Chapter One: Fight Club

Previous examples of my Chapter One Analysis series can be found here. If you want to read the first chapter of Fight Club for yourself you can find it here.

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

In a publishing climate where men are considered a poor demographic to aim a book at, I thought I’d take a look at one of the leading lights of what is called transgressive fiction. No holds barred, down and dirty, psychologically and morally questionable and questioning. 

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Need to Know: the basis of all story

Any story requires the reader to want to know what happens next. This need to know is called suspense. Usually people think of the big, terrifying, heart pumping moments when they think of the term, but wondering if you need to buy milk is also suspense.

If you can build and maintain suspense in a story, at whatever level, it will be more interesting to read for the reader. See the box above? What’s inside? Not knowing makes you curious, huh?

What if I then say, I’ll tell you tomorrow, and take the box away?

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Loitering With Intent

Why write? I don’t mean in general or in existential terms (I write because I must), I mean the story you’re working on at the moment, your current WiP, why are you writing it?

Most people, when asked this, will deflect or try not to give a straight answer. Like writing a pitch or a synopsis, it’s seen as an awkward chore to be done only when absolutely necessary.

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W is for Write What You Know?

I think this proclamation is often misunderstood, certainly in this form. A better way to put it, I feel, is ‘Use what you know.’

Obviously if you know a lot about the subject that you're writing about then you will bring an authenticity to it. Your words will carry authority. The confidence you feel in the words you put on the page will transfer to the reader. One of the biggest issues for aspiring writers is feeling their story is going to be doubted. People will say, ‘You said she was going to a cool party. I wouldn’t want to go to a party like the one you’ve described. How can you think this is cool?’ 

This kind of insecurity is at the root of a lot of the vague, detail withholding, coy writing at the start of stories. If I don’t say exactly what I mean, no one can judge me. I may not have proved I’m right, but nobody can prove I’m wrong.

One of the ways to get round this 'retreat into the comfortably obscure' is to write what you know to be true. I went to a party like this, it was damn cool, and I don’t care who thinks otherwise. That confidence from experience can get you over that initial hurdle of self-doubt.

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M is for Maximum Minimum

One of the skills a writer needs is to be able to get the most out of the words he uses. It is relatively easy to go on at length about something and by doing so convey what you mean to the reader. If I describe something using as many words as possible you will eventually be able to visualise it. If I keep going it will get annoying. Once someone knows what you mean, they will not appreciate your eagerness to be extra super clear.

It is not just a matter of using the fewest words either. Simply stating facts in a literal manner ends up being very dull. But when you can concisely convey what is happening and at the same time evoke an emotion, a strong tone and specific voice, then you start to create something beyond information, you create story.

It is something of an irony that the most efficient, succinct way to get across something that people instantly recognise and relate to is to use a cliché. If I say 'He had a face for radio' you know exactly what I mean and it is a clever way of saying it, and kudos to whoever came up with it. The thing is, it's easy to get a laugh with someone else's joke but that doesn't make you funny. Being an author is about authorship and you want people to know that what they're reading is you, it's your work and your ideas and you should get the credit (or blame).

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K is for Kill Your Darlings?

This well-known phrase, attributed to various people, basically means that sometimes we hang onto something in the a purely because we like the sound of it. It may be irrelevant, it may be long winded or unbalancing, it may disrupt flow and pace, but because it’s clever, or funny or lyrical, we see it as having earned its place.  I think we all know when we've written a nicely turned out phrase and who wouldn't want to show that off? The problem is it means the rest of the narrative suffers and, difficult as it may be, the sage thing to do is to remove it.

I don't necessarily agree.

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E is for Ends with an Epiphany

You have a character with a goal, he reaches his goal, the end. Right?

A bit boring maybe. Okay, you have a character, he has a goal, he faces obstacles, he overcomes them, the end. Better?

It depends, I suppose. If the obstacles and the way he overcomes them are interesting then that would be fine. It's all a bit mechanical though. Shouldn't there be a more emotional aspect to a story?

You have a character, a vampire kills his wife, he hunts down the vampire and finds an army of them. He sacrifices himself to stop them. The end.

The problem is what I'm suggesting is a variation on a simplistic theme. A person has a goal, when they either achieve it or fail to achieve it, the story ends and obviously that is how most stories work. But when you get to the end of a story you want some kind of moment. A feeling of satisfaction. Everything has been building to a point and now that  you’ve arrived you want it to have some kind of meaning. And the way for that to happen is for the character to not just achieve (or not achieve) his mission, but for him to gain some understanding from it. You want him to have an epiphany.

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Chapter One Analysis

I'm going to take the first chapter of a successful novel and break it down to see how the author hooks the reader, what information he feels is necessary at this point of the story, how he approaches things like POV, character and voice.

The book I've chosen is A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby, Stepford Wives). A 237 page, tightly written suspense thriller, it is a commercial novel but with many unconventional touches, extremely well plotted with some very clever twists and turns. It was his first novel, which is also one of the reasons I chose it. Chapter One is just over four pages long.

There will be the spoilers. 

Chapter 1 starts with these lines:

His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him, gripping his face with jaw-aching pressure. That was all right though; the lights were out.

On the surface this gives a very clear indication of his mood.  In fact it tells the reader directly that 'he' is angry and blames 'she'. The writing is visual and the last line gives a nice sense that he's hiding his feelings, but in many ways this would seem to be a overly 'telling' start. But as we'll see, it isn't. 

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Go with the flow

Apart from what a story is about, there is also the matter of how it is written. Once the reader is caught up in the story they can find themselves being drawn irresistibly through the exciting parts but just as irresistibly through slower sections. To some degree this is to do with being engaged with the story overall and the characters, but it is also to do with the way it is written. The way the words are put together, the construction of the narrative, the syntax used to create a rhythm.

Some people are obviously just gifted in this regard. They naturally put words together in an attractive way. But that doesn't mean it can't be learnt. On the most basic level there is spelling and grammar and typos. Just being able to read the text will make the flow better. But assuming those things are at a competent level, there is  another level of sophistication beyond that, which will make the narrative flow.

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Seeing is believing

The problem with most obvious and familiar emotions is that a word like ‘angry’ gives us an instant idea of what angry means, but not a picture. But when you refer to a specific time when a specific character got angry, what does that really mean? What does it look like? All you really convey is a general, clichéd concept of the kind of mood that person was in. You don’t put the reader in the scene, seeing it.

There are two ways to overcome this.

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You can't trust what people say...

Build a story, leave the door open

A story is more than a series of events that happen. Scenes have to be interesting, they have to build and they have to play a role in communicating the overall narrative. But how do you know if the scene you have written is helping to tell the story or distracting from it? One way to decide is to look at the scene and ask yourself what is its significance? Not to the character, or even to the writer, but to the story.

Most things that happen in a story can be said to have some sort of influence on the greater scheme of things if you really push it. A girl walking down the street on the way to school who notices a red sports car, which is then never mentioned again, could be said to have some symbolic or metaphorical resonance with the themes of the story. That's fine, but once you know that, you are then able to decide whether that's the best way to achieve that effect (which it may well be). Problem is most people don't do that and leave it hanging as a thing that happened in the story just because. And that's what it will read like.

If a woman is getting ready to go for a job interview and the phone rings and it’s some guy trying to convince her to switch phone plans, and once she gets rid of him she goes off to her a job interview, what’s the significance to her story? If it makes her late and she misses the bus, then that could have a very strong impact. If the guy tells her that she'd be stupid to pass up this limited special offer and she gets very irate, calling him a cocksucker who should stick his head up his own ass so he has somewhere quiet to eat his bag of dicks, and then puts the phone down and goes back to being very normal and getting ready (pink shirt or white shirt?) that tells us something about her but it has a particular significance since she's going for a job interview where that aspect of her personality may prove to be a liability (although personally I'd hire her on the spot).

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