What can stories do, how best might one tell them and sell them? These questions lie at the heart of Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different, the new memoir-cum-creative-writing-manual from Chuck Palahniuk. Best known to readers as the author of Fight Club, the cult novel which has become something of a bible to a generation of Angry Young Men, Palahniuk here swaps shock value for an odd sentimentalism.
It’s a sentimentalism which tinges reflections both on his own career (from a “kitchen-table MFA” to his latter-day successes) and those on the state of literature in general. As in this sentence: “Bret Easton Ellis tells me the novel is no longer even a blip in the culture.” Yikes. The line is an early red flag: if the novel is such an irrelevancy, why need he pen a book offering advice on creative writing? Nevertheless, he persists.
The result is a collection of bite-size essays on literary devices, grouped under themes such as “Establishing Your Authority”, “Tension”, and “Process”, interspersed with anecdotes from Palahniuk’s career. The first rule of Write Club? “Think of a story as a stream of information […]Now think of yourself, the writer, as a DJ mixing tracks.” Budding authors are encouraged to play with the “textures” available to them, to steer clear of dream scenes, and confusingly, given the long-winded subtitle, to keep their sentences short.
Between times, we’re offered vignettes of Stephen King signing books until his hand bleeds; legions of fans desperate to tattoo Palahniuk’s signature on their bodies; ecstasy trips and fainting spells; a depressing justification of a failed bid for a Super Bowl banking commercial (“Had Cheever ever gotten a Super Bowl spot? For that matter, had Shakespeare?”) The book ends with a chapter on “Troubleshooting Your Fiction”, and suggested readings for the eager student from Raymond Carver to Nora Ephron, Victor Turner to Mark McGurl.
One question niggled at this reader throughout: who is this book for? Presumably, it’s for the aforementioned Angry Young Men, now setting out to write their own generation-defining opuses. (A peculiar attribute of the book is its illustrations. Certain pull quotes are accompanied by classic tattoo designs daggers, snakes, skulls all the better for ripping out and pinning to your dorm wall, or maybe even for having inked on your bicep.) Palahniuk appears keenly attuned to the expectations of his readership.
Performative
Reminiscing about a brief stint touring Portland alongside celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain for a television programme, the author recalls learning what he could “deliver” to TV stations: a “male demographic, aged eighteen to thirty-five”. Consider This, it seems, is pitched towards the same demographic, to limiting effect. There’s something performative less than authentic in his authorial stance, even as he purports to delve deep into his own writerly psyche.
When moved to cite examples of the techniques he recommends, the novelist is as likely to look towards his own work as that of F. Scott Fitzgerald, say, or Margaret Mitchell. This book, he tells us, is largely concerned with “recognising what good story tellers do intuitively”, and in this class he unabashedly counts himself, relying on readers to do the same. “Remember my novel Snuff and the sex doll slowly leaking air?” Palahniuk asks at one point, in a characteristic interjection.
While the introduction tells us that Consider This aspires to the status of a dialogue with the reader, it has the air of a sermon to those already-converted. Paragraphs frequently begin with a variation on the phrase “If you were my student”, a faux-impassionate schtick which quickly becomes grating. Why should you model your writing after Palahniuk’s, when even reading his suggestions feels like a slog? More successful are the moments when he reflects on his apprenticeship as a writer, on trying and failing to make his stories sing, then trying again. With these rare instances of vulnerability, I was reminded of the value of another writing maxim: show, don’t tell. It’s a maxim which Palahniuk would have done well to follow more closely.
One inspiration for this new handbook, we’re told, is the author’s “memory of The Worst Writing Workshop Ever”, which cost participants “several thousand dollars, payable weeks in advance”, and yielded little in practical advice or material benefits. Our guide presents himself as an affable foil to the racketeering, workshop-leading “Editor to the Stars”. He is, it’s implied, a man of the people, out to democratise the practise of creative writing. Maybe it’s cynical, but I had a tough time believing in the altruism of his motives. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a book which places so much emphasis on the marketability of literature, Consider This reads more like a cash-grab than a well-intentioned teaching guide.
