Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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In so many ways, these places-support groups, twelve-step recovery groups, demolition derbies-they've come to serve the role that organized religion used to. We used to go to church to reveal the worst aspects of ourselves, our sins. To tell our stories. To be recognized. To be forgiven. And to be redeemed, accepted back into our community. This ritual was our way to stay connected to people, and to resolve our anxiety before it could take us so far from humanity that we would be lost.
In these places I found the truest stories. In support groups. In hospitals. Anywhere people had nothing left to lose, that's where they told the most truth.
While writing Invisible Monsters, I'd call telephone sex numbers and ask people to tell me their dirtiest stories. You can just call and say: "Hey, everybody, I'm looking for hot brother-sister incest stories, let's hear yours!" or "Tell me about your dirtiest, filthiest cross-dressing fantasy!" and you'll be taking notes for hours. Because it's only sound, it's like an obscene radio show. Some people are terrible actors, but some will break your heart.
On one call, a kid talked about being blackmailed into having sex with a policeman who threatened to have his parents charged with abuse and neglect. The policeman gave the kid gonorrhea, and the parents he was trying to save… they threw him out to live on the street. Telling his story, near the end the kid started to cry. If he was lying, it was a magnificent performance. A tiny one-on-one piece of theater. If it was a story, it was still a great story.
So of course I used it in the book.
The world is made of people telling stories. Look at the stock market. Look at fashion. And any long story, any novel, is just a combination of short stories.
While researching my fourth book, Choke, I sat in on sex-addict talk therapy sessions, twice each week for six months. Wednesday and Friday nights.
In so many ways, these rap sessions weren't much different than the Thursday-night writers' workshop I attended. Both groups were just people telling their stories. The sexaholics might've been a little less concerned about "craft," but they still told their stories of anonymous bathroom sex and prostitutes with enough skill to get a good reaction from their audience. Many of these people had talked in meetings for so many years that hearing them, you heard a great soliloquy. A brilliant actor playing him- or herself. A one-person monologue that showed an instinct for slowly revealing key information, creating dramatic tension, setting up payoffs and completely enrolling the listener.
For Choke, I also sat with Alzheimer's patients as a volunteer. My role was just to ask them about the old photographs each patient kept in a box in their closet, to try and spur their memory. It was a job the nursing staff didn't have time to do. And, again, it was about telling stories. One subplot of Choke came together as, day by day, each patient would look at the same photo, but tell a different story about it. One day, the beautiful bare-breasted woman would be their wife. The next day, she was some woman they met in Mexico while serving in the navy. The next day, the woman was an old friend from work. What struck me is… they had to create a story to explain who she was. Even if they'd forgotten, they'd never admit it. A faulty well-told story was always better than admitting they didn't recognize this woman.
Telephone sex lines, illness support groups, twelve-step groups, all these places are schools for learning how to tell a story effectively. Out loud. To people. Not just to look for ideas, but how to perform.
We live our lives according to stories. About being Irish or being black. About working hard or shooting heroin. Being male or female. And we spend our lives looking for evidence-facts and proof-that support our story. As a writer, you just recognize that part of human nature. Each time you create a character, you look at the world as that character, looking for the details that make that reality the one true reality.
Like a lawyer arguing a case in a courtroom, you become an advocate who wants the reader to accept the truth of your character's worldview. You want to give the reader a break from their own life. From their own life story.
This is how I create a character. I tend to give each character an education and a skill set that limits how they see the world. A house cleaner sees the world as an endless series of stains to remove. A fashion model sees the world as a series of rivals for public attention. A failed medical student sees nothing but the moles and twitches that might be the early signs of a terminal illness.
During this same period when I started writing, friends and I started a weekly tradition we called "Game Night." Every Sunday evening we'd meet to play party games, like charades. Some nights we'd never start the game. All we needed was the excuse, and sometimes a structure, to be together. If I was stuck in my writing, looking for a new way to develop a theme, I'd do what I'd later call "crowd seeding." I'd throw out a topic of conversation, maybe tell a quick funny story and prompt people to tell their own versions.
Writing Survivor, I'd bring up the topic of cleaning hints, and people would provide them for hours. For Choke, it was coded security announcements. For Diary, I told stories about what I'd found, or left, sealed inside the walls of houses I'd worked on. Hearing my handful of stories, my friends told theirs. And their guests told their stories. And within one evening, I had enough for a book.
In this way, even the lonely act of writing becomes an excuse to be around people. In turn, the people fuel the storytelling.
Alone. Together. Fact. Fiction. It's a cycle.
Comedy. Tragedy. Light. Dark. They define each other.
It works, but only if you don't get stuck too long in any one place.
Testy Festy
A pretty blonde tilts her cowboy hat farther back on her head. This is so she can deep-throat a cowboy without her hat brim hitting him in the gut. This is on a stage, in a crowded bar. Both of them are naked and smeared with chocolate pudding and whipped cream. This they call the "Co-Ed Body Painting Contest." The stage is red carpet. The lights, fluorescent. The crowd chants, "We want head! We want head!"
The cowboy sprays whipped cream in the crack of the blonde's ass and eats it out. The blonde masturbates him with a handful of chocolate pudding. Another couple take the stage and the man licks pudding out of the woman's shaved pussy. A girl with a brown ponytail in a halter top sucks off a kid with an uncut dick.
This is while the crowd sings "You've Lost That Loving Feeling."
As the girl leaves the stage, one of her girlfriends shouts, "You sucked him, you little bitch!"