Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

by Chuck Palahniuk

  A few years ago, only a few of these conventions shipped industry players from New York and Los Angeles, put them up in hotels, and paid them a stipend to sit here and listen. Now there are so many conventions that organizers must scrape the barrel a little, looking for any producer's assistant or associate editor who can spare a weekend to fly out to Kansas City or Bellingham or Nashville.

  This is the Midwest Writers Conference. Or the Writers of Southern California Conference. Or the Georgia State Writers Conference. As a hopeful writer, you've paid to get in the door, for a name badge and a keynote lunch. There are classes to attend, lectures about technique and marketing. There's the mixed comfort and competition of other writers. Fellow writers. So many of them with a manuscript under one arm. You pay the extra money, the seven-minute money, to buy the ear of an industry player. To buy the chance to sell, and maybe you'll walk away with some money and recognition for your story. An experiential lottery ticket. A chance to turn lemons-a miscarriage, a drunk driver, a grizzly bear-into lemonade.

  Straw, but spun into gold. Here in the big storytelling casino.

  Then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.

  In another way, this hotel ballroom, it's filled with people telling about their one awful crime. Spilling their guts about how they aborted a child. How they smuggled drugs stuffed up their ass all the way from Pakistan. Here's how they fell out of grace, the opposite of a hero's story. Here's how they can sell even their bad example-how it can help others. Prevent similar disasters. These people are here to find redemption. To them, each curtained booth becomes a confessional. Each movie producer, a priest.

  It's no longer God waiting in judgment. It's the marketplace.

  Maybe a book contract is the new halo. Our new reward for surviving with strength and character. Instead of heaven, we get money and media attention.

  Maybe a movie starring Julia Roberts, bigger than life and pretty as an angel, is the only afterlife we get.

  And that's only if… your life, your story is something you can package and market and sell.

  In another way, this is so much like the crowd here last month, when a television game show was auditioning contestants. To answer brain teasers. Or the month before, when producers for a daytime talk show were here, looking for troubled people who wanted to air their problems on national television… fathers and sons who've shared the same sex partner. Or mothers suing for child support. Or anyone getting a sex change.

  Then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.

  The philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out how human beings tend to look at the world as a standing stock of material, ready for us to use. As inventory to be processed into something more valuable. Trees into wood. Animals into meat. He called this world of raw natural resources: bestand. It seems inevitable that people without access to natural bestand such as oil wells or diamond mines, that they'd turn to the only inventory they do have-their lives.

  More and more, the bestand of our era is our own intellectual property. Our ideas. Our life stories. Our experience.

  What people used to endure or enjoy-all those plot-point events of potty training and honeymoons and lung cancer-now they can be shaped to best effect and sold.

  The trick is to pay attention. Take notes.

  The problem with seeing the world as bestand, Heidegger said, was it leads you to use things, enslave and exploit things and people, for your own benefit.

  With this in mind, is it possible to enslave yourself?

  Martin Heidegger also points out that an event is shaped by the presence of the observer. A tree falling in the forest is somehow different if someone is there, noting and accenting the details in order to turn it into a Julia Roberts vehicle.

  If only by distorting events, tweaking them for more dramatic impact, exaggerating them to the point you forget your actual history-you forget who you are-is it possible to exploit your own life for the sake of a marketable story?

  But then, sorry, but your seven minutes is up.

  Maybe we should've seen this coming.

  In the 1960s and 70s, televised cooking shows coaxed a rising class of people to spend their extra time and money on food and wine. From eating, they moved on to cooking. Led by how-to experts like Julia Child and Graham Kerr, we exploded the market for Viking ranges and copper cookware. In the 1980s, with the freedom of VCRs and CD players, entertainment moved in to become our new obsession.

  Movies became the field where people could meet and debate, like they did over soufflés and wine a decade before. Like Julia Child had, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert appeared on television and taught us how to split hairs. Entertainment became the next place to invest our extra time and money.

  Instead of the vintage and bouquet and legs of a wine, we talked about the effective use of voice-over and backstory and character development.

  In the 1990s, we turned to books. And instead of Roger Ebert it was Oprah Winfrey.

  Still, the really big difference was, you could cook at home. You really couldn't make a movie, not at home. But, you could write a book. Or a screenplay. And those do become movies.

  The screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker once said that no one in Los Angeles is ever more than fifty feet from a screenplay. They're stowed in the trunks of cars. In desk drawers at work. In laptop computers. Always ready to be pitched. A winning lottery ticket looking for its jackpot. An uncashed paycheck.

  For the first time in history, five factors have aligned to bring about this explosion in storytelling. In no particular order the factors are:

  Free time.

  Technology.

  Material.

  Education.

  And disgust.

  The first seems simple. More people have more free time. People are retiring and living longer. Our standard of living and social safety net allows people to work fewer hours. Plus, as more people recognize the value of storytelling-but strictly as book and movie material-more people see writing, reading, and research as something more than just a highbrow recreation. Writing's not just a nice little hobby. It's becoming a bona fide financial endeavor worth your time and energy. Telling anyone that you write always prompts the question "What have you published?" Our expectation is: writing equals money. Or good writing should. Still, it would be damn near impossible to get your work seen if not for the second factor:

  Technology. For a small investment, you can be published on the Internet, accessible to millions of people worldwide. Printers and small presses can provide any number of on-demand hard-copy books for anybody with the money to self-publish. Or subsidy publish. Or vanity publish. Or whatever you want to call it. Anybody who can use a photocopy machine and a stapler can publish a book. It's never been so easy. Never in history have so many books hit the market each year. All of them filled with the third factor:

  Material. As more people grow old, with the experience of a lifetime to remember, the more they worry about losing it. All those memories. Their best formulas, stories, routines for making a dinner table burst into laughter. Their legacy. Their life. Just a touch of Alzheimer's disease, and it could all disappear. Besides, all our best adventures seem to be behind us. So it feels good to relive them, to share them on paper. Organizing and making all that flotsam and jetsam make sense. Wrapping it up, neat and tidy, and putting a nice bow on top. The first volume in the three-volume boxed set that will be your life. The "best of" NFL highlights tape of your life. All in one place, your reasons for doing what you did. Your explanation why, in case anyone wants to know.

  And thank God for factor number four:

  Education. Because at least we all know how to keyboard. We know where to put the commas… kind of. Pretty much. We have automatic spell-checking. We're not afraid to sit down and take a swing at the job of book writing. Stephen King makes it look so easy. All those books. And Irvine Welsh, he makes it look like fun, the last place you can do drugs and commit crimes and not get arrested, or fat, or sick. Besides, we've read books all our l
ives. We've seen a million movies. In fact, that's part of our motivation, the fifth factor:

  Disgust. Except for maybe six movies at the video store, the rest is crap. And most books, it's the same. Crap. We could do better. We know all the basic plots. It's all been broken down by Joseph Campbell. By John Gardner. By E. B. White. Instead of wasting more time and money on another crappy book or movie, how about you take a stab at doing the job? I mean, why not?

  Then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.

  Okay, okay, so maybe we're headed down a road toward mindless, self-obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angles. Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer. Every funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the first opportunity.

  A world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential.

  Where a story no longer follows as the result of an experience.

  Now the experience happens in order to generate a story.

  Sort of like when you suggest: "Let's not but say we did."

  The story-the product you can sell-becomes more important than the actual event.

  One danger is, we might hurry through life, enduring event after event, in order to build our list of experiences. Our stock of stories. And our hunger for stories might reduce our awareness of the actual experience. In the way we shut down after watching too many action-adventure movies. Our body chemistry can't tolerate the stimulation. Or we unconsciously defend ourselves by pretending not to be present, by acting as a detached «witness» or reporter to our own life. And by doing that, never feeling an emotion or really participating. Always weighing what the story will be worth in cold cash.

  Another danger is this rush through events might give us a false understanding of our own ability. If events occur to challenge and test us and we experience them only as a story to be recorded and sold, then have we lived? Have we matured? Or will we die feeling vaguely cheated and shortchanged by our storytelling vocation?

  Already we've seen people use «research» as their defense for committing crimes. Winona Ryder shoplifting in preparation to play a character who steals. Pete Townsend visiting Internet kiddie-porn websites in order to write about his own childhood abuse.

  Already our freedom of speech is headed for a collision with every other law. How can you write about a sadistic rapist «character» if you've never raped anybody? How can we create exciting, edgy books and movies if we only live boring, sedate lives?

  The laws that forbid you to drive on the sidewalk, to feel the thud of people crumbling off the hood of your car, the crash of bodies shattering your windshield, those laws are economically oppressive. When you really think about it, restricting your access to heroin and snuff movies is a restriction of your free trade. It's impossible to write books, authentic books, about slavery if the government makes owning slaves illegal.

  Anything "based on a true story" is more salable than fiction.

  But, then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.

  Of course, it's not all bad news.

  There's the talk-therapy aspect to most writers' workshops.

  There's the idea of fiction as a safe laboratory for exploring ourselves and our world. For experimenting with a persona or character and social organization, trying on costumes and running a social model until it breaks down.

  There is all that.

  One positive aspect is, maybe this awareness and recording will lead us to live more interesting lives. Maybe we'll be less likely to make the same mistakes again and again. Marry another drunk. Get pregnant, again. Because by now we know this would make a boring, unsympathetic character. A female lead Julia Roberts would never play. Instead of modeling our lives after brave, smart fictional characters-maybe we'll lead brave, smart lives to base our own fictional characters on.

  Controlling the story of your past-recording and exhausting it-that skill might allow us to move into the future and write that story. Instead of letting life just happen, we could outline our own personal plot. We'll learn the craft we'll need to accept that responsibility. We'll develop our ability to imagine in finer and finer detail. We can more exactly focus on what we want to accomplish, to attain, to become.

  You want to be happy? You want to be at peace? You want to be healthy?

  As any good writer would tell you: unpack "happy." What does it look like? How can you demonstrate happiness on the page-that vague, abstract concept. Show, don't tell. Show me "happiness."

  In this way, learning to write means learning to look at yourself and the world in extreme close-up. If nothing else, maybe learning how to write will force us to take a closer look at everything, to really see it-if only in order to reproduce it on a page.

  Maybe with a little more effort and reflection, you can live the kind of life story a literary agent would want to read.

  Or maybe… just maybe this whole process is our training wheels toward something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures. Our flood of books and movies-of plots and story arcs-they might be mankind's way to be aware of all our history. Our options. All the ways we've tried in the past to fix the world.

  We have it all: the time, the technology, the experience, the education, and the disgust.

  What if they made a movie about a war and nobody came?

  If we're too lazy to learn history history, maybe we can learn plots. Maybe our sense of "been there, done that" will save us from declaring the next war. If war won't "play," then why bother? If war can't "find an audience." If we see that war «tanks» after the opening weekend, then no one will green-light another one. Not for a long, long time.

  Then, finally, what if some writer comes up with an entirely new story? A new and compelling way to live, before…

  Sorry, your seven minutes is up.

  Demolition

  They come over the hills, sacrifices on their way here to die.

  Today is Friday, the thirteenth of June. Tonight the moon is full.

  They come here covered in decorations. Painted pink and wearing huge pig snouts, their floppy pink pig ears towering against the blue sky. They come, done up with huge yellow bows made of painted plywood. They come, painted bright blue and costumed to look like giant sharks with dorsal fins. Or painted green and crowded with little space aliens standing around slant-eyed under a spinning silver radar dish and flashing colored strobe lights.

  They come, painted black with ambulance light bars. Or painted with brown desert camouflage and hand-drawn cartoons of missiles roaring toward Arabs riding camels. They come trailing clouds of special-effects smoke. Shooting cannons made from pipe and blasting black-powder charges.

  They come with names like Beaver Patrol and the Viking and Mean Gang-Green, from dryland wheat towns such as Mesa and Cheney and Sprague. Eighteen sacrifices total, they come here to die. To die and be reborn. To be destroyed and be saved and come back next year.

  Tonight is about breaking things and then fixing them. About having the power of life and death.

  They come for what's called the Lind Combine Demolition Derby.

  The where is Lind, Washington. The town of Lind consists of 462 people in the dry hills of the eastern reaches of Washington State. The town centers around the Union Grain elevators, which run parallel to the Burlington Northern railroad tracks. The numbered streets-First, Second, and Third-also run parallel to the tracks. The streets that intersect with the tracks begin with N Street as you enter town from the west end. Then comes E Street. Then I Street. All in all the streets spell out N-E-I–L-S-O-N, the family name of the brothers James and Dugal, who plotted the town in 1888.

  The main intersection at Second and I is lined with two-story commercial buildings. The biggest building downtown is the faded pink art deco Phillips Building, home of the Empire movie theater, closed for decades. The nicest one is the Whitman Bank Building, brick with the bank's name painted in gold on the
windows. Next door is the Hometown Hair salon.

  The landscape for a hundred miles in any direction is sagebrush and tumbleweed, except where the rolling hills are plowed to raise wheat. There, dust devils spin. Train tracks connect the tall grain elevators of farm towns such as Lind and Odessa and Kahlotus and Ritzville and Wilbur. At the north end of Lind tower the concrete ruins of the Milwaukee Road train trestle, dramatic as a Roman aqueduct.

  There's no record of where the name Lind came from.

  At the south end of town are the rodeo grounds, where bleacher seats line three sides of a dirt arena and jackrabbits graze in a gravel parking lot, around the dented and rusting hulks of retired demolition-derby contestants.

  The what are combines, the big, slow machines used to harvest wheat. Each combine consists of four wheels: two huge chest-high wheels in front and two smaller, knee-high, wheels in back. The front wheels drive the machine, pulling it along. The rear wheels steer. In a pinch-say, when somebody rips off your rear wheels-you can steer with your front ones. Those front drive wheels each have brakes. To turn right you just stop your right wheel and let the left keep going. To turn left you do the opposite.

  The front of each combine is a wide, low scoop called a header. It looks a little like the blade on the front of a bulldozer, only wider, lower, and made of sheet metal. It scoops up the wheat. From the header the wheat is sieved and threshed and shot out into a truck. The driver sits up, six feet off the ground, near the engine. Size- and shapewise, it looks very much like a man riding a boxy steel elephant.

  Here, your header is what you use to pop another guy's tires. Or rip off his header. Or mangle his drive belts. That's why, in years past, guys filled their header scoops with concrete or welded them with layers of battleship plating or cut them down so they were harder for other combines to hook.

  But that's against the rules now. Lots of rules changed after Frank Bren ran over his own father in 1999, broke his leg, and left one huge front wheel parked on top of him. Since then Mike Bren has walked with a limp.