“Haha! I finished this one year to the day after I bought it!
Every person I tell that, they say “How do you know?” Because I used the purchase receipt as a bookmark, fuckers. Do not question me. I mean, it’s pretty fair to question me when it comes to dates, times, and whatnot, but when it comes to not throwing away a receipt out of sheer laziness, I’m unassailable.
It’s kind of become tradition for me to write an annual-ish defense of Chuck Palahniuk. I think he’s become a very popular author to hate. And by now, he’s written enough books that everyone, even hardcore fans, has disliked a couple or found a couple forgettable.
But I’m not feeling in a defensive mood today. And I gotta tell you, if you’re reading this, Palahniuk’s 18th or 19th book, depending on whether you count the Invisible Monsters remix as two separate works, gimme a fuckin break. You should know what you’re getting into, and if you don’t like it, who’s fault is that, really?
Instead, I just want to talk about what I liked about this book.
I wish this book had come out when I was in my early 20’s and trying to learn how to write, because something Palahniuk does that most writers don’t, his frames for his stories, his methods, they’re all on very naked display in these stories. I think this is what people mean when they critique his prose, that they are used to seeing a drywalled product when they’re getting an unfinished basement from Palahniuk in some ways. But I kinda like it. I like seeing where the stories are going a little bit, in terms of the prose, and seeing what he tries to mask the surprises and what he tries out to give the characters different tones. Sometimes his technique works and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always a lesson. Maybe this is part of why I like him too. Because even when I don’t get too thrilled about the narrative arc of a story, I feel like I get something out of it. Like I learned something about writing.
When you first start out, it’s really fucking hard. You might have an idea for a story, but you don’t know if it’s a big enough idea for a whole story, or an interesting enough idea. And I think my biggest problem when I started out was that I didn’t know the difference between an idea and a story. Let alone how to take something more abstract, like an emotion, and write a story about that emotion.
I wrote a whole book-length work that was just a bunch of ideas, set pieces that came in sequence. I’m sure there was something there, but it wasn’t a story.
I wrote a whole book-length work about…I don’t know. A whole bunch of different shit. A bunch of feelings I had that I tried to express through writing.
Neither of those pieces worked because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I didn’t know the role of story.
I can give you an example of what I mean. Here’s an excerpt from an article about Palahniuk:
“Despite one of his most cited stories revolving around a swimming pool masturbation mishap in which the protagonist escapes drowning by biting through his own large intestine…”
And that, to me, is a total misread of the story in question, “Guts.”
Yes, that happens in the story, but that’s not what the story is ABOUT.
Because (hey, I have defensiveness in me after all! Huzzah!) while that event happens in the story, and while it’s grotesque, that story isn’t ABOUT that. It’s a story with urban legends and sex stuff and the shame people feel about sex.
But it’s not ABOUT that stuff either.
It’s about…damn, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but it’s about being human. It’s about how being human now means that we still have these old sexual urges somewhere in the lizard brain, and those come into conflict with polite, modern society. It’s about that moment when you first disappointed your parents, big time. It’s about a stupid, quick decision that changed your whole life course.
What happens in that story, Palahniuk takes feelings and moments from regular lives that everyone can relate to, and he frames them in a grotesque, outrageous story, and those contrasts really work. When you start to see yourself in this character, when you really feel for him in the last pages of that story, you see the great trick that’s been pulled on you. You read this transgressive-feeling story that’s ultimately about living up to your own potential.
I think Make Something Up has some strong entries and some that are less strong, but I wish I’d read it a long time ago and took some things away from it.
And I’d really recommend this book to people who are learning to turn ideas into stories, and people learning to read like writers. If you’re just starting out, and if you’re not really sure what it means to “read like a writer,” then this is a good book to get you started.
And here’s my advice.
Get a notebook. Read the first story, and then fill the first page in your notebook with reactions to the writing. Don’t talk about characters, don’t talk about the decisions they made. Don’t worry about whether or not you “liked” the story or the characters. Write about the language used. Write about how the story is framed. Write about how the words felt to you, not in a good/bad sense, but with words that describe their rhythm, their overall feeling as opposed to quality. Write about what in the story was successful and wasn’t. Copy down a sentence that worked for you, and then compose your own sentence using the same structure.
Doing all that will start you reading like a writer. Instead of being swept away by a story, you’ll be thinking about what you’re going to write down in your notebook, looking for the places the story turns and the way the framing device is touched on throughout the story. Reading becomes like driving a car for a mechanic where the sounds aren’t just a hum, they’re individual rhythms and bumps and feelings all created by the workings of the car. When you know how a car works, you know what’s causing what and why everything’s happening, and you don’t just hear the collective noise, you hear its individual parts.
And that’s really all I have to say. ‘Til next year.”