How Busy Can One Writer Be? A Conversation with Chuck Palahniuk about Bait and Other...

I love short stories because they have their effect, their pay-off, relatively quickly. It’s not like reading an 800-page book and realizing that it’s not going to have much of an ending—oh, the disappointment and rage I feel after I’ve wasted time reading a long book with a weak or a poor ending. With a short story, you find out right away whether you are going to like it or not. But as a writer, I’m able to hold in my head, moment by moment, sentence by sentence, exactly how the writer created that effect. For creative writing, the short story is perfect; you can take it apart like a little machine and find out exactly how it works. Also, in short stories you can experiment with language in a way you can’t in a novel. If you used a stylized, strange language for 800 pages, or ever 200 pages, you’d really exhaust the reader; but you can do it in 10 pages and it’s tolerable.

SLUG: Is there anything you’d like to add about the aesthetics of Bait?

Palahniuk: The one consideration we had to wrap our heads around was that the illustrations had to exist in enclosed spaces, and that each one of these enclosed spaces had to [be surrounded by] a bold line. We got to referring to these as “coloring opportunities.” The walls in each scene had to have wallpaper; the clothing couldn’t be plain; the fabrics had to have texture, so that there would be as many coloring opportunities as possible.

SLUG: Is there one story that especially stands out to you in this collection?

Palahniuk: The first one, “Dad All Over.” [It] was probably the oldest story in the collection. It was published in Playboy about a year or two ago. It was very much about the aftermath of my mother’s death, and the unresolved aspects of her cancer.

SLUG: What other books or media do you have in the works?

Palahniuk: I’ve got most of Fight Club 3 done as a graphic novel, but I’m putting it on the backburner to put some bolder ideas in there. I kinda pulled a lot of punches in Fight Club 2 because I knew I was introducing my readers to a new medium. I didn’t want to swamp them with a new medium and a whole bunch of really edgy stuff, so I figured, in Fight Club 3, I can pull out all the stops and create that chaos I am known for. But the next thing really might be the Lullaby film, which has its financing, and we are just beginning casting. I co-wrote the script with the director, and I’m sure there will be rewrites all the way through.

SLUG: Fight Club aside, what is it like seeing one of your novels come alive on the screen, like Choke or the upcoming Lullaby?

Palahniuk: It’s more exciting now that I’ve done comics, because I understand the sort of sequence of visual storytelling better since doing Fight Club 2. I couldn’t have written a decent screenplay before.

SLUG: How was doing promotion for Fight Club 2 different that promotion for the original novel or the movie?

Palahniuk: To tell you the truth, Dark Horse started sending me to Comic Cons to try and broaden my readership. I went and met with comic people, and I so much enjoyed the comic culture. People who write and illustrate comics—all freelancers—they really can’t hold grudges, because they never know, from one year to the next, who they’ll be working with. They tend to be very laid back and good-natured people. And the parties are so much fun and not pretentious, compared to literary-fiction publishing parties. The whole culture of comics, promotion of comics, and audience of comics are just a lot more fun and easier to be with. It has been a wonderful vacation.

SLUG: Any other sequels? Maybe a graphic novel sequel to Beautiful You?

I’d love to do a sequel to Beautiful You, but that would be much touchier because it is so sexualized. As a graphic novel, it would have to be made too literal to be a graphic novel—it would lapse into pornography too easily. I think there would always have to be the distance of language between what was depicted. Beautiful You was the funnest book of all to write; I just laughed all the way through that book, and my friends said I was a joy while I was writing it.

SLUG: Any plans to come to Utah? For an event, reading, vacation?

Palahniuk: Boy, not soon, unless Lullaby comes together really fast and we end up at Sundance again.

SLUG: Thank you for speaking with us. Any last thoughts?

Palahniuk: It’s kind of esoteric, but Scott Allie, my editor at Dark Horse, really put this whole thing [Bait] together. I just came back from [the Czech Republic], from a huge event to launch Fight Club 2 in Czech, and the Czech publisher referred to Scott as a god at Dark Horse Publishing.

Scott really was such a mother hen about matching up the right artist, working with every artist, and managing the entire project while I was on the road for two months promoting Fight Club 2. Scott really was the guiding genius that made it all happen.

And with that, we let Chuck go—he had a writing workshop to get to. Alas, there is no rest in the day of a writer.