Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altiger Show. Chuck Palahniuk is one of my all time favorite writers. We dive deep into the writing process. Here he is. At one point, you say, my point is, how can I ask you to trust me on this when I don't even trust myself? What exactly did you mean by that? Did you call into question the story's truth, and we have to wonder about that? You know, that is a place where I'm saying, I'm not gonna hit you over the head with this. I'm gonna leave it up to you. It's almost kind of a paper tiger. I'm saying, you I'm gonna make this enormous case, present you with this enormous sort of body of evidence, but, ultimately, you're the one that makes a decision. And so it it, it allows the reader almost a token, independence. Joan Didion does this really well. She is so beautiful at kind of stating a case, but then, ultimately, she, you know, acknowledges that that this the reader who has to make the the final judgment. And it's like you would do with a jury. You you might ask them to make a certain verdict, but you cannot tell them to make that verdict. Yeah. It is it's kind of a an elegant way of acquiescing to their you know, acknowledging their independence. Yeah. It's interesting. You with the Joan Didion example, it reminds me of the story I I'm pretty sure it was in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, that collection of essays where I forget the exact scene. You'll you'll probably remember where she's observing something that's really horrific about a young girl. Mhmm. And she's not personally reacting in the essay, and that was almost a later criticism of her. Like, why doesn't she get involved? And, again, I I think what you're, like, what you're saying is these stories are not just about the story. They're really also about what's going on with the writer. But the reader, when they're reading it, it's about what's going on with them. It's not even about the writer. They have to view it with their own eyes and come to their own conclusions. Like, have you ever written something where, people just did not like what you wrote? Not the style or not the quality of it, but they just hated you for saying something and wanted you to know. Oh, that's that's a little part of everything. There were lines in Fight Club that were so incendiary that that people were just furious about them, and they're still in the lines that people go to to kind of, you know, deride the book. There was one line in fight club just and I thought it was innocuous. It was describing the kind of guys you would see in fight club, and the line was, the men you see in fight club were the generation raised by women or something like that to some extent. And every single mother, I think, in America jumped on that line and hated the book just because of that one line or hated the movie because of that one line. I think that was the rose Rosie O'Donnell case, you know, that she she was your former neighbor, wasn't she? You you live in the same building. No. I don't know. Actually, Joan Didion was a former neighbor, but I and Joseph Heller. But I don't know about Rosie O'Donnell, actually. Nora Ephron had lived in that movie. Nora Ephron. Yeah. Yeah. Nora Ephron also. Rosie O'Donnell, the week before the movie came out, she went on air and she gave the entire plot. She spoiled the entire movie and she advocated that people should not go to this movie because she told the twist. She told everything that was gonna happen. And she's just you know, she was very pissed off by that line. So I try to have at least one of those lines in everything, a line that will really, really be a a step too far. Because I come from the punk generation, where unless you take that step too far that you're really uncomfortable with, then you're later gonna regret when you get to be 59 years old. You're gonna think, why the hell didn't I go there when I was 32? Why was I holding back? Why was I such a chicken s**t? And so there's gotta be that step too far, that line that really ticks people off, or I will beat myself up for the rest of my life. And it's it's not just a line constructed to piss people off. It's it's it's an inner it's a truth for you. It's what you felt when writing that or or always feel. And but you know it's you have that feeling. It's a little over the edge that some people are gonna react to this. And then when they do react to it, like, with Rosie O'Donnell in that example, like, that she's putting her hand in your pocket and taking money out of it potentially. You don't you don't know. It's a week before the movie comes out. So what was your personal reaction? Like, how did you deal with that? You know, at the time, I wasn't even aware of it. I think 20th Century Fox was much more invested in than I was, so they were probably livid about it. And to tell the truth, I live such a unlikely life. I'm surprised that anything of mine ever gets published. And so it's really easy for me to put these things in there because I never really see them. I never really perceived them as ever reaching an audience. So, again, it's gotta surprise or offend me first, because I don't expect it to reach anybody else. You know, it reminds me too that you're you have certainly an absurdist quality to all of your writing and and and this one as well where you get the sense by the end I I can mention the name of the the first story you you you write about is this woman, Susie, who's, writes captions for, you know, celebrity gardens photos of celebrity gardens. And there's a sadness to the story by the end, and and I I would describe this with a with a lot of your writing is that you get this sense that the past is meaningful and meaningless at the same time. It's meaningful to these people because this is what they spend their lives doing. It's meaningful to find out what how Ted adjacent you are compared to another person because that's how you it's a bonding thing that that's how these people the small talk of these people get to know each other in a in a weird way. But on the other hand, it's completely meaningless. Like, it has no real meet it's not important how many blocks away their family lived from Ted Bundy. And and out of the you have to construct the reader, the writer, the characters kinda have to construct their own meaning from it, and that's fine, but you're not going to attribute a meaning to it. Like, again, I'm I'm wondering how conscious is the absurdism in the in the very philosophical sense of absurdism. The story starts by saying, we're gonna talk about stories, writing stories, and the story ends with creating something from words. So it begins and ends with that kind of hat tip to the fact that this is just symbols on paper, that this is just a string of sort of nonsense, of some things written down that ultimately don't make any sense whatsoever, that that they're just things that evoke a reaction. They're not real things. They don't exist. That none of this exists. And I think in a way, it is that that makes it even more tragic that everything that's depicted inside the story has passed, because it's saying, ultimately, everything will pa*s. And it's that acknowledgment of, you know, romantic fatalism. Yeah. And and, you know, it's funny. Like, Albert Camus who who wrote about absurdism and and his novels are you he sort of defined it to some extent. And he he does always say, you know, even though nothing has meaning and I'm paraphrasing him. Even though maybe everything's meaningless, at the end of the day, choose love. And you get that sense that you love these characters. And and and but you just brought up a really fascinating point that I didn't realize until you said it. The last few paragraphs there or or, you know, the last paragraph really is very different from how you begin the the story, the essay. You begin in the like you said, and it's very kinda like, I'm gonna tell stories. This is gonna be kind of my advice. So you get this sense, oh, is he writing an advice for writing or how to on writing book? And then at the and it's very direct and super minimalist. And then at the end, you're right. It's like and I didn't think you consciously did this. You write it it's very beautifully worded. You're you're you you became a a a kind of traditional literary author at the at the end. If I'm I don't know if I'm if I'm describing with the right phrase. Maybe that's not how you think of it, but was that intentional? Like, you like, you you just sort of suggested it was. You know, the first person that I sent the essay to was Amy Hempel because she had her her stories. That story, her sort of signature story in the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried. It is absolutely gorgeous. It is memoir. It's fictionalized memoir, and it has the through line of the gorilla that's taught sign language. And it comes the last image in the story is that gorilla in this moment of complete heartbreak as the gorilla is is doing a thing that signifies a thing. It's just doing symbols that no longer mean anything. And to tell the truth between you and me, Susie, my friend who wrote the photo captions, she's a reinvention of Amy Hempel's gorilla. No offense to Susie. Wow. That's really interesting. Susie is introduced to play the role of that other, that gorilla that is taught a symbol of of signing, of telling stories with symbols. And then she's revisited in different ways to keep her present on the page like that gorilla is. There's very funny stories in the middle of the Amy Hempel story that revisit the gorilla's progress. And then at the end, the gorilla experiences this enormous, loss that stands in for Amy Hempel's loss because Amy Hempel is not physically present at the death of her best friend. She's left the she's left the hospital. And so to fill in that blank, we get the gorilla again at a moment of similar loss. And it's even more heartbreaking because if we were to see Amy Hempel crying at the end of Amy Hempel's sad story, it would be about Amy Hempel. And instead, when we see this animal suffering in this enormous way at the end of the story, it becomes about us. Yeah. That's interesting. Like, we feel emotions. Like, if she had concluded, and then I cried forever or whatever Right. Right. We wouldn't give a s**t. Right. Exactly. But there was something else in the in the in the Susie story, which is that the gardener said to her, every photo you see is taken before. And, you know, before the divorce of the celebrity cup, whatever celebrity it was, before the death, before the whatever Yeah. And the the some tragedy. And I guess that's the case when you're writing people's places and things, and there's, you know, there's some traumatic point. And these are all your your mom when you were a kid or the gym coach or the, or Susie, whatever. These are all things that are happening to you before some traumatic event, and we only get hints of it in you're right. We see it in Susie's story, perhaps perhaps, I'm saying, at at the end. And, you know, you again, you cannot make the story about you. You have to leave it porous enough that the the reader has a participation, that the reader all the information accumulates in the reader's mind. And so in a way, the reader becomes the smartest person there, and the reader ultimately has to make pass the verdict about what the story is about. And the reader is please. Oh, no. Go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. The reader is going to have to have a way to put their own experience in and relate to the story, and that's why the story is so intercut with different things. Because if you intercut with different elements, it's more likely that one of those elements, the reader's gonna grasp that element, and that's gonna be their way into the story. And you wanna give the reader as many ways as possible to engage with the story. I like that. You wanna give the reader as many ways as possible to engage with the story. So they might like either the individual side stories or characters. They might like the overall story. They might find some deeper meaning in it, like like what you were saying with the Titanic. Oh, this is, like, this is a metaphor for the end of Edwardian culture. So you're giving lots of lots of outs for the reader to say why he or she liked this. What about a story, though, that's very direct? Like, let's say, Harry Potter, where it's like this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, and a 1000000000 people loved it. And, this is gonna sound awful. I've never read a Harry Potter. But I used to love books like that. And I and I loved those books growing up. And so that's not to say that, you know, I didn't really love those books. But since I started to write, I'm looking for something that's less conventional. I'm looking for something that that speaks to a bigger truth than, maybe those kind of books, speak to. Yeah. And I guess I guess you could find you know, Harry Potter is basically about a kid who's lonely. His his step parents don't treat him well, and then he becomes a wizard. And there's there's this aspirational thing, and probably people to some extent relate to, oh, my childhood was difficult, and I wish I could have become wizard. So maybe with aspirational, that's really the deeper the deeper story somehow is that it's still about us, but, you know, we're just not wizards. So we get to read about a kid who did become 1. Well and, also, I always think that those stories, magic stories, superhero stories, they're always about power. And they pretty much always depict an orphan achieving power. Superman is an orphan who comes to Earth and finds his power. And so they appeal to kids because kids are really powerless and also because, you know, kids dread having dread losing their parents. So you show a child their worst case scenario, that they're gonna end up an orphan, but that they're all ultimately gonna find a kind of power. And so I think those stories appeal to people who really have no power, But once later in life, you've achieved an education, you've achieved connections, you've achieved resources, you don't crave for a kind of generalized power in that same way that you did as a child. So those stories no longer really appeal to you. Yeah. It's it's it's so interesting because then you think of, like, all these great novels. Like, let's again, with Albert Camus, the stranger starts off the first line. He becomes an orphan. You know, he's an adult, but his mom dies. And and it's almost a reverse of he doesn't get power after that. He he sort of steadily declines in in power. And it's interesting how once you have that structure and know it, you could play with it to create a unique story. But doesn't the stranger end with him throwing the priest out of the cell? Mhmm. And in a way, on the on the eve of his execution, he finally sheds all of the presuppositions of his entire life. And he has just a few hours of complete enlightenment as he throws the priest out, and he looks at the moon, and he sees the moon for the first time in his entire life, and he realizes, I am finally alive. Mhmm. And he's on the live he's alive right on the cusp of about being killed, but that represents a victory, when you compare it to someone who dies without ever being alive. And so, ultimately, his downfall after his mother's death is is not about losing real things. It's about losing, fake things. That's so it's so interesting. Like, this is so valuable. Anyone listening to this who's a who's a writer or a storyteller of any sort, this is like, now you like, look at Star Wars as an example. Star Wars, he's an orphan in the beginning, or you think he is. And I'm just taking a very direct, simple, basic example that kids love. Of course, by the end, he's in a very direct way, he's fully powerful. And you could knowing again these, not necessarily tricks, but these sort of primal truths about storytelling, I wonder if there's something about storytelling that is primal that's sort of imprinted on our brain so that we respond to stories that, whether we know it or not, have this deeper significance. Like, I didn't re think about that in terms of The Stranger, but you're but I reacted strongly to that novel. I read it, like, 10 times, and, there's something primal that that these stories hit you with. And I think that one of the tricks is if you acknowledge the fact that it's a story upfront like I did with the essay, you're in a way kind of you're getting past that that nagging idea in people's minds that they're reading a story, that you're just sort of staying it up front. You're saying Charles Foster Kane is dead, but we're gonna show him alive. And you are addressing that sort of nagging thing so that you can get to something more profound. You're kind of acknowledging the mechanics of the thing so that people won't be focused on the mechanics of the thing. The way that Brecht, as his plays were performed, I understood that he had people walk through the audience and bang pots and pans to constantly disrupt the kind of trance that a play can be. He wanted people to not be engaged in the kind of illusion that a play is. He wanted people to be looking for the deeper, you know, meaning, where it was going, not just the the sort of surface of it. I love this line. And, again, this is talking about the the World War 2 writers. Each of these writers had outlived his horrors by embracing a new reality where chaos and absurdity were the norm, where loved ones died, but love did not. And I I like that again because it's absurd. The stories they tell are absurd, but you do find this backbone in in love for for whether it's love for the characters or horror about the event, but there's always kinda like this this backbone and which which is the important which ultimately is is the real story. And I'm thinking even, like, take old man in the sea. Right? Who cares about a guy who fishes? But there's a deeper story that readers right away could connect with and which is structured even in the language he uses, which I which I find to be really interesting. Like, structure is so important, and that's what you basically describe in this book. Yeah. And, another sort of Lishian minimalist thing is that, Lish teaches that the readers have reached a point where they don't just accept a story. Maybe children will accept a story. But especially these days, as soon as you say anything to somebody, they say, what was your source? Who told you that? Because the first thing they wanna do is negate it by negating the source. And so Lish said, you have to create this kind of at least false context for the telling of the story, because people will not just accept a story anymore anymore. They know a story has an agenda. They wanna know who's telling the story, why they're telling the story. They wanna know all these things about the story before they wanna hear the story. And so you have to kind of at least in an an illusory way, you have to create all those aspects of the story at the same time that you deliver the story itself. So like you with the exhibits, in this case, those are the things. Because, ultimately, each story is that you write is about you and not the characters. You could imagine a memoir about you that's through the your your reviews of your own books perhaps. You know, like, because each book is telling something new about you. A 1000000 years ago, when they rebooted Vanity Fair Magazine, they hired Truman Capote to do a profile on Greta Garbo, and she was not gonna talk to him. So he worked it out that he could go into her apartment, and he did the entire profile by describing every object that she owned and had on display in her apartment. And it was so fascinating because it was a a look at Greta Garbo that wasn't in words and wasn't in sort of images of Greta Garbo. It was in the the things that she had accumulated, the the the objects they carried. And so in a way, that's just a really interesting approach to take at memoir or biography, is to talk about the stuff in our lives, which was also a kind of thing in in Citizen Kane. All those objects accumulating and ultimately ending with the sled, which was the primary object, was just another example of using the objects as the memoir. Yeah. It's it's it's so fascinating, the role of of structure. And and, you know, people, places, and things, the title. What that what does that come from? That comes from, like, kind of like a first grader learning about writing. Describe, you know, the people, places, and things here, and that's your that's how you write a story. Or what what what specifically does that come from? Because I can't remember. You know, it I just made it up, I thought. It seemed like the most sort of boiled down aspect of what what is this story about. It's not even and things. It's just people comma places comma things. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. People it's interesting. You know, by the way, this is neither here nor there. But when I first the first time I read it, I started by accident on the 2nd page. So the first page has the when you're learning to write, never start with your most important story. So I thought the first page, the first time I read it, started with case in point, A friend named Susie used to write photo captions. And so I thought, okay. This is this is Chuck starting, like, mid mid sentence almost or mid paragraph, and that's, like, an interesting device that it throws the reader right into into this situation that's happening. That'd be very Brett Ellis because he did that in rules of attraction, where it just kind of ellipses into the story and then at the end ellipses out of the book. So there was no really clear beginning or end. I thought that was really smart. Yeah. That's funny. And, again, structure is so important to people don't realize, I think, how important structure is just as important as the words for telling what the story is. And, again, that's what I appreciated so much, not only the stories you tell, but the structure of this, your writing style. I saw having read Consider This, your book about writing, I saw so many different, ideas from that book in the writing of this. It really kind of underlined for me, you know, how how great these books are or essays or whatever. So People Place Us Things, is it only available at scribd right now? Scribd.com? It is. And and they paid for it. And so, I have to, you know, drive as much traffic there as possible so they can make back their investment. Well, I hope they do because I'm an investor in Scribd. So Oh, thank you. Yeah. So everybody go to scribd.com right now and download as many copies as possible. Not only that, I did a scrib, original as well, back in the day. So, knock yourself out, but, Chuck Palaniac, is that did I say it right? James, I can't say your name either. It's it's all good. I'll touch her? It's like, I'll touch her fast. I'll touch her. It's funny because years ago, I met, Michael Chabon, and we were sharing a cab. And he introduced me to his wife, and he said, this is my wife, Ayala. And he said, I've never seen my wife's name, Ayala. And I have never forgotten her name. That was 20 years ago, so I'll touch her. You know, I, I went to grad school, in 1989, which is the year I think that was the year Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, came out. And I was going to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and I just loved that book. And, because I thought I'm going to have an experience in Pittsburgh like this main character. And that book just held, you know, all this mystery for me, and he he became a a a you know, and then I his his next book, I think, was A Model World, a bunch of short stories. Just a very good writer. I've always enjoyed his stuff as well. And then the adventures of cavalier and clay. Model world was Mckinney. I think his second book was wasn't it, boys boys? It was about the performance of the school? Yes. And it was it made it to the Michael Douglas movie. Yeah. Yeah. Something about the name of that was. Wonder Boys. Wonder Boys. Yeah. Wonder Boys. That was a great book too. So but that just brought back that that memory. Well, Chuck, thanks so much. I again, if you wanna read a great story or great advice about writing or I mean, it really is a a a remarkable essay. I've I've read it several times. I've enjoyed it, and it's it's so creative creatively done. And I think it's in just even if you're learning to write or communicate or tell a story, the ideas of of structure and the and the style of this are so interesting. It's it's it's not a long essay. You can read it in one setting. Go to Scribd or scribd. I never know how to say it. Scribd.com. And, Chuck, thanks once again for for coming on the podcast. I really super appreciate it. Thank you, Chuck. Interesting conversation. Yeah. It's it's great. Thank you very much.
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