This past Wednesday, I attended a zoom session in my writing program’s series – Creator Speakers – featuring none other than Fight Club (among many many other works) author Chuck Palahniuk. Not only was he gracious with his time to speak to a bunch of authors in training, but he was gracious in sharing his views on writing as well.
On the topic of writing Fight Club, he said that readers were more in love with the structure of the book than the story he told. The structure read more like a song or a ballad and it created stickiness. As a writer, I definitely want my content to stick in a reader’s mind, so I’ll be taking this advice and running with it as far as I can.
Besides sharing a raunchy story as an example for why he never wants to meet his favorite authors (T;LDR it destroys how you see the characters), he had a lot of insightful comments. I can’t share them all but here are my favorites (my paraphrasing unless in quote marks):
- Emotional authority has more weight now than intellectual authority. With the invention of the internet, anyone can be an authority on a topic they can research or find videos of online. But emotional authority is not something you can claim unless you take the time to listen to the people around you and recognizing when they are sharing secrets. This leads to thoughts like, “I thought it was just me,” which leads to the next point.
- Embrace the commonality we all share. Find interesting stories and lessons from listening and finding commonality with everyone around you. If you do that, you’ll hear “unexpressed yet universal experiences” from everyone. And then use those common experiences as themes in your writing. Not only will it provide a rich and deep character journey, it will also resonate with your readers.
- Don’t write to fix the world. Use it as a model for a new possibility. This one is deep. And really important. If you are sharing your book with people, don’t expect the words to fix the world, or them, but do expect or hope it to be used as a new potentiality, as a new way of looking at things, or as a new solution to a current problem. Really, it boils down to his statement: “finding joy instead of repairing something.”
Thank you, Chuck Palahniuk. Your words really do carry wisdom.
(And sorry about the closed eyes picture. I was technologically challenged that day.)