Try This On: Build Your Chant

"It Creates a Sense of Urgency"

Two Very Different Effects to Try

Let’s talk about what I’ll call Pointillism versus Filibuster stories. We’ll touch more on the former soon, but in a nutshell I think of Pointillist stories as ones like Amy Hempel’s The Harvest or Tumble Home. Think of Pointillist paintings. These stories consist of brilliant points of time and/or detail, usually set apart from each other by a space break. Each point of detail is an exact piece of evidence being established in court. On the page, they appear more like the stanzas of a poem than like prose. In a way, the Pointillist story is a synthesis of poetry and prose.¹

My original story Fight Club was such a Pointillist story, but I set the moments apart by inserting bland “rules” between the detailed “points.” The book I launch this coming October, Shock Induction, is also Pointillist, but uses a repeating graphic device in lieu of white space between the short passages.

As for similar graphic devices to separate sections of prose, Richard Bach did it in Illusions. That novel uses fake fingerprints of grease as “artifacts” on the page, to suggest a smudged, hand-written journal. A great nonfiction gimmick.

To me, that open space break mimics a synapse firing in my mind. Or, the space break acts as the moment of “rest” in music. Or like the wall of blank space between paintings in a gallery. Such rests control the pace of the story, and ensure the reader isn’t overloaded by too much too soon. Attribution in dialog (he said, she said) provides that same bland resting place. Thus attribution allows the writer to control the delivery of the dialog in the reader’s mind.

The Pointillist story cuts the details together like a collage. Little bits or longer bits, but elements are strung together like beads for best effect. The Pointillist story works like web surfing or channel surfing: Distinct details that abut each other. The reader is allowed to recognize their relationship to one another. Like the way film is cut.²

But as I said, more on Pointillism later. For now let’s look at the Filibuster.

A big brown bug bit a big brown bear

Call it a “comic tirade” or a “run-on” story, but you’ve seen it often. Think of the Filibuster as the cousin of the Authority Speech. A Filibuster is pure pent-up emotion that spills out in a rush, venting itself at full speed. This isn’t the best example; it’s from the BBC series Abfab, but a good comic tirade explodes.

This is a better example, but the tirade doesn’t start until 4:28. If anyone can find the Edina speech about “making bloody corn-husk bloody dollies” that’s a great comic tirade. Even when a tirade is triggered by anger, it’s still somewhat comic because it’s a relief from tension. If your tirade can be heart-felt and have a moment of funny, I doff my hat to you.

Just for clarity, a Filibuster story/speech vents emotion. In contrast, an Authority speech gives a seemingly vacuous character a sudden power and authority. An Authority speech shifts the power in a scene.

In a Filibuster speech/story, the action or passion carries the speech. It need not be rational because it’s unrelenting emotional release.

Which Brings Us to Auction Calls

Remember, “action carries its own authority.” If something moves, we will watch it.

Verbs fly under the radar and leave no room (or little) for the audience to wonder “Why does Jude Law’s (7:13) garbage disposal have a switch on the Inside?” Or, “Why can’t Jack Torrance just push his way out of the hedge maze? It’s just bushes!” Point is, forward momentum forces the audience to keep up. The need to pay close attention shuts off the questioning mind.

Few things seize attention better than an auctioneer’s call.³ An auctioneer is mesmerizing. Note how the auctioneer’s hands move at 2:20. Before the 1930s the practice of oratory gesture had fallen out of fashion. One element that helped bring Hitler to power is that he resurrected using antiquated hand gestures to underscore his words. Such gestures — like those of an orchestra conductor — might seem hokey, but they help create the spell. And yes, they do look like gangs throwing signals. A language of gesture atop the spoken language.

And like song, the auctioneer’s chant is a distortion of language. It’s intense, but check out the duet at 3:15. Watch the gestures, too. “His lullaby was the auction chant.”

For a moment you’re rewiring the reader’s brain. You’re teaching the reader how to read afresh. Pure joy.

Whether it’s high-culture or low-culture, an auction chant is storytelling. As such, it’s hypnosis. A good storyteller, like a good film editor, knows when to cut. And knows when to hold a shot for a few moments. That holding, call it pacing, call it stalling, calling it milking the moment, auctioneers hold the tension by using “filler words.”

Note here that many of the filler words are in the imperative mood, rhetorical questions like:

• Do I hear fifty?

• Who’ll give me fifty-five?

• Do I have sixty?

As such, they hypnotize with second-person language. Just like the favorite hypnosis scripts, “You are getting sleepy. You are feeling very, very sleepy…” Or, as you’ve seen so often, “You unlock this door with the key of imagination…” Note how the theme music written in a minor key sounds distracting in a similar way to the auctioneer’s voice. From Slate, regarding the Twilight Zone music:

Sometime during the summer of 1960, faced with a pile of unusable music, Gluskin had the idea of Frankensteining together a theme from the stock music cues. He took two discordant pieces Constant had written, originally entitled “Milieu No. 2” and “Étrange No. 3,” spliced them together, and made television history on the cheap. Here’s the first time Constant’s theme for The Twilight Zone appeared, from the second season premiere, “King 9 Will Not Return.”

“Frankensteining together”? That sounds an awful lot like Pointillism.

And to my mind, the filler words seem to act like the Sha-na-na and La-la-la parts of songs. In a way, like the bland space breaks in Pointillism, but also like the fill words in an auctioneer’s chant.

So, Chuck, How Do We Do That In Fiction?

In songs, it strikes me that lyrics like La la, la and Sha-na-na are the filler words that keep the beat but don’t forward the “plot” or story of the song. Sure, in music the beat fills the space between lyrics, but what would be the filler words in prose?

My go-to is “unlikely conjunctions.” Imagine how a small child tells a story. “And then we went to the zoo, and then we saw the tiger, after the tiger we had ice cream except I dropped my cone…” Kids rush. Kids — especially from big families, or just neglected kids — fear being interrupted and losing the spotlight. So listen to how a kid uses unlikely words as a way to shift between moments or topics. In my story Loser, I used “except” and “but” and “only” as the unlikely mid-sentence shifts. For example, “The car is a red Nissan, except it’s really green, only Liam said it was a Ford.”⁴

Again, chatty kid-speak. And the unlikely conjunctions act as the repeating device or filler words that keep carrying the audience forward. The unlikely conjunctions build your chant.

Again, every story is an experiment. To write the story The Facts of Life I used “even when” and “even if” and “even so” and “even then” and “even though” as the shift — or buffer, or sorbet — to link more important moments. Picture an impossibly long movie take — check out the long “Tricycle Take” from The Shining. But how to create the constant tension of a long take in prose? Again, action carries authority. Filler words keep the tension up. Rhythm captives us.⁵

In the short story The Facts of Life I wanted to mimic the botched “birds-and-the-bees” speeches that my friends recounted from their childhoods. What follows is less than one sentence:

He said how, when they’re only high schoolers, sometimes the only place to be alone is in a car, even if it’s a Dodge Dart with sticky duct tape covering the rips in the vinyl upholstery, and even then they need to buy tickets to a drive-in movie – something almost impossible to explain to a kid these days, except to say it’s like a television set so big it could cover one whole side of the building where daddy works – even if the movie playing that week is “The Getaway” starring Sally Struthers which is almost beside the point because the only reason mommies and daddies go to drive-in theaters is to be alone, and when they’re in high school, the urge to be alone together and kiss and touch and torch a little weed and wrestle around like two freshly skinned porn stars on a bed of hot salt, well mommies and daddies in that situation would buy tickets to watch paint dry if it guaranteed them a couple hours of being out-from-under everyone’s thumb, even if what they have is a real, true eternal love that older mommies and daddies have forgotten is even possible, even then a Dodge Dart isn’t the best set of hook-up wheels because some dipshit previous owner had replaced the front bench seat with two bucket seats, and the back seat offers only room enough to do it front-to-back, pitcher-catcher-style, laying on their sides, not the best of positions because the mommy says it always, always puts too much air inside her, even now Troy’s dad is watching the road and not seeing his kid’s reaction, even when he says pitcher-catcher is the mommy’s only position because if she tried cowgirl even once she’d be sitting up, bobbing up and down for everyone to see, her tits and hair flopping until the whole drive-in would flash on their headlights, high-low, high-low, and honk and yell rodeo giddy-ups until the story would be all over school, even then this daddy at the drive-in nominates they try a little sixty-nine to get the party started even as he’s describing them stripping off their clothes and wrestling around the backseat, even then his little boy, Troy, asks what this has to do with where babies come from even if his dad has reached the moment where the mommy takes the daddy’s danger zone between two fingers of one hand like she’s picking up used trash off the floor of a public bathroom and she says he’s not smelling as fresh as she’d like and she’s having second thoughts even after he’s explained and explained about how clean he is and the nature of foreskin, even so she’s not buying it even when he throws out his old argument about “what makes it only genital mutilation when it happens to girls?” even then she’s frosting over even when he says, “Genital mutilation is genital mutilation no matter how you slice it,” even that doesn’t make her laugh even when he winks to indicate he’s just kidding, even then she’s dug in her heels regarding the possibility of coping his junk so he climbs his top half into the front seat and pops open the glove compartment and digs around the old road maps even if that means explaining a roadmap to his kid, a generation of kids who have GPS everything so they’ll never know the origami nightmare of trying to refold some old paper at night in the wind, even then he’s searching for a condom and something, anything, to cover the smell, even if that smell is nothing but the way a healthy pre-mutilated danger zone is supposed to smell, even then all the daddy can locate is a big bottle of hand sanitizer leftover from the last winter panic about Asian bird flu, and even though that was a decade before the kid was born, his boy wants to go off on a tangent about what-was-bird-flu? and what’s-a-bucket-seat? even if none of that matters in the big picture, even now he’s explaining how this daddy shows the hand sanitizer to the mommy in the backseat covered with duct tape and he offers to sanitizer his entire danger zone if that will make her happy, even her frosty heart can’t not melt when exposed to that big of a romantic gesture, even then he’s worried this is going to hurt because the bottle says it’s a big percent alcohol, even if his danger zone is aching with a need so bad it overrides his common sense so he squeezes out a jumbo handful of this clear, cold, slimy gel and uses it to jack his danger zone, and even with almost a hundred germicidal ingredients listed on the label, not counting a trace amount of aloe vera, even then it doesn’t hurt as much as he’d imagined, not as much as his zone is already aching, as if he might die from an impacted sperm, like a wisdom tooth but between his skinny teenage legs, the pain’s not so much that his danger zone changes its mind even when the mommy still won’t give him throat, even then his danger zone is still as rock hard as the nose on his face even when he face plants dead center in mommy’s danger zone and goes to town, playing this game they used to call “Flipper” which is based on a TV show so old that even Nickelodeon won’t touch it, even then this mommy won’t put her lips to work because now she’s worried about being poisoned by chemical compounds, even then, instead of giving up, the daddy stays face down, holding his breath, playing “Flipper,” treading her water with his tongue because he knows if she’s hot enough she’ll agree to anything, even now Troy’s dad…

Granted, it’s a chore to read on the page, but out loud… Read aloud, this story rocked. If you don’t have a story that works out loud, your book tour or open-mike night is going to feel like torture. So, keep the camera moving with a series of unlikely conjunctions.

About Auction Chants and Hypnosis, This from Scott Duvall at PXD Hypnosis:

Listening to an auctioneer's chant, a fast-paced, rhythmic repetition of numbers and filler words, engages the human brain and mind in several complex ways. This experience can be analyzed from both cognitive and psychological perspectives.

 Cognitive Engagement

1. Attention and Focus: The rapid pace and rhythmic nature of the auction chant can capture and hold listeners' attention. The brain must process information quickly to follow the changing bids and decide on action.

2. Auditory Processing: The chant requires listeners to engage in selective auditory processing, distinguishing between relevant numerical information and filler words. This skill involves the temporal lobe, which is crucial for processing sounds and language.

3. Working Memory: Keeping track of the current and next bid amounts demands the use of working memory. The prefrontal cortex plays a key role here, updating and holding information momentarily for decision-making.

4. Language and Numbers Processing: Understanding the chant involves both linguistic and numerical comprehension, engaging areas like the left hemisphere's language centers (Broca's and Wernicke's areas) and the intraparietal sulcus for numerical cognition.

Psychological Effects

1. Excitement and Arousal: The fast pace and competitive environment of auctions can increase physiological arousal and excitement. This is mediated by the brain's reward system, particularly through the release of dopamine, which enhances motivation and pleasure.

2. Decision-Making Under Pressure: The urgency created by the chant's tempo pressures listeners to make quick decisions. This activates the prefrontal cortex for decision-making, alongside the amygdala, which processes emotions that can influence decisions.

3. Social and Competitive Dynamics: Being part of an auction and reacting to the chant can stimulate the brain's social cognition networks, including areas involved in theory of mind (understanding others' thoughts and intentions). The competitive aspect may also activate the striatum, related to reward processing in social contexts.

4. Stress Response: For some, the fast-paced decision-making and fear of losing can trigger a stress response, releasing cortisol. This can affect cognitive functions temporarily, impacting judgment and memory.

The auction chant creates a unique listening experience that engages multiple cognitive and psychological processes. It requires attention, quick auditory processing, and working memory, while also evoking excitement, competitive instincts, and sometimes stress. This blend of engagement can make auctions mentally stimulating but also demanding, showcasing the complexity of human cognition and emotion in response to rapid, rhythmic auditory stimuli.

If you can find a conceit for stringing together language, working the words until they break down — bravo. Forty years ago, a friend told me about seeing Anne Bancroft live in a comedy review in New York. In the skit, she lay on an analyst’s couch and recounted a dream. In the dream she was hosting a party, and as people arrived she had to introduce them. For example, Pia Zadora and Mia Farrow. Thus, she had to recite longer and longer strings of what sounded like nonsense. “Pia, please meet Mia, Zazu, Zoey, Dizzy, Desi…” Per my friend, Bancroft could rattle off the endless names with incredible energy and speed. Years after the fact, she confessed that all the names were printed on a huge poster and mounted to the ceiling. In the skit, she had to lie on the couch so she’d be gazing upward — at the poster on the ceiling.

Bancroft could seemingly recite the longer and longer list of names with the speed of an auctioneer, driving the audience to roars of approval. The language broke down until she sounded as if she were speaking in tongue. Breathless, the scene ended with her telling the analyst, “And then, who should enter the party but YOU Dr. Finklestein!”

The skit was brilliant. If anyone can find a taped copy, please let me know. The person who told me the story did so in 1981, 82? but such brilliance sticks in the memory. The tirade. The auctioneer’s chant. Such intense things transcend Jewish or British or Hillbilly worlds and unite everyone who hears them.

In summary:

The Pointillist story — exact details or moments strung together

The Filibuster story — details linked together in a rush by strong emotion

The Authority Speech — seizing authority by demonstrating a depth of knowledge ⁶

In closing, listen to how auctioneers create, manipulate and resolve tension. Listen to how kids string together details and events. Listen to how music uses nonsense filler words to carry to us forward, so la-la-la-la-la.⁷ Every story is an experiment.

1. Hempel has told me that after her car was smashed by a San Francisco bus and she was in a long coma she emerged writing in this strange, perfect, intuitive style. After I was beaten unconscious by a gang of teenagers in 1994, I wrote the Fight Club story in my own, similar Hempel style. Coincidence?

2. But, golly, there has to be a plot. Please don’t write Modernist nonsense that forces the reader to determine everything. Please.

3. As a kid I went to calf auctions each spring. My grandparents would buy “two-day-old” calves from dairy farmers to raise as beef steers. Between auctions and demolition derbies, my writerly tastes were formed. No going back to Charles Dickens at that point.

4. As the storyteller, all I’m doing is establishing the car, then stepping on it twice to keep the car in the reader’s mind.

5. Again, a hypnotic trance can be induced with rhythm, repetition and novelty.

6. In the most quiet bar anywhere, ever. What Boston is this? Nic?

7. The classic song from which “More cowbell emerged.” What repeated word will become your cow bell?