And then I’d tell you, “Now get off my porch.”
But if you came back to me a third time, I’d say, “Kid…” I’d say, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
A Postcard from the Tour
Bob Maull scared the crap out of me. He stood maybe chest high to most people and had a mop of white-gray hair and a walrus mustache. He owned 23rd Avenue Books in Portland, Oregon, and had founded the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Once you’re published and trying to scratch out a living you’ll find these regional bookseller associations are a great ally. In August 1996 when Fight Club was published in hardcover I signed copies at his shop. He took me aside and said, “Kid…”
I was thirty-four and still working full-time at Freightliner Trucks. On the truck assembly line, where I’d started the swing shift in 1986, vendor reps—from Rockwell, Cummins Diesel, Jacobs Engine Brakes—would bring us doughnuts. To curry goodwill, they’d set out suitcase-size pink boxes packed with Bavarian crème doughnuts, jelly doughnuts, everything filled and covered with jimmies and shredded coconut. A favorite prank among my friends was to insert the nozzle of a grease gun and fill certain doughnuts with axle grease. Then to watch from behind the wire-mesh parts bins and wait for someone to bite into a doctored one. It never got old.
I’d graduated with a degree in journalism in 1986, and so many of my fellow assembly-line workers had the same degree that we used to joke that the University of Oregon School of Journalism ought to teach welding. Line workers who could weld got an extra three-dollar welding differential for every hour on the clock.
After my first book tour I’d given up any dream of escaping that factory. Two people had attended my event at the Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle. In San Francisco, where I was driven two hours to a Barnes & Noble in Livermore, no one attended my reading. For that I’d squandered my annual week’s vacation, and then it was back to Portland and Freightliner Trucks.
At 23rd Avenue Books, Bob said, “If you want to make a career out of this you’ll need to bring out a new book every year. Never go longer than sixteen months without something new because after sixteen months people quit coming in that door and asking me if you have another book yet.”
A book every year, I got it. The die was cast.
Bob knew his business, and being an author is nothing if not a small business. Requiring a license and…everything. The city once contacted me to request an inventory of my existing stock. I explained I was a writer, and my stock was ideas. The city asked if I had any pens or pencils on my desk. Yeah, I told them. They said I needed to count any pens and pencils lying around and file an annual report listing them as current inventory. They weren’t joking. Neither am I. Neither was Bob.
“And another thing,” he cautioned me, “don’t use a lot of commas. People hate sentences with lots of commas. Keep your sentences short. Readers like short sentences.”
Bob retired and moved to Cape Cod, he followed the Red Sox fanatically, and he died.
Twenty-Third Avenue Books closed.
Bless you, Bob Maull. May one of your many, many graves always be inside my head.
Textures
Let’s get started.
Think of a story as a stream of information. At best it’s an ever-changing series of rhythms. Now think of yourself, the writer, as a DJ mixing tracks.
The more music you have to sample from—the more records you have to spin—the more likely you’ll keep your audience dancing. You’ll have more tricks to control the mood. To calm it down to a lull. Then to raise it to a crescendo. But to always keep changing, varying, evolving the stream of information so it seems fresh and immediate and keeps the reader hooked.
If you were my student I’d want you to be aware of the many different “textures” of information at your disposal. These are best defined by the examples that follow.
When telling a story, consider mixing any or all of the following. Textures: The Three Types of Communication
Description: A man walks into a bar.
Instruction: Walk into a bar.
Exclamation (onomatopoeia): Sigh.
Most fiction consists of only description, but good storytelling can mix all three forms. For instance, “A man walks into a bar and orders a margarita. Easy enough. Mix three parts tequila and two parts triple sec with one part lime juice, pour it over ice, and—voilà—that’s a margarita.”
Using all three forms of communication creates a natural, conversational style. Description combined with occasional instruction, and punctuated with sound effects or exclamations: It’s how people talk.
Instruction addresses the reader, breaking the fourth wall. The verbs are active and punchy. “Walk this way.” Or, “Look for the red house near Ocean Avenue.” And they imply useful, factual information—thus building your authority. Look at Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, and how she plants recipes within the story.
In my own short story “Guts,” I lapse into a long passage of instruction: “…go buy a pack of those lambskin condoms. Take one out and unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly. Then try to tear it. Try to pull it in half.” The shift from moment-to-moment description to an instructional aside creates tension because it cuts away from the action for a beat. Then, boom, we’re back in the description of events.
Granted, most of what you ever write will be description, but don’t hesitate to shift to instruction. Likewise, onomatopoeia shouldn’t be limited to the “pow” and “blam” we see in comic books. In my novel Pygmy, every time I needed a mid-sentence beat of something to accentuate the end of the passage…“Trapped all day, then could be next walk to toilet, pow-pow, clot knock out brain.” I get a greater effect at the end of the sentence by interrupting
