The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
Real writers write because they love to write. They don't write for public acclaim.
It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.
Don't rush or force the ending. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.
The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.
Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.
The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.
Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.
So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn’t funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it. That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can’t control life, at least you can control your version.
If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.
People would ask me to autograph their bodies and then the next time I'd see them on tour they'd have my autograph tattooed. I decided I wouldn't write on people anymore, but I'd give them arms and legs and if they wanted those autographed I'd do that.
Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.
I remember selling my first short story and thinking, Oh my god, I sold something for fifty dollars! That gives me the authority to say I'm a writer and to actually write more things! It legitimized the activity.
I have an experience with as many of my readers as possible that's really genuine. I love it when they write to me, and I'm able to send them things. I love meeting them in person, and even if it's only for a moment I love having that physical, touching interaction.
When I first started writing, there was no way I'd write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That's why in "Fight Club" all the sex happens off-screen. It's all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn't bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with "Choke" was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.
I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.
The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.
I write because it's a way of presenting something without having to be there.
Some writers research in order to write. I write in order to research topics that interest me. Especially if I can meet with other people, in forums from illness support groups to phone-sex hotlines, and learn what other people know best.
It's interesting because when David Fincher was making "Fight Club," he said, "It's a romance." And it really is. Almost everything I ever write is just a romance. And that needed to be sort of pointed up at the end of "Fight Club." The film has a very different ending than the book does.
The strength of film is its accessibility and immediacy. But the strength of books is that freedom to really depict anything you want because people are going to be reading it in private. So, I'm always trying to write with the immediacy and the constant motion of film but I'm also trying to write with the complete freedom of subject matter that books have.
I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering.
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