"Palahniuk, Chuck - Stranger Than Fiction {True Stories} v4.0 com" - читать интересную книгу автора (Palahniuk Chuck)

Stranger Than Fiction {True Stories}

Chuck Palahniuk


For Mick and Chick
and Chimp


{Fact and Fiction: An Introduction}
If you havenТt already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.
In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus. No, the dream is a big house, off alone somewhere. A penthouse, like Howard Hughes. Or a mountaintop castle, like William Randolph Hearst. Some lovely isolated nest where you can invite only the rabble you like. An environment you can control, free from conflict and pain. Where you rule.
Whether itТs a ranch in Montana or basement apartment with ten thousand DVDs and high-speed Internet access, it never fails. We get there, and weТre alone. And weТre lonely.
After weТre miserable enough-like the narrator in his Fight Club condo, or the narrator isolated by her own beautiful face in Invisible Monsters-we destroy our lovely nest and force ourselves back into the larger world. In so many ways, thatТs also how you write a novel. You plan and research. You spend time alone, building this lovely world where you control, control, control everything. You let the telephone ring. The emails pile up. You stay in your story world until you destroy it. Then you come back to be with other people.
If your story world sells well enough, you get to go on book tour. Do interviews. Really be with people. A lot of people. People, until youТre sick of people. Until you crave the idea of escaping, getting away to a . . .
To another lovely story world.
And so it goes. Alone. Together. Alone. Together.
Chances are, if youТre reading this, you know this cycle. Reading a book is not a group activity. Not like going to a movie or a concert. This is the lonely end of the spectrum.
Every story in this book is about being with other people. Me being with people. Or people being together.
For the castle builders, itТs about flying a stone flag so grand it attracts people with the same dream.
For the combine-demolition folks, itТs about finding a way to get together, a social structure with rules and goals and roles for people to fill while they rebuild their community by crashing farm equipment.
For Marilyn Manson, itТs about a kid from the Midwest who canТt swim, suddenly moved to Florida, where social life is lived in the ocean. Here, that kid is still trying to connect with people.
These are all nonfiction stories and essays I wrote between novels. In my own cycle, it goes: Fact. Fiction. Fact. Fiction.
The one drawback to writing is the being alone. The writing part. The lonely-garret part. In peopleТs imagination, thatТs the difference between a writer and a journalist. The journalist, the newspaper reporter, is always rushing, hunting, meeting people, digging up facts. Cooking a story. The journalist writes surrounded by people, and always on deadline. Crowded and hurried. Exciting and fun.
The journalist writes to connect you to the larger world. A conduit.
But a writer writer is different. Anybody who writes fiction is-people imagine-alone. Maybe because fiction seems to connect you to only the voice of one other person. Maybe because reading is something we do alone. ItТs a pastime that seems to split us away from others.
The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it.
WhatТs funny is, youТd be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world.
ItТs hard to call any of my novels Уfiction.Ф
Most of the reason I write is because once a week it brought me together with other people. This was in a workshop taught by a published writer-Tom Spanbauer-around his kitchen table on Thursday nights. At the time, most of my friendships were based on proximity: neighbors or coworkers. Those people you know only because, well, youТre stuck sitting next to them every day.
The funniest person I know, Ina Gebert, calls coworkers your Уair family.Ф
The problem with proximity friends is, they move away. They quit or get fired.
It wasnТt until a writing workshop that I discovered the idea of friendships based on a shared passion. Writing. Or theater. Or music. Some shared vision. A mutual quest that would keep you together with other people who valued this vague, intangible skill you valued. These are friendships that outlast jobs and evictions. This steady, regular Thursday-night gabfest was the only incentive to keep me writing during the years when writing didnТt pay a dime. Tom and Suzy and Monica and Steven and Bill and Cory and Rick. We fought and praised each other. And it was enough.
My pet theory about Fight ClubТs success is that the story presented a structure for people to be together. People want to see new ways for connecting. Look at books like How to Make an American Quilt and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and The Joy Luck Club. These are all books that present a structure-making a quilt or playing mah-jongg-that allows people to be together and share their stories. All these books are short stories bound together by a shared activity. Of course, theyТre all womenТs stories. We donТt see a lot of new models for male social interaction. ThereТs sports. Barn raisings. ThatТs about it.
And now thereТs fight clubs. For better or worse.
Before I started writing Fight Club, I worked as a volunteer at a charity hospice. My job was to drive people to appointments and support-group meetings. There, theyТd sit around with other people in a church basement, comparing symptoms and doing New Age exercises. Those meetings were uncomfortable because no matter how I tried to hide, people always assumed I had the disease they had. There was no discreet way to say I was just observing, a tourist waiting to take my charge back to the hospice. So I started telling myself a story about a guy who haunted terminal illness support groups to feel better about his own pointless life.
In so many ways, these places-support groups, twelve-step recovery groups, demolition derbies-theyТve come to serve the role that organized religion used to. We used to go to church to reveal the worst aspects of ourselves, our sins. To tell our stories. To be recognized. To be forgiven. And to be redeemed, accepted back into our community. This ritual was our way to stay connected to people, and to resolve our anxiety before it could take us so far from humanity that we would be lost.
In these places I found the truest stories. In support groups. In hospitals. Anywhere people had nothing left to lose, thatТs where they told the most truth.
While writing Invisible Monsters, IТd call telephone sex numbers and ask people to tell me their dirtiest stories. You can just call and say: УHey, everybody, IТm looking for hot brother-sister incest stories, letТs hear yours!Ф or УTell me about your dirtiest, filthiest cross-dressing fantasy!Ф and youТll be taking notes for hours. Because itТs only sound, itТs like an obscene radio show. Some people are terrible actors, but some will break your heart.
On one call, a kid talked about being blackmailed into having sex with a policeman who threatened to have his parents charged with abuse and neglect. The policeman gave the kid gonorrhea, and the parents he was trying to save . . . they threw him out to live on the street. Telling his story, near the end the kid started to cry. If he was lying, it was a magnificent performance. A tiny one-on-one piece of theater. If it was a story, it was still a great story.
So of course I used it in the book.
The world is made of people telling stories. Look at the stock market. Look at fashion. And any long story, any novel, is just a combination of short stories.
While researching my fourth book, Choke, I sat in on sex-addict talk therapy sessions, twice each week for six months. Wednesday and Friday nights.
In so many ways, these rap sessions werenТt much different than the Thursday-night writersТ workshop I attended. Both groups were just people telling their stories. The sexaholics mightТve been a little less concerned about Уcraft,Ф but they still told their stories of anonymous bathroom sex and prostitutes with enough skill to get a good reaction from their audience. Many of these people had talked in meetings for so many years that hearing them, you heard a great soliloquy. A brilliant actor playing him- or herself. A one-person monologue that showed an instinct for slowly revealing key information, creating dramatic tension, setting up payoffs and completely enrolling the listener.
For Choke, I also sat with AlzheimerТs patients as a volunteer. My role was just to ask them about the old photographs each patient kept in a box in their closet, to try and spur their memory. It was a job the nursing staff didnТt have time to do. And, again, it was about telling stories. One subplot of Choke came together as, day by day, each patient would look at the same photo, but tell a different story about it. One day, the beautiful bare-breasted woman would be their wife. The next day, she was some woman they met in Mexico while serving in the navy. The next day, the woman was an old friend from work. What struck me is . . . they had to create a story to explain who she was. Even if theyТd forgotten, theyТd never admit it. A faulty well-told story was always better than admitting they didnТt recognize this woman.
Telephone sex lines, illness support groups, twelve-step groups, all these places are schools for learning how to tell a story effectively. Out loud. To people. Not just to look for ideas, but how to perform.
We live our lives according to stories. About being Irish or being black. About working hard or shooting heroin. Being male or female. And we spend our lives looking for evidence-facts and proof-that support our story. As a writer, you just recognize that part of human nature. Each time you create a character, you look at the world as that character, looking for the details that make that reality the one true reality.