“Kid [...] Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I'd enjoyed the essays I'd read over the years and read this book mostly over the course of a night I could barely sleep for. That might influence some of my following comments.
It's fun to me how I actually manage to disagree with some of the advice, genuinely not because I think I'm in any way better, I'm really not, but this book is very much Chuck Palahniuk's (and Tom Spanbauer's) approach to fiction writing and publishing goals - and Chuck warns as much right from the start! - so understandably there were certain things that didn't resonate with me (an hobbyist fan fiction writer - and I will return to that) or found quite odd actually - and in fact I can think of a whole school of authors who are not at all worse for the way they very much don't approach writing and teaching it like …
I'd enjoyed the essays I'd read over the years and read this book mostly over the course of a night I could barely sleep for. That might influence some of my following comments.
It's fun to me how I actually manage to disagree with some of the advice, genuinely not because I think I'm in any way better, I'm really not, but this book is very much Chuck Palahniuk's (and Tom Spanbauer's) approach to fiction writing and publishing goals - and Chuck warns as much right from the start! - so understandably there were certain things that didn't resonate with me (an hobbyist fan fiction writer - and I will return to that) or found quite odd actually - and in fact I can think of a whole school of authors who are not at all worse for the way they very much don't approach writing and teaching it like Chuck Palahniuk does.
Palahniuk's voice is very strong in this book that's part a collection of his writing advice essays, part episodic autobiography. I think it cements the advice as - while interesting for anyone to observe - not actual gospel. This is advice that's good for fiction writing but some of it is also for publishing, for the reader's reaction: In "Textures: Depict a Social Model through Repetition" I was left thinking that I don't want to write to captivate the kind of audience that takes Fight Club's rules as something to in any way emulate in real life - and frankly, specially with the context of a story further down the book, I don't think Palahniuk wanted to either, but he correctly pointed out that readers do love that shit, it does work and if it works well enough it can even pay your rent, so I understand his choice of not directly denouncing it.
It just felt a little sad, really.
I think for some people that strength of voice is going to be a negative. Palahniuk himself says he doesn't strive to be likeable, and it does kinda show, in a prickly sort of fashion. But with all the anecdotes (some quite messed up frankly, american book tours are something else) and advice I walked out of the book with a healthy respect for the man. Sure he might think slash fiction is a raunchy, absurd genre but as a slash fanfiction writer? Yeah it is! And it's why I like it but he personally doesn't - or at least it sure didn't look like he did to me - but because I've also seen him preach that good writing isn't about making the writer look good, I was left feeling that he at the very least respects it too, specially when it doesn't pull punches, and not pulling punches is a big part of what he teaches indeed.