There, they'd sit around with other people in a church basement, comparing symptoms and doing New Age exercises. My job was to drive people to appointments and support-group meetings. For better or worse.īefore I started writing Fight Club, I worked as a volunteer at a charity hospice. That's about it.Īnd now there's fight clubs. We don't see a lot of new models for male social interaction. All these books are short stories bound together by a shared activity. These are all books that present a structure-making a quilt or playing mah-jongg-that allows people to be together and share their stories.
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Look at books like How to Make an American Quilt and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and The Joy Luck Club. People want to see new ways for connecting. My pet theory about Fight Club's success is that the story presented a structure for people to be together. Tom and Suzy and Monica and Steven and Bill and Cory and Rick. This steady, regular Thursday-night gabfest was the only incentive to keep me writing during the years when writing didn't pay a dime. These are friendships that outlast jobs and evictions. A mutual quest that would keep you together with other people who valued this vague, intangible skill you valued. It wasn't until a writing workshop that I discovered the idea of friendships based on a shared passion. The problem with proximity friends is, they move away. The funniest person I know, Ina Gebert, calls coworkers your "air family." Those people you know only because, well, you're stuck sitting next to them every day. At the time, most of my friendships were based on proximity: neighbors or coworkers. This was in a workshop taught by a published writer-Tom Spanbauer-around his kitchen table on Thursday nights. Most of the reason I write is because once a week it brought me together with other people. It's hard to call any of my novels "fiction."
What's funny is, you'd be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. It's a pastime that seems to split us away from others. Maybe because reading is something we do alone. Maybe because fiction seems to connect you to only the voice of one other person. Anybody who writes fiction is-people imagine-alone. A conduit.īut a writer writer is different. The journalist writes to connect you to the larger world. The journalist writes surrounded by people, and always on deadline. The journalist, the newspaper reporter, is always rushing, hunting, meeting people, digging up facts. In people's imagination, that's the difference between a writer and a journalist. The one drawback to writing is the being alone. These are all nonfiction stories and essays I wrote between novels. Here, that kid is still trying to connect with people. Or people being together.įor the castle builders, it's about flying a stone flag so grand it attracts people with the same dream.įor the combine-demolition folks, it's about finding a way to get together, a social structure with rules and goals and roles for people to fill while they rebuild their community by crashing farm equipment.įor Marilyn Manson, it's about a kid from the Midwest who can't swim, suddenly moved to Florida, where social life is lived in the ocean. This is the lonely end of the spectrum.Įvery story in this book is about being with other people. Together.Ĭhances are, if you're reading this, you know this cycle. Until you crave the idea of escaping, getting away to a…Īnd so it goes. If your story world sells well enough, you get to go on book tour. Then you come back to be with other people. You stay in your story world until you destroy it.
You spend time alone, building this lovely world where you control, control, control everything. In so many ways, that's also how you write a novel. And we're lonely.Īfter we're miserable enough-like the narrator in his Fight Club condo, or the narrator isolated by her own beautiful face in Invisible Monsters-we destroy our lovely nest and force ourselves back into the larger world. Whether it's a ranch in Montana or basement apartment with ten thousand DVDs and high-speed Internet access, it never fails.
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An environment you can control, free from conflict and pain. Some lovely isolated nest where you can invite only the rabble you like. Or a mountaintop castle, like William Randolph Hearst. No, the dream is a big house, off alone somewhere. In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus. If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.
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