“Telling
a story is like being a stripper,” says Chuck Palahniuk. “Don't
take it all off and show your pussy. Take off one thing at a time;
take steps towards what's going to happen.”
The
first thing I hear when I arrive at The International Anthony BurgessFoundation is that there will be no
meet-and-greet, no photos and no dedications involving the Oregon
novelist. The IABF representative says Mr. Palahniuk has another
event in another town to attend after this one.
To a
seasoned celebrity stalk- I mean, erm, enthusiast, this is obviously
a gutting setback. We'll see, I think. I've been to a lot of book
signings out of curiosity and a general passion for stories, but
Chuck Palahniuk has been a favourite for over a decade.
My
old pal Fat Roland is on the door, and he tells me Mr. Palahniuk is in the back room,
signing books. I wonder- can I get a photo-bomb? When the staff let
us, I follow the crowd into the main room, nipping past the tall guy
in Santa pyjamas to get to the front row.
The IABF
representative takes to the mic to introduce the man, whose first
novel Fight Club went on to define a generation and inspire countless
other movies, and copycat clubs. Mr. Palahniuk takes the mic.
“Tonight,”
he says, “there will not be any bullshit beautiful stories.” But
he reads a story that, well, you could call it beautiful in its own
way. Beautifully graphic and shocking, but a delicately sentimental
tale: a geek, his hot but totally mental girlfriend and a bus journey
that takes what you could describe as a very wrong turn.
It isn't
any of his numerous shorts that he's here to discuss, though. Doomed
is the new novel he's promoting tonight: his first sequel. The book,
following on from Damned, is the second in a trilogy, a collection
that he's writing for catharsis, he says, to give him time to
overcome the death of his mother and father.
“In
writing,” he says, “there's no reward. So always write what's
personal to you so you get the therapeutic benefit, even if no-one
buys it.”
And this
is the first of a number of wise sound bytes from the author, during
probing questions from the rep, describing his writing techniques and
processes. (“Make the reader feel smarter than the character. We'll
want to care for her. We don't care for people that are better than
us. Make it so we wanna fix that.”)
The
correct crafting of the answer is important to Mr. Palahniuk, and we
can tell this by the consideration that goes into his responses, the
anticipatory silent pauses as he finds the starting point for his
explanatory anecdotes.
The rep
throws out the questions to the audience. A 19-year-old budding
writer asks Mr. Palahniuk about his story-writing processes.
“Y'know,
at thirty,” Palahniuk says, “you see the breakdown.” He doesn't
explicitly mention it, but he's clearly talking about life. “In
Fight Club, the narrator gets nurturing. In the second act, that
nurturing falls apart. At thirty, you can't use your plan any more.
You have to wing it. But that third act... that's when it all comes
together.”
Next, a
girl in her early twenties speaks up. “First, thanks for making me
too scared to eat out anywhere,” she says. (She's referring to
Fight Club's Tyler Durden, a part-time waiter who would lace his
bodily fluids into the high-priced meals he served.) “It's made me
a really good cook. I was wondering, do you find it hard to eat out?”
Palahniuk
sighs. “The world is full of such atrocities. One time I was at a
charity dinner with an oncologist. I had my wine glass; a woman next
to me, a chatty woman in her forties, she didn't. But she was
obsessed with wine. She was saying, 'I love wine, but every time I
drink it, I get a burning feeling in my throat afterwards. I decided
eventually that God didn't want me to drink wine any more, so I gave
it up. But, boy, do I miss wine.'
“This
oncologist, he interrupts, and says, 'Miss, I'm a cancer specialist.
That is not God talking to you. You probably have stage 4 Hodgkin's
Lymphoma.'”
Nervous
laughter bounces off the Foundation's bare brick walls.
“'Here's
my card. You're gonna need 6 months treatment. It's not too late.'
“She's
not so chatty any more.
“The
oncologist, he says, 'after treatment, that first drink will be the
worst drink you ever taste. But if it doesn't hurt, the second
drink... that will be the best tasting drink. Sorry about that!'
“I
found out months later after the woman's GP phoned me: the oncologist
was right.”
The IABF
rep says there's time for one more question. My hand shoots up and he
picks me.
“I
believe you were a journalist before you got into fiction. Given that
blogging and citizen journalism is now becoming so popular, how
important do you think qualifications in journalism are, and how do
you see the future of journalism?”
“A
lot of us entered journalism because of the Watergate scandal. We all wanted to be the
next Woodward and Bernstein. Then when we graduated, there were no jobs. I went and worked on a
freight-liner. But I never wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to
write fiction! So, if you want to write a lifetime of books, a
background in journalism will help.
“I
remember on my first day on this freight-liner, the manager sent me
to the foreman to get a squeegee sharpener. The foreman didn't have
one, so he sent me to another foreman. I fell for it, but that day, I
met every foreman I might ever work for. Another job I had, at
Target, they took up a whole of my day sending
me to look for a shelf stretcher.
“I
told this story at a party to a paediatric surgeon. He said, that's
nothing. This surgeon, he told me that on his first day he'd been
paged and ordered around the hospital all day, when he hears
screaming from this other room. He goes into this room, a dark,
unused ward, and follows the sound of this screaming to a hospital
bed. He looks underneath it and a woman thrusts something into his
hands and it's slick with blood and she screams 'YOU KILLED MY BABY
YOU SON ON A BITCH!'
“The
lights go on. The woman, she's one of his team. What he's holding is
a resuscitation baby, a training doll, drenched in fake blood. Behind
a separation screen, the rest of the team are watching him, trying
not to laugh.
“I was
in Paris talking to a veterinary scientist. What they do when they
graduate is, the vets take you to an all-night party and ply you with
wine. If you don't faint, they hit you with an animal tranquilliser.
Then they strip you naked and sew you into the belly of a dead horse.
When you wake up, your head aches, you want to vomit, and it's so
tight and dark and the smell is awful. Your team-mates- you can hear
them from inside the horse. They start yelling at you. 'If you wanna
be part of this team, you're gonna have to fight. This is a terrible
job!'
“So
you fight, you push against the wall and you start your rebirth. You
find an opening and you thrust out your arm and someone hands you a
glass of wine and you burst out of the corpse to rapturous applause,
and from that moment on... nothing in your career will be as bad as
waking up inside a dead horse.
“I got
these stories by coaxing this information out of people, and that
skill came through journalism training.”
With
that, the IABF rep stirs up one last well-deserved round of applause
before the staff walk him through the crowd. He stops for a few
moments for pictures, at which point I pounce...
…and I
slip him my blog card and the staff ferry who could be my biggest
living literary hero briskly out of the room.
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