After writing \Fight Club,"" his debut novel later produced as a major film, Chuck Palahniuk developed a cult following for his visceral, detailed and concise writing style. His following novels (including ""Choke"" and ""Diary"") proved equally disturbing and poignant. In preparation for his Distinguished Lecture Series appearance tonight at Memorial Union, Palahniuk recently spoke with The Daily Cardinal about his upcoming book, his writing style and the general state of modern literature.
The Daily Cardinal: What can we expect during your lecture? Are you planning to read ""Guts"" or anything from your next book ""Haunted?""
Chuck Palahniuk: Actually, I read ""Guts"" when I was here on tour this last summer. So I'm going to be reading a couple things from ""Haunted,"" but I'm also going to be talking about, basically, how people use stories to digest their lives. How we're all addicted-we're compulsive storytellers. About using that human need to craft something larger than just your daydreams.
DC: What kind of themes do you explore in ""Haunted?""
CP: One of the earliest concepts for the book was I wanted to write the kind of stories Edgar Allen Poe would be writing if he were alive right now. We have the freedom to write about anything. Books are hardly a mass medium right now-really nobody reads books. And books are the last really consensual medium where people really experience a book totally alone, and they have to make the effort to go through that book. So books can go places where movies and television and music never could because they rely on reaching a huge audience of non-consensual people. So books have that fantastic freedom to depict things that other forms of mass media couldn't. That was the big challenge-what would Poe be writing about in terms of everyday horrors? Things that are really around us all the time that we don't acknowledge. Another theme that emerged was food. Every writer seems to do one book that centers around food. For years, my friends joked that I'm the best appetite suppressant. Women I know, if they want to lose weight, they eat as many meals as they can with me. Because of what I talk about, it keeps them from wanting to eat ever again. So I thought, why not write a food book that would be designed to help people lose weight? That would always kill your appetite. That's sort of what ""Haunted"" became.
DC: I'd heard it was the kind of book that would do that to your appetite, but that's an interesting initial concept.
CP: Well, food emerged as a very dominant thing in every one of the stories. These are stories that people are telling each other in the context of being trapped and starving to death together. They're trying to kill each others' appetites, as well as explain their backstory. I get a little tired of all these romantic books that use food as this evocative device for conjuring up past relationships, so I wanted to write just the opposite of that kind of book. A book that would use food as an ongoing source of horror.
DC: I've noticed that you've delved into horror fiction as a way to continue your subversive, critical commentary on things in a way that's still acceptable and entertaining. Are you planning to continue doing horror after ""Haunted,"" or are there other genres you want to tackle?
CP: I have an idea for an actual trilogy, a three-part, much longer epic, and if I had to slap that into a genre, I would call it science fiction. It would be more science fiction than anything else, because it would be set in a very near, dystopian future. But that's all in my head right now. I'm still putting it together.
DC: That's definitely another genre that lends itself to doing some stories that disguise what message you're trying to get at.
CP: Exactly, and it's a way that, during times of an immediate threat-I'm thinking of the '50s with communism and during the '40s with fascism-it never really worked very well to address these things head on. It was always much more effective to use a metaphor, whether it was science fiction or it was fantasy. Whether it was ""Animal Farm"" or ""1984,"" the metaphor always worked so much better at addressing the actual problem than addressing the problem head on. It's always much more fun to work, it's much less literal. It makes a story much more timeless.
DC: Do you find it more enjoyable to write some of these later books than it was to write something more straightforward with its message like ""Fight Club"" and ""Survivor?""
CP: You know, I always loved the writing process. That's the biggest challenge-to reinvent it every time so it feels like the first time. It should feel like this fantastic fun adventure, otherwise I wouldn't do it. I'd just cash it in and start teaching at this point. So it still is just as much fun. It really has to be fun for me or it's a waste of my time.
DC: Two of your last books have been non-fiction-""Fugitives & Refugees"" and ""Stranger Than Fiction"". Do you find that an interesting diversion from fiction, or equally interesting? Do you want to return to doing non-fiction at times?
CP: Most of my fiction starts as non-fiction. There is very little in any of my novels that I actually invented or made up. Almost all of it started as something I heard from people. In a way, ""Haunted"" is sort of this Hans Christen Anderson collection of true stories, folk stories and urban legends I've been hearing from people everywhere. When I write non-fiction, it's basically taking that core, original material and presenting it as itself rather than crafting it into a larger narrative, forcing it to serve a purpose in a novel. Also, my style is almost as much an essay style as it is a prose fictional style. I borrow a lot from essay writers. So writing essays is not that much different from writing fiction either. When I'm writing fiction, I feel like I have to put all the pieces together. But when I'm writing non-fiction I just have to pay attention and be ready for whatever does present itself.
DC: You've talked in the past about everyone wanting this global media. Now we've got the Internet, we've got television and film, these globalized media, and you've said it's almost one of those situations where you want something and when you get it, you think ""What the hell did we do?"" Do you think there's going to be an underground explosion of literature as a reaction?
CP: I think that there will be, and it's not just my opinion. The Wall Street Journal had done some pieces a couple years ago about how the new status object, the new status pastime for younger generations had become reading, being seen with certain books-and writing, because readers eventually become writers. So I have to wonder if writing isn't going to be the next MTV, the next popular media for the next generation, if we're going to see this explosion in short stories and in novels eventually. It's been a neglected little wasteland. So few people read and pay attention to books, and yet books are really a fantastic gateway for people to get a vision of the world. Books require so little capital to create and distribute, so I have to think books are due for a big comeback.
DC: How difficult is it for newer writers to get into the publishing industry? Do you think this explosion might also take place over the Internet as well? It seems like a medium with a lot of potential for writing experimentation and growth.
CP: I think the Internet is a really good training ground, but it hasn't demonstrated itself as a profit-making medium. I think writers will want some return for their investment other than just the joy of writing. I think it's a great launching place and a great workshopping place. But in a way, I almost see performance being more important than the Internet. Starting with slam poetry and this human need to tell your story in a very public way. That group dynamic, you just don't have that on the Internet.
DC: As you went around reading ""Guts,"" how surprised were you at the visceral reaction people had? Do you attribute that partially to the oral performance aspect?
CP: I think it was a combination of things, like the size of the crowd. Crowds where people were tightly packed together and the room was warm. And then the fact that the story was funny at the beginning. People were really disarmed by that funny, dark humor. They were very relaxed and very receptive once the story starts to get dark. At that point, they can't escape. They're trapped by circumstance and they're hearing something they're not ready to hear because they're so relaxed and open from laughing the moment before. That transition is really what does it.
DC: You've cited Amy Hempel as an influence on your writing style. How did her work specifically influence you?
CP: With Amy Hempel, I saw how a story could be boiled down to the really incredible details. The most important facts, just laundry listed on the page. And that you didn't need a lot of flowery transitional set-up language to carry the reader from one fact or event to the next. That you could do as much in a short story as most writers do in a novel by just not having that plodding, boring, transitional language. Just putting it down and listing it out like Hempel and allowing the reader to put the story together in their own head. That's the incredible gift from Amy Hempel. She also avoids all sentimentality. She can put things down in such a cold way, like a list of evidence in a court case. The sentimentality has to occur within the reader instead of in the story itself. She doesn't tell you how to feel, you just end up feeling this fantastically strong emotion that hasn't been dictated to you.
DC: After reading your and Hempel's work with such dense, compact prose, I've found reading other pop-fiction authors becomes a struggle. That flowery descriptive prose just becomes boring. Do you find yourself frustrated with the state of pop-literature at the moment?
CP: That was one of the drawbacks of taking Tom Stanbauer's minimalist course when I first started writing. It completely ruined 90% of the books in the world for me. I could no longer go back and enjoy a lot of the writers I used to enjoy. Unless I wanted to fall asleep. Those books were still really good at putting me to sleep at night, but that's not what I want a book for. But what the hell? That's a good tradeoff. I was already bored of that sort of writing, or I never would have ventured into writing myself.
DC: A lot of your books are disjunctive and non-linear. Why is that such a frequent device in your writing? Is that something you're going to continue using? It really forces the reader to follow what's going on at all times.
CP: The non-linear quality, I love that. Gorden Lisch, the inventor of what I call minimalist writing, says that when people tell a story they don't tell it in a linear and polished way, because you wouldn't believe it. When they tell a story loaded with emotion and honesty and feeling, they tell it in a very broken, erstwhile way. So you're trying to mimic that emotion, that honesty or integrity of the spoken true story by writing in that same broken, non-linear way. And also to take advantage of pacing. It's better to start in the middle of the action and risk the lull later by going into flashback. Tell the detail at the moment when you need the release rather than telling the detail just before the action happens to take place. It's using action when you want action and using flashback or description when you need a respite from the action.
DC: It would seem that would take a lot of effort to plot those sections out to get the proper flow, so that your story is peaking in the proper place. How does that affect your writing process?
CP: It's something you do over all the rewrites. The first draft might be entirely action, completely horizontal, plot after plot event that just goes from A to Z and gets you from the beginning to the end. The second rewrite might be where you go in and you put in the flashbacks and the backstory, and your third rewrite might be where you go in and you pace things differently with a third element, whether that's emotion or a different plot revelation or you change the ending. But with every rewrite, you're really slashing and burning the entire book so that the fourth draft is nothing like the first draft. The resulting book is so different that it's kept my interest. Otherwise, I couldn't go back and make small changes with a rewrite. I have to change things in really enormous ways, and I think that's where the plots really get complicated.
DC: Often your books discuss very specific aspects or events both to comment on them and relate them to a central theme (like relating wildlife management and sound pollution to the theme of power in ""Lullabye""). Are these smaller topics things that just happen to be on your mind during the rewrites and make their way in, or do you come to the table with them in mnd from the beginning?
CP: Every book starts with some personal thing in my life that I need to express-something that I need to explore and exhaust my emotional reaction to. In a way, writing that book is my coping mechanism to be with something like my father's murder or a noisy neighbor-something that I cannot fix, but I cannot tolerate either. That's where each book really starts. That's the energy I put into the book. That's my reason for writing the book. I don't think you could arbitrarily say, ""Wow, wouldn't it be great to write a book about ____?"" You have to have a real personal stake in whatever that story is, or nothing's going to keep bringing you back to the page. You'll have no personal issue in the book. Especially when you're writing and you're not getting paid for it, you're doing it in your spare time-you need to be exhausting some personal thing. The book has to be of some service to you, or why bother doing it?
DC: What do your friends think when they show up in your books?
CP: For the most part, my friends just love it. They are so thrilled that I used their dog or their car. The woman who ran the laundry in ""Fight Club"" where Marla steals the clothes? She's a friend of mine and she threatened to sue me for depicting her laundry as a place where you could steal clothes. That was my closest lawsuit. The carrot guy from ""Guts,"" who had that whole carrot misadventure as an adolescent, he is no longer speaking to me because I used his carrot story. Those are the only two casualties.
DC: Are some of those real personal sources of your books from much earlier in your life? Do you find yourself going back to something that tied you up and you would have written about years ago?
CP: They tend to be things that are more immediate, right now in my life rather than childhood things brought forward. They tend to be things I'm dealing with that are crises of the moment. I had a really happy childhood. There's really nothing to tell. I wish I had a great childhood to draw on, but no, I just had a really bland childhood, so that's why I don't write about that.
DC: Do you think that it's a depressing thing that our post-9/11 culture and social climate would make it impossible for a book like ""Survivor"" to be made into a movie? Or do you think it's just a different situation that's going to create this viral form of commentary and entertainment?
CP: No, I think it's totally appropriate. I don't really mourn the loss of the soapbox, anarchist fiction at all. Right now, fiction is going to have to be a little more seductive and charming and funny to get a message out and to get published and to find an audience. I don't see that as a bad thing at all.
DC: Is that going to discourage some writers with great messages from putting them out there?
CP: That's the sort of blessing of the capitalist system. From what I understood, 20th Century Fox was not thrilled about making the ""Fight Club"" movie, but they were terrified that that whole package of talent would walk off and find another studio. And that some studio would make that movie and profit from it. Anywhere that the system realizes there's going to be money made, if that message is well told, that message is probably going to get out.
-Interview conducted by William Temby
