knowledge of the man's cause of death. Turns out it was covid. My students aren't amused.
Can’t say I blame them.
Is watching an anatomy some kind of unspoken rite of passage for writers? Seems to be a more common occurrence than one might think. An up close and personal confrontation with death being the seemingly through line reason as to why.
Consider that by writing writers are looking for a safe way to explore themes they personally find threatening. An anatomy lab is a structured glimpse at mortality.
Recently, after years of writing about murders, my co-teacher Chelsea Cain witnessed a murder and watched the victim die at her feet. She was devastated, despite having depicted far more violent deaths in her thriller novels.
Whoa. So sorry to hear about her experience.
That is really awful ☹️
The man's widow wasn't too amused either:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/man-donated-his-body-to-science-company-sold-500-tickets-to-his-dissection/
Bingo. A goodly chunk of that audience was writers from the Bad Dream Factory. They've offered me cell phone video, but I've declined.
I saw that on the news. Hate the whole scandal surrounding it. But I love the idea.
In the example of Rosemary's Baby it really is meaningful description in that it helps provoke the reader to think more about the item and even question the significance of it. And as you mentioned... tell about the character. All in very few words.
Oh man I just started reading "Ice at the Bottom of the World" (per your recommendation) and I noticed that his descriptions were consistently and subtly engrossing. I wasn't sure why and you just verbalized it. Great stuff!
The story "This is Us, Excellent" will kill you.
Hello Chuck. This is Devil’s advocate speaking,
What comes first? The audience, the atmosphere, the action, or the…. whatever else I dunno I’m trying to sound smart.
Ok take two: I think it terms of worlds and prose that embody the essence of Da Vinci’s quote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
How would you take the art of balancing an inquisitive (albeit black / white) hypothetical mind, vs. the romantic one? If the “half-eaten apple” paints a picture as one that is self-evident to the definition of the words, how would you describe the apple in a way to curate the character, looking at the half-eaten apple with a perspective take?
My bias is the habit of over-exaggerated stories, as in, hyperbolic ones, emphasized to the Nth degree. My upbringing has been around a series of over-expressions of individual perspectives, and like I said, my bias towards simplicity is, the ultimate sophistication to me. I can get pretty tuned out pretty fast by the descriptive genius, but truly have encountered a truth of myself, hence my question, that PERSPECTIVE is everything. I am aspiring to write myself well, and definitely have to work on balancing these perspectives in my writing.
My two cents worth: Action comes first. What's the little machine that will run faster and faster and eventually break down? Voice comes second. We accept that songs are a distortion of language that often breaks down into squeals, howls, chaos at its height. Similarly, good writing should distort language in a unique way. That said, I endorse your exaggeration of story/voice/perspective. Audience is never a consideration, unless I'm testing an idea aloud on friends or fellow writers.
Writing 'Invisible Monsters' in that hybrid Vogue Magazine-slash-drag queen voice was a revelation to me.
wonderful insight! Thank you much, the story of writing, continues 🙏❤️🔥✍️🧠🚀🛸
This made me think of the first moments in the movie Rounders. Mike grabs his roll and for a second we pick up a worn out Poker Book. Not any worn out Poker book, no, It's the painfully boring ultra-important Mike Caro's Book of Tells. A small detail that I've only realised it's significance until now. Chuck, you should charge money for this stuff.. ALL of it.
Thank you. And I need to see 'Rounders.'
You do, yes.
Love it! It's all in the details. Thanks Chuck!
Love this entry! Now that I’ve also read one of your co-teacher’s novels (One Kick, which was, naturally, thrilling) I find myself falling finding the obvious example in her work (Scrabble tile, again). Along with the incomplete/unique angle, it also brings questions. I’m beginning to see writing somewhat as sowing a field of questions/misdirections with the goal being a degree of clarity at the end. Really never thought that way before. Thanks for broadening the horizon!
In Alan Bennett's diaries he makes a very interesting point - he references seeing something in the street (if my memory serves it's a group of nuns carrying balloons) and points out how something like that would never happen in a book or film unless it's specifically part of the plot or has a point. Reality throws up these strange things all the time as you walk around life. I wonder if it's possible to incorporate this aspect of life without derailing plot?
Consider that humans always assign meaning and look for patterns in even unrelated, random things. So you could depict such things, but your character would automatically look for a way to make those events significant. Of course the "pattern" is bias confirmation, but it says loads about the character.
Goodness. I think I left that open-ended. It's undecided whether the victim was born female or had had surgery. It's that wiggle room that gives stories like 'The Haunting of Hill House' a long life. Is the house haunted, or is Eleanor just insane?
Thanks for emphasizing that tension doesn’t have to be some grand murder-mystery. I think that this is something that’s easy to misunderstand, and I misunderstood it a lot at first. One thing that I’ve done (similar to your suggested exercises of writing lists of physical gestures and transitional phrases) is to think through things that create tension and stress in my own life.
Bosses who won’t acknowledge questions that they don’t want to answer, opposing family members who press politics or religion, talking to neighbors when there is some sort of impending issue that must come to a head, waiting on blood work to come back from a wound that isn’t healing, etc. These examples are somewhat broad, but what I do is I think about the specific actions and circumstances that made that situation stressful.
For example, the massive dying oak in my backyard is leaning over everyone’s power lines and also covers half of my neighbor’s yard. Not only that, but it is continually shedding branches onto her property and she’s elderly and low income. She keeps dealing with these branches, but neither of us have talked about it. I can save significant money if I have the power company take it out (free), but then there would be more coordination with having to pay for a separate company to remove the branches in both yards. All of this stress because I don’t know if she’ll understand or what she’ll say. Or I could just wing it and wait for it to fall and pray that it doesn’t take out both of our fences in the process of pulling down the power lines (won’t be doing that).
power companies, oak trees, old branches, old ladies, property lines, power lines: lots of rich stuff there
The idea of homeowners insurance also comes to mind.
Yes, homeowners insurance. If it takes out the main line going to houses, then that is the responsibility of the home owner(s) rather than the power company. Both of us also have two dogs that roam our yards. The idea of fences getting taken out plus dogs and downed power lines... Man. The more I think about this I definitely need to get it dealt with. Also, now I think I am going to work this into my new story. Could be a great clock.
Such is the secret formula of plotting: Keep as much in suspension as possible, then as quickly as possible resolve it all. The enormous relief occurs are joy. In the 80s there was a procrastinating behavior called "brinksmanship" in which people postponed doing a lot of needed tasks until the last moment (the brink). By resolving everything quickly, at the point of disaster, they created drama and victory in their lives. The behavior drove their peers crazy.
I really enjoy when a story implies history. I always think of the opening to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indy is sitting at the table trying to make a deal and it's implied that one of the bad guys had visited him the night before trying to steal the item. It shows the guy's hand bandage. It's such a small moment but It always stirs my imagination wondering what had happened. Like in Aliens or Annihilation. The characters show up after the fact and you know some crazy shit went down.
Thanks for this. Question: you said, “You want to pile up small incomplete issues. Incomplete objects or lies or half-eaten food or unanswered questions. Make your reader carry the burden of unresolved stuff. That’s tension.”
Are you required to resolve all of these at some point in the story?
As I am typing this I think maybe it is a stupid question, but I am going to click post anyhow…
Is it just me or does the descriptor "amazing" set anyone else off into a low key rage? Everyone uses it now and why? Everyone has a thesaurus in their back pocket. It's the Karen of descriptors.
Nice tidbit tip, thank you CP. Looking forward to digging into all your posts as my novel starts brewing and I maintain the confidence to stick with it. Just finished Consider This and have been reading you for 25 years. My biggest problem: how do i write something that doesn't feel like a Chuck knock off.
Ok I think I did the assignment correctly. Here goes... I had a dream about you last night Mr. Palahniuk. Let me explain. You didn’t do anything humiliating. You were teaching me how to fight. You said “Candice, you’re far too small and old to be going toe-to-toe with anyone besides a 10 year old and even then it will probably be a wash. You need to always carry around one of the large, heavy, glass ashtrays that your mother used to smoke with all day and use that to wail on anyone coming at you.”
Come at me bros.