YouSaid · the spoken record

Chuck Palahniuk

lines on the record: 78
first: 2020-09-02
most recent: 2020-09-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I love making intentional mistakes. Oh my gosh. You know, what is the first thing that Scarlett O'Hara says in Gone with the Wind?”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over and over. And so in minimalism, you look for as many different ways as possible to say the same thing over and over and over.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, another kind of core thing in minimalism is that you keep saying the same thing over and over. I finally got minimalism one day. I left Spanbauer's workshop. I went home. I turned on television. There was a commercial for skipper's seafood. And the commercial was just a montage of images. It was the signage. It was the paper cups. It was the napkins. It was people at a table smiling and happy. with skippers badging all around them. It was people in uniforms with skippers badging. And every single one of these images, even though they were all different images, they all basically said the same thing. And at no point did they insert, say, a horse running in the surf. There were no unrelated aspects. It was all saying skippers seafood.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She forces the reader to have the emotional reaction that her narrator is not having. And by the end of that story, you find yourself weeping so hard and you don't know why you're weeping so hard because you haven't been told this is the sad part. This is where you should cry. But she has so burdened you with what seemed like innocuous moments that you have no other reaction except for to have the emotional reaction that her character's not having. I could go on and on. There's so many little tricks.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's just so many little tricks. One is just to constantly be changing the texture, to find some way that you can shift from first person to third person to second person. The way that people tell a joke conversationally to deliver the story in broken down, articulated bits that will assemble themselves in the reader's mind without a lot of connective tissue, without a lot of transitional phrasing. This is why I love the work of Amy Hempel so much is in stories like in the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried, she basically presents a list of fantastic details without any kind of transitional narrative linking them together. And the list of details piles up in your mind like an attorney presenting bits of evidence in court. And at the end, she doesn't dictate.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would argue right from the get go, from the first sentence, you've got to engage the audience. And that goes back to journalism that your lead has to be really strong. Your lead has to raise a question, has to tease something. And if not your lead, then at least your first paragraph has to really hook the audience. It has to make them want to read the next sentence or the next paragraph. And beyond that, you know, it really is about staying very visceral or on the body, as Tom would teach it, that you involve a constant sort of awareness of physicality so that you're enrolling the reader on a physical level, not just an emotional or intellectual level, but you have the reader's entire body is in the story. And that's why so many of my stories really involve either sex or violence.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Andy Warhol would say art is whatever you can get away with. I have heard 40 minute hour long stories that felt like 10 minutes. Same goes for movies. Anything the idea is to keep people engaged on such an intense level that they lose track of time. They are so completely involved in the story. And so time doesn't really matter as long as people's butts don't hurt and as long as they stay really deeply immersed in the story.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other kind of fail safe device that's built in is it as a teller of stories, you know, when you're dying. You know when that story is just not landing. You can tell from whether the room is engaged. You can tell from the silence in the room. You can tell from the emotional reactions from people. Right now, I'm still trying to conduct my writer's workshop. And we're doing it on Zoom. And it is death. Because as you read your work on Zoom, you're not getting the ongoing, the laughter, the groans, the inhales, the fantastic silence of terror. You're not getting any emotional feedback. So it feels like you are failing for 30 or 40 minutes. And if you were in front of an audience, you would know at what point you had gone way too long and that you were your story was failed.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what I like to see? I'd like to see more spoken word stories. If you had a program of stories, because stories weren't always written down, stories were originally somebody, something that was told by somebody to an audience. And those are the stories that you really crave, those stories you heard around the campfire when you were a kid that really scared the pants off of you. Or they were the stories you heard in the barbershop that made you really laugh. And so if you adhere to that kind of oral storytelling model, you could never go long, long. And so in a way, I would like to see more stories told out loud. Because it automatically limits how long they can be.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of them. And I would argue it's because so many publications pay by the word, so they will pay less for a fantastic short story than they will for a really flabby 40, 100-page, long, long story.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so when your dog sees a squirrel. The dog falls into a trance because the squirrel is a moving thing and the dog will follow the verb that motion carries its own authority. And so as long as you keep a character in action and the action is always towards a purpose and is not overthought, it's not over analyzed, the story will occur as really good and engaging because action is always taking place. And so as long as you stay in action and you come back and you complete an unresolved thing, then there's that sense of satisfaction. You don't have to resolve the entire world. You just have to resolve one aspect of the world. And that's enough to give people a sense of reward. I could segue here to short stories because I adore short stories. There just are not enough.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“writes Rosemary's baby, which is about a woman who is manipulated and then completely controlled by the medical services around her. And she's coerced into having this monster of a baby after everyone has assured her that everything is going to be just fine. And in doing so, Ira 11 really kind of broke open how women were able to be with the whole medical industrial complex and how they were able to discuss abortion. It was really one of the first, maybe the first mainstream movie in which abortion was openly discussed. And also in an indirect way how thalidomide was dealt with culturally. All these kind of horrors that people just could not talk about openly because they were too controversial and too frightening. IR11 gave people a metaphor that allowed them to exhaust all their feelings around these things so that”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about somebody else. Let's talk about Ira 11, who was always a hero of mine. He wrote Rosemary's baby at a time when women were being given the lidomide and being told, take this, it will calm you down. And women were just controlled and kind of forced to do whatever the obstetrician said to do. And regardless of what they were worried about, their concerns were dismissed. Nobody could talk about abortion at the time. So IRA 11.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Controlled way of experiencing and exploring conflict and violence like you would dance that could allow everybody who had problems with conflict to kind of put their toe in the water and kind of experience conflict and develop an ability to be with it, but be less reactive to it. And so dangerous writing is effectively about taking an idea, something that is unresolved and threatening to you and blowing it up and exploring it and making it worse than you ever imagined it could be. And in doing so, really exhausting your emotional reaction to it. And typically that makes the problem itself go away entirely.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's an example. My parents fought like animals. My parents fought like crazy. And so so much of my childhood and my siblings' childhood was about maintaining peace. We would play Henry Kissinger where we would hide in the basement. And once mom and dad, once the fighting had reached this huge crescendo, one of us would be chosen to hurt themselves so that a bleeding child or a child with a broken bone suddenly had to be dealt with. And my parents couldn't fight it anymore. So we played this game of being Henry Kissinger to calm the waters, to kind of redirect all of their anxiety. And so I really could not be with conflict. So I wrote the book Fight Club, which is all about this consensual structured.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Storytelling and reinventing reading so that readers have that fantastic excitement that you first had in first or second grade once you figured it out. And you could follow these symbols. You want to not just tell a story, you want to completely reinvent the act of reading every single time.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It made me really listening for how other people describe things because typically when people are talking, they don't use abstractions when they're telling a story. They are using a much more intuitive way of describing things that has really linked their experience. And that's what you're listening for, the way that the people describe things in what Gordon Lish would call burnt tongue, this kind of inexact, awkward, inelegant way of saying something that says it in a new fresh way, but also implies the emotion behind the story, a story that's told really beautifully and smoothly and elegantly does not carry a lot of honesty or emotion, doesn't imply the kind of stress that's behind the story. So you're looking for ways of kind of reinventing”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or realized or believed, or You can't even use love. It's about staying away from abstractions. You can't use one inch. You can't use, it was a 100 degree day. You can't say he was a six foot tall man. You have to stay away from all abstractions because a six-foot tall man is somebody different to everyone who meets him. And so when your character says he was six feet tall, you're losing an incredible chance of describing giving to the reader how the character perceives a six-foot tall man.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there are so many rules. And as a writer, you go into writing without rules. And you tend to just write in these default ways that you've always thought a story should be. But then Tom and Gordon come in and they say, you may not use thought verbs. You have to externalize everything the way an actor would so that the thought, the realization, the epiphany occurs within the reader. You can't dictate emotion like that”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A man named Tom Spanbauer had just moved to Portland from New York, where he studied at Columbia with a famous editor named Gordon Lish. And Gordon Lish is famous for a lot of things, including being Raymond Carver's editor, being a famous Knopf editor, fiction editor at Esquire, running a magazine called The Quarterly and really sort of developing a style called minimalism. And a school of writers who were very popular at the time, who were known as the minimalists. And so Tom had moved to Portland, and he was more or less teaching Gordon Liccius' minimalism in a workshop. And that's where I got my real, real education”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tom was effectively my second writing teacher. My first writing teacher was a very nice workshop led by a writer named Andrea Carlyle, who eventually came to me and said that my work was so upsetting to the other writers who were all very nice middle-aged people. And I was this crazy 25-year-old. And the other students no longer really felt safe around me. And so she was asking me to leave the workshop.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, a shorter piece is about exploring an idea, but a shorter piece is really a fantastic opportunity to mess with a language, to really do an experiment in restructuring information. And the original short story that became Fight Club, it became chapter 16 in Fight Club was just because I wanted to do a story in which the transitions were rules. I wanted to use rules as a kind of chorus, a non-fiction transitional device that would allow me to cut together different aspects of the story like I was cutting film. I could jump around temporally, I could jump around whether I was in scene or in sort of observation. As long as I came back to the rules. So a short story is really an experiment in how to completely reinvent structuring a story. What the story is about is always kind of a secondary thing.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was explaining to me that he has always been 135 pounds because he had to have a radical bowel resectioning. And I asked him why. And he explained this horrible swimming pool story. And I realized I had the third anecdote, that I had the third verse for what would be kind of a song that would ultimately make people faint, but that some people have come to me and they've told me that it is the saddest story they have ever written in their lives. And that's always the goal is to make people laugh and then to really break their heart.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted to try pegging as an adolescent and had bought a carrot, but then was too embarrassed to buy a carrot in Vaseline, so he bought all the ingredients for a carrot cake and Vaseline. And I had these two great anecdotes that were funny and heartbreaking and visceral. And it wasn't until I was doing research for my book, Choke, that a sexaholic. In a sexaholic support group”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really started with I had two anecdotes and they were so similar and I knew I couldn't do anything with two anecdotes. It was like writing a song with two verses. You really need a third verse and you need a bridge. And so I had an anecdote about a friend of mine in college who had been in the Marines and stationed in the Middle East. And he got very stoned in college and called me from the hospital and said that he had tried this Prince's wand trick that he had learned in the Middle East or he had witnessed these long brass rods that people that men would insert in their urethra. So he had tried to do it with a long drip of wax from a candle and he ended up in the hospital and he ended up hugely in debt and dropping out of college. And then I tied that to an anecdote that I had heard about a friend who”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A doctor in Cambridge witnessed a bunch of people faint. But whatever it made the shift. And in religious cults where they make you sing or chant a lot, the purpose of that is to hyperventilate so that you're really susceptible to passing out. That's why you have people passing out in very fundamentalist religious ceremonies. And so by having people laugh so much during the first part of the story, once the true nature of the story is revealed, then people are physiologically set up to faint. And the doctor explains how their head falls to one side. And then in order to open their airway, their body has to fall to the floor. And so that's what was happening. People were laughing. They were shocked. They fell to the floor.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so having Shirley's ashes in my house, I just had to write a story that would be as offensive as the lottery was. And Playboy published it, originally had turned it down, but then the editor, Kristinapolitano, came to an event and saw people faint while I was reading Guts. So he had to buy it. And then in England, the Guardian had to buy it. They ran it in their Sunday literary supplement. And they later reported to me that a huge number up their subscribers had canceled after that was published.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had always been fascinated by the fact that when Shirley Jackson published the lottery in the New Yorker lost something like 500 subscribers, people who were so offended by that story. And I always thought, what would it take these days for a story to offend people that much that they would actually cancel subscriptions? And I ended up becoming acquaintances with Shirley Jackson's daughter who sent me a big chunk of Shirley's Cremains, their burned-up remains.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT