Copyright © 2020 by Chuck Palahniuk
Cover art and design by Tree Abraham
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Grand Central Publishing
Hachette Book Group
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First edition: January 2020
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-1795-0 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-1796-7 (ebook)
E3-20191210-DA-NF-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Introduction
A Postcard from the Tour
Textures
A Postcard from the Tour
Establishing Your Authority
A Postcard from the Tour
A Postcard from the Tour
Tension
A Postcard from the Tour
Process
A Postcard from the Tour
A Couple of Surefire Strategies for Selling Books to Americans
A Postcard from the Tour
So Why Bother?
A Postcard from the Tour
Reading List: Fiction
A Postcard from the Tour
Reading List: Nonfiction
Another Postcard from the Tour
Troubleshooting Your Fiction
A Postcard from the Tour
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Chuck Palahniuk
To Tom Spanbauer with
gratitude and respect
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Author’s Note
This book contains the best advice and stories of many brilliant people. Most are credited, two are not. Those two are Wes Miller, who edited the manuscript for Grand Central; and Scott Allie, who edited the manuscript a year before Wes saw it, and later arranged for the tattoo illustrations. What works here works with their considerable help.
A second helping of my appreciation goes out to Sara Reinhart for helping manage the illustrations, and to the artist Toby Linwood at Tattoo 34 in Portland. Don’t just get inked, get Toby.
Introduction
For most of my life I haven’t balanced my checkbook. The result was too depressing, to find out how little money I’d saved. What little the years of my life had amounted to.
So long as my checks cleared, I’d no interest in figuring down to the penny how poor I always was. For the same reason, I’ve put off writing a book on writing. I didn’t want to be faced with how little I could offer on the subject. How stupid I remained after all this time and practice.
My education consists of a kitchen-table MFA, earned sitting around Andrea Carlisle’s kitchen, then Tom Spanbauer’s kitchen, then Suzy Vitello’s and Chelsea Cain’s. My program began in 1988 and continues to this day. There’s no graduation ceremony and no diploma.
The first writing workshop I joined was Andrea’s, and it consisted of nice people. After a couple of years Andrea took me aside. That week I’d submitted a scene depicting a young man who struggled to complete sex with a slowly deflating sex doll. A scene I’d eventually use in my novel Snuff, fifteen years later. On behalf of the other writers Andrea told me I wasn’t a good fit for the group. Due to my fiction, no one felt safe around me. As consolation she suggested I study with another writer, Tom Spanbauer. He’d recently moved to Portland from New York.
Tom. Tom’s workshop was different. We met in a condemned house he’d bought with plans for renovation. We felt like outlaws just by violating the yellow UNSAFE DO NOT ENTER notice stapled to the door. The previous owner had been a recluse who’d lined the interior with sheets of clear plastic and kept the air constantly warm and misted so he could grow a vast collection of orchids. The house had rotted from the inside out, leaving only a few floorboards that could still support a person’s weight. The writer Monica Drake recalls the first time she arrived for a class there and found that all the porches had collapsed. She wandered around the outside, stumped as to how to reach any of the doors that hung high above the junky, overgrown yard. For Monica that impossible leap over broken glass and rusted nails has always stood for the challenge of becoming a professional writer.
About the yard, Tom told us that cutting the blackberry canes and carting away the heaps of garbage would bond us as a team. It wasn’t enough to arrive with manuscripts for review. We should also spend our weekends digging up the jagged soup cans and dead cats and carting all of these to a landfill. What did we know? As twenty-somethings we played along, and Tom made us soggy tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. His actual workshop sessions were more conventional, but just slightly. If we found ourselves stuck creatively he might break out the I Ching coins or refer us to his favorite psychic in Seattle. He brought in writers, among them Peter Christopher and Karen Karbo, who could teach us what he could not. What took place was less a class than it was a dialogue. And that’s what I’d like this book to be: a dialogue. This isn’t just me telling you this. To give credit where it’s due, this is my teachers and their teachers’ teachers, going back to the caveman days. These are lessons that daisy-chain into the past and the future. They should be organized and curated, by me or by someone.
Still, I’m torn.
One factor pushing me to write this book is a memory of The Worst Writing Workshop Ever. It was taught by a West Coast editor who solicits students by mail. His glossy pamphlets
