My answer to people wanting my name on an arm or leg. No more tattoos. In Ann Arbor one man hiked up his pant leg to show me my signature carved into his leg with an X-Acto knife, but he was nice enough, not the maniac you might expect.
Every tour a well-oiled machine. Every tour another shipping container from China. In each city, “Since you’ve given us such a big hand…”
Until Miami one year where the book event was held on a waterfront stage owned by the Shake-A-Leg Foundation. Not that I knew that. How could I know? Not until I was introduced to the foundation’s founder, after I’d thrown hundreds of severed legs into the crowd, and the founder turned out to be a handsome man, Harry Horgan, who’d been paralyzed in a car accident. Shake-A-Leg being his way to help others in similar circumstances. What could I do except apologize?
No offense intended. None taken.
Disaster averted. I get a lot of practice apologizing.
That, the only mishap east of the Mississippi. The west side, another story. All my western tour stops were scheduled, by chance, just one day after another writer, a man named Aron Ralston. Despite my labels DO NOT OPEN BEFORE PALAHNIUK BOOK EVENT, most stores were curious and opened the boxes early. Such a stack of mysterious, smelly boxes. They found all the severed arms and thought, This is the most distasteful book promotion we’ve ever seen.
And still not reading my labels, the booksellers went to Aron when he arrived and told him, “You’ll be happy to know your severed arms arrived safely.” Aron Ralston, the author of Between a Rock and a Hard Place, the book made into the James Franco film 127 Hours. Yes, that Aron Ralston. The man who was compelled to cut off his own arm while hiking. Who then had to politely tell the bookstore staff that they should read the boxes, and that the arms were for Chuck Palahniuk appearing the next night.
No shit, because in so many stores people had made this same assumption. And then the bookstore people somehow assuming I’d known my events would follow Aron’s and that I was a deranged joker who’d methodically plotted to harass this other author, just out of my sick sense of humor.
When really, I’d been doing this for a few years. Simply to try and humorously dissuade some people from getting a tattoo. I’m really not a tactless dick, but maybe I ought to start to think more things through.
Tension
In real life writers are lousy at dealing with tension. We avoid conflict. We’re writers because we like to deal with things from a distance. But writing still gives us a way to dabble. We create the tension. We manage it, and we resolve it. As writers we get to be the bully. If someone gets cancer, we caused it. Our job is to challenge and confront the reader, but we can’t do any of that if we’re so tension-averse that we can’t create suspense and conflict.
As Ira Levin saw it, “Great problems, not clever solutions, make great fiction.”
Ira Levin
This means being able to tolerate the incomplete thing. Whether it’s the unfinished first draft or the events confronting the characters. In regard to the unfinished draft, Tom Spanbauer used to say, “The longer you can be with the unresolved thing, the more beautifully it will resolve itself.”
In regard to tormenting your characters, this is tougher than it sounds for many writers. Writers who come from a background of abuse or insecurity might never get the plot off the ground. I’ve seen a lot of characters drink soothing tea while petting a cat and gazing out a window at the rain. And I’ve seen just as many characters exchange tennis-match quips that never rise above being clever. It takes some practice to create, sustain, and increase chaos, and trust that you can also resolve it.
Consider how the traditional burlesque show alternates strippers with comedians. Sex builds tension. Laughter cuts it. So such a program will keep the audience happy by first arousing people, then exhausting them with the release of laughter. Likewise, girlie magazines are famous for their formula of mixing nude photos with raunchy cartoons. Once more, one element creates tension. The other lessens it.
If you were my student I’d tell you I understand your unease with tension. But writing fiction allows you to experience escalating conflict, controlled by you. Writing fiction will help you deal with tension and conflict in your real life. Tension: The Vertical versus the Horizontal in a Story
It was a television commercial for Skipper’s Seafood that broke the logjam for me.
In workshop Tom Spanbauer would always lecture about the horizontal and the vertical of a story. The horizontal refers to the sequence of plot points: The Woodhouse couple moves into a new apartment, Rosemary meets a neighbor, the neighbor jumps from a window one night…etc. The vertical refers to the increase in emotional, physical, and psychological tension over the course of the story. As the plot progresses so should the tension ramp up. Minus the vertical, a story devolves to “and then, and then, and then.”
One way that Minimalist writing creates the vertical effectively is by limiting the elements within a story. Introducing an element, say a new character or setting, requires descriptive language. Passive language. So by introducing limited elements, and doing so early, the Minimalist writer is free to aggressively move the plot forward. And the limited number of elements—characters, objects, settings—accrue meaning and importance as they’re used repeatedly.
Tom used an analogy taught to him by his instructor, Gordon Lish. Tom called the themes of a story “the horses.” He’d ask a student, “What are the horses of this?” In his analogy, if you were migrating from Wisconsin to California in a covered wagon, you’d arrive at Stockton with
