From Destruction to Creation

Chuck Palahniuk discusses Choke and his
writing with turtleneck.net
by Chris Switzer

          
         "Look again," says Chuck.
         He's describing what he calls the "look again" game – his approach to greater detail in writing, his method for bringing more clarity to his descriptions of what we all see every day but never realize until it's pointed out to us. We are blind until Chuck shows us the light.
         I'm looking at Chuck Palahniuk, the man who wrote the now legendary Fight Club, one of the most thought-provoking novels of the last ten years. He's been hailed as a visionary, a rebel, and the next Don DeLillo. Chuck sits across from me in a small eatery in Edinboro, PA. What I see is a gentle man, soft-spoken and exceedingly polite. He quietly orders coffee, eggs benedict, and a muffin. He offers to pay for breakfast, but I insist on paying the bill. He answers all of my questions with sincerity.
         Look again.
         Now, in sharp focus, I can see Tyler Durden sitting across from me, along with Tender Branson, Victor Mancini, and yes, even Shannon McFarland. I can see the man who once got into a fistfight during a weekend camping trip and returned to work on Monday only to have his coworkers avert their eyes and conspicuously avoid asking the obvious: "What happened to you?" I can see the man who broke into the apartment of a friend dying of AIDS to remove all evidence of sexual paraphernalia, so his friend's mother wouldn't find it. I can see the man who once injected grease into a donut and watched patiently to see which one of his coworkers would take the first bite.
         "Look again, and then look for the details, and then look again, and look for more details," he says. "That's the mantra when I'm writing. Look again, look again, look again. What am I not seeing? What is the telling detail about this situation that I'm not getting?" Chuck leans forward while explaining. "I was sitting on the plane playing the look again game, and when you're on a plane you're all facing the same way, so you can really study everyone's hair. The woman in front of me had really lovely blond hair. So I was looking at her hair thinking, "How would I describe this hair? In a non-judgmental way, physically, how can I evoke the experience of this hair?' I see how every hair is a different color, and it's almost crystalline-looking, not round, but as if the hair shaft itself is a geometric shape, with angles in it, and it's refracting the light. The longer strands go one way, but the shorter strands splay across the surface of the hair, and the longer strands separate to create cleavings in the hair, and caves, and hollow dark spaces inside. I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, this looks just cedar, or pine wood when you split it." Chuck smiles, indicating that the punch line is looming. "I'm doing all of this, and I realize that the woman right across the aisle is her mother." He starts to laugh. "She's looking at me in a hostile way, like, "Why are you staring at my daughter's hair so intensely?' The daughter has no idea, and I almost have my nose in her hair while I'm taking notes, playing this game. So people are constantly catching me staring at them really hard, when in fact I'm just trying to document something about them that I want to use in a book. And then they're thinking, Stalker!"