'No chapter was longer than a music video’: Chuck Palahniuk on how he wrote Fight Club
This comes front loaded with a lot of maths. Please bear with me. My first house cost $60,000. I’d put down $5,000 in cash I’d saved, and planned to pay the balance in monthly instalments of $500 on a loan at 10% interest. Ten per cent because this was 1991. The sellers had to carry the loan because the house sat on random concrete blocks instead of a foundation. It measured 20ft by 20ft.
The monthly payments wouldn’t pay off the loan, but they were all I could afford. At the end of the 10year term the sellers would charge me a $14,000 balloon payment, and most likely I’d lose my entire investment. Everything except my bed and desk had to go. The first time a friend came to visit and saw the entire place filled by nothing but this enormous desk and small bed, he asked: “Why do you have a receptionist for your bedroom?”
The television and radio could find no stations. No cable company would service this wooded, dirt-road neighbourhood. I could either read or write. Or go to parties and crash on other people’s sofas.
So I took the soft option. Hadn’t I already wasted enough years trying to write fake Stephen King novels that no agent would touch? If I was going to write anything new, no chapter would be longer than a music video. Anything the characters said or did would have to be cribbed from the antics of my most clever friends. I’d write this new book on the back of my hand, on toilet tissue in bathrooms, on bar napkins. Once a week I’d key all this into my desktop computer at work on a slow afternoon.
Details coalesced around certain themes. What the character did for work, for example. How the character met his true love. Where the character came to live. And my plan had been to write a series of short stories. Writers such as Raymond Carver had made collections very bankable. But when I placed my stories in series they formed a pattern of their own. They told a larger story, but would need only a few bridging chapters to qualify as a more traditional novel.
All the while that $14,000 balloon payment loomed.
Safe to say the rough novel, Fight Club, sold. Then the overseas rights sold. And the movie rights. Then I contacted my mortgage holders and asked to meet and pay off the house. At the title company they seemed like a nice retired couple. The wife wept and said they’d hoped to get my payment for years to come, that 10% interest was sweet compared to anything a bank could offer.
I wrote three more novels at that desk before selling the house for $90,000. It still sits at the edge of a huge, dark forest. Whoever lives there, I hope they love it.
•Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This is published by Corsair.