That’s the reason so many of my books depict a social model, be it the Party Crashing game in Rant or tightly structured movie-set protocol in Snuff. Once you establish your rules and begin to repeat them, they provide the framework in which characters can feel confident. The characters know how to behave. And they’ll begin to relax and reveal themselves.
It was years before I understood why I wrote these social model books. It wasn’t until I’d been introduced to the work of the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. He suggests that people create “liminoid” events as a kind of social experiment. Each is a short-lived society in which people agree to be equals. Communitas, he called it. If the experiment is a success: if it serves people by providing community, fun, stress relief, self-expression, whatever…then it gradually becomes an institution. The best recent example is Burning Man, the festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Another example is Santa Rampage, the gatherings of revelers all dressed as Santa Claus and all going by the name Santa Claus. Both have passed from being spontaneous fringe happenings to becoming beloved traditions.
It’s possible no one is as lonely as writers. Experts have made the case that Ken Kesey based the lunatics in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on the workshop he attended at Stanford. Likewise, Toni Morrison most likely based the plantation in Beloved on her own writing workshop, and Robert Olen Butler based the bus passengers in his novel Mr. Spaceman on his writing workshop.
The linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath has said that a book will only become a classic if it binds together a community of readers. So recognize that reading is a lonely pastime. Don’t shy away from inventing rituals in your story. Invent rules and prayers. Give people roles to play and lines to recite. Include some form of communion and confession, a way for people to tell their stories and find connection with others.
To heighten this ritual effect, consider creating a “template” chapter. Using one existing chapter, change minor details and make it arrive at a fresh epiphany. Chances are the reader won’t realize what you’ve done, but will unconsciously recognize the repeated structure. Use this template to create three chapters placed equal distances apart in the book.
In this world where so many fraternal organizations and religions are disappearing, if you were my student I’d tell you to use ritual and repetition to invent new ones for your readers. Give people a model they can replicate and characters to emulate. Textures: Paraphrasing versus Quoting
Consider that when you put a character’s dialogue in quotes you give the character greater reality. Conversely when you paraphrase someone you distance and diminish them.
For example, paraphrased dialogue: I told them to put the box in the corner.
Versus: I told them, “Put the box in the corner.”
In Fight Club I chose to put everyone’s dialogue in quotes—except for the narrator’s. Even Tyler occurs as more real because his words are quoted. So whenever you want to undermine what’s being said, paraphrase it. If you want to negate or lessen a character, paraphrase what they say.
When you want to showcase a character, put their dialogue in quotation marks. Include attribution. Underscore the speech with a gesture.
It’s a subtle effect, but if you were my student I’d tell you it works.
A Postcard from the Tour
Kim Ricketts told me the Stephen King story. We’d gone to Belltown after an event at the University of Washington bookstore. Over beers, she told me she was branching out, beginning to plan speaker events for corporations like Microsoft and Starbucks. I needed a ride back to my hotel, but Kim was smart and funny, and before the Stephen King story she told me the Al Franken story, which is why the University of Washington now required people attending an author appearance to actually buy the book. Because Al Franken had filled all eight-hundred-plus seats in Kane Hall, and the students had laughed at everything Franken had said. Attendance cost the audience members nothing, but by the end of the night Franken had sold a whopping eight books.
As per the new policy, book purchase would henceforth be required.
To snag a Stephen King event, Kim said she’d had to agree to his standard terms. She’d had to hire bodyguards and find a venue that would hold five thousand people. Each person could bring three items to have autographed by Mr. King. The event would last some eight hours, and someone would have to stand beside the signing table and hold an ice pack to the author’s shoulder for the duration.
The day arrived, and Kim held the ice pack to the shoulder in question. The venue, Town Hall, a deconsecrated church on Capitol Hill, has a jaw-dropping view of downtown Seattle. It was filled with the five thousand mostly young people, all ready to wait hours for their three signatures.
King sat and began to sign autographs. Kim stood holding the ice pack to his pesky shoulder. Not a hundred books into the eventual fifteen thousand, Kim said that King looked up at her and asked, “Can you get me some bandages?”
He showed her his signing hand, how the skin along the thumb and index finger had fossilized into a thick callus from a lifetime of marathon book signings. These calluses are the writer’s equivalent of a wrestler’s cauliflower ear. Thick as the armor on the hide of a stegosaurus, the calluses had begun to crack.
“I’m bleeding on the stock,” King said. He showed fresh blood smudged on his pen and a partial fingerprint of blood on the
