Try This: Write Like a Broken Record
The Linear Story is Dead
To those of you who read and enjoyed Collector’s Item, thank you. I’d like to explain a bit about how it — and much of my best stuff — was written in this odd-ball style…
Twenty-five years ago I wanted to invent a writing style that would allow me to present a story that seemed disorganized. With luck it would organize itself only within the reader’s mind. The story would occur in scenes intercut with observations and asides, and all of it would barrel along with the momentum of a punk rock song.1
The short stories I’ll be citing here are:
Fight Club (which became Chapter Six in the novel of the same name)
Loser (from the collection Make Something Up)
The Facts of Life (also from Make Something Up)
Knock-Knock (also from Make Something Up)
Dad All Over (from the collection Bait)
Collector’s Item (posted on this Substack)
First, the cultural precedent…
In the case of Collector’s Item, consider a small passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5. In this scene the narrator watches a war film run backward. The burning cities are swept by squadrons of planes that vacuum the fire into metal cylinders. Those cylinders are transferred to factories to be disassembled, and the explosive chemicals are taken to mines and buried safely. The passage depicts violence with a happy ending. It works beautifully.2
The Martin Amis novel Time’s Arrow also runs backward, the entire book. And several recent horror stories and novels have used VCRs and videotapes that magically record events in the future. Still, I’d yet to see a story that allowed rewinding and fast forwarding so that characters could quickly juxtapose events. Vonnegut jumps us between Billy Pilgrim’s past, his present, and his future by just cutting away at a moment of peril. We see the through-line object begin as a lump in the lining of a coat, then it morphs into a large diamond, then it morphs into the ring Pilgrim gives his new wife.