Joe Rogan - Chuck Palahniuk on Censorship in Writing

That's fascinating. Now, another thing I really wanted to talk to you about is something that you brought up when you sent the notes to Matt was censorship and that and self-censorship which is going on apparently in writer groups and groups of people that are deciding that certain words should be eliminated from a vocabulary and from vernacular and that you shouldn't discuss certain things anymore. These things are it's harming fiction and harming literature you can't explore the darker ideas. You know, oh you want to see me crucify myself right now? Yeah. Okay this is kind of the career ending moment. For for several years I was in a writer's workshop and the core group of us had been meeting since 1990. So this is a workshop that was almost 30 years old and gradually people were asking each other not to use certain words. First, you know, nobody really used the n-word but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop and then in a story I used the word faggot and a very good friend of mine said you're not bringing that word into workshop you're not writing anything with the f-word and and it just became more and more tightly strictured that way and so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other and one of the writers in our workshop is a writer named Cheryl Strayed who had written a book called Wild which was a hugely successful book it was chosen as an Oprah book and it will be on bookstore shelves for the rest of history Cheryl's book Wild but while she was writing it she had written a segment about how as a child she would be sat on the sofa with her grandfather and her grandfather taught her how to masturbate him and so as a child she would masturbate her grandfather until he achieved orgasm and then later she would find these featherless featherless birds that had fallen out of a nest and she picked one up and she knew it would die so she crushed it between her bare hands this is a very small child and she wrote how as that bird died crushed between her hands it it's death throes its spasms of death felt exactly like her grandfather's penis ejaculating in her little hand that was the best thing she ever wrote and her editor at Knopf said that is not going in this book because we want this book to be a big book and if we see you jerking off your grandfather and then killing baby birds that is not gonna make Oprah Winfrey happy so it was a magnificent piece of writing and a magnificent kind of parallel and awareness for a child to have and that's juxtaposition of sexual abuse and death was magnificent oh my god it worked on every level but the publisher said this is not gonna be in the book did she send it to you or did she show it to you she brought her to workshop and she read it there was even a newspaper reporter present there and we all realized it was fantastically powerful but then she said they won't take this this can't go in Wow did she do anything with it she published it online or no and there were so many parts of that book there were so much better than what they actually did publish really and so it's that kind of censorship where you're trying to reach a reader standing in line at Starbucks and this has got to go in that point of purchase stand and it's got to be a face out and I understand for a long time if you wanted to face out yet Barnes and Noble especially on the discover new writers face out stack you could not have the word fuck on the first page because they did not want people picking up that book and opening it and seeing the f-word that that just did not fit their corporate culture and so you know so much of this censorship is it's because people really want to reach the largest audience without offending people but there's giant problems with that right I mean one of the more fascinating things about books is that the story plays out in your mind exactly the nature of consumption makes it about the only medium which in which you can go to those places yeah literally you couldn't there's no way you would be able to find to put that in a book her story about a grandfather and the bird maybe you could put the bird in but the grandfather part is in a snow way yeah and I feel like I'm telling stories out of school but it's such a perfect example of that kind of self censorship and it's also something so magnificent that I feel it should come out it should sort of be stated I don't want to steal her thunder I wanted to honor the story but it's like so many stories that people tell me I'm kind of seen as a safe person you know kind of a degraded monster maybe but as a degraded monster with no self-esteem whatsoever they feel safe telling me these things because in a way they probably feel a little morally superior to me why do you think people would consider you a degraded monster because I can read a story like guts that is so completely humiliating because as I read it it's in the first person so people more or less assume that it's my story even though it's stories garnered from many different people but the fact that I'm presenting it means that I'm the person that is this losing face and afterwards people feel like they can risk losing face by telling me their story that's very much like the gut story so when someone is writing something that's deeply disturbing like that when you when you when you hit those parts of your mind and you come to this pathway do you consider do you say well no one's ever gonna allow this to be in a book no one's ever do you consider those thoughts or do you just go through with it first and then review it or do you not do that at all you know my formative years with a punk years the 70s into the 80s and we always used to have a saying people would say don't hit the break until you hear a glass break or don't stop until you hear a glass break and so I always think the point of writing is to coach yourself to that point that you would never have gone voluntarily and also to coach your reader to the point where the reader would never have gone voluntarily in a story like guts you know it's very funny on the front end and if you told people on the front end where it was gonna go they'd never read that story but it's very funny and charming and well-paced on the front and then once people realize where it's gonna go they're already trapped and so in a way it's a way to enjoy that though you like the way you said they're already trapped you seem to take some satisfaction in that but in writing it I'm also sort of springing the trap on myself starting down a path that I have no idea is gonna be so humiliating or so emotionally upsetting or so dark because if I did I would never would go down that path when you write a story like that how much of it do you plan out in advance I might plan out up to the the end of the second act you know at the moment of greatest crisis this will happen you know in Fight Club the moment of greatest crisis is going to be when everyone in the support groups figures out that this guy is lying to them and they're all given the choice of either accepting him for his transgressions or rejecting him same thing in choke there's going to be that moment when people realize that he has faked choking and that he's made them into a fake hero and they're gonna either kill him or accept him and so I typically know that the second act is gonna end with a transgression being revealed but beyond that I don't want to know because I want the story to complete itself with its own momentum at that point and if it doesn't surprise me beyond the second act then it's not going to surprise the reader do you write do you have like a storyboard laid out and do you use like index cards or anything to figure out where things are going or do you just kind of know now no you know that's part of the glory is it whenever I get stuck I go to the gym and I say okay this I'm working on this scene where this happens and this happens and this happens and my friends will say they'll always be somebody there with a really fresh take and life experience who can say well have you thought about this happening and it will take the story in a direction that is so unexpected because it's not from my experience and that that's the glory and they feel like they've contributed they're they're so happy and and I'm happy to spend time among people and I'm happy to have the story complete in a way that I never ever could have anticipated that's fascinating so you do it at the gym yeah the gym is really great because you're around people and you have these recoveries between sets so you have a little time to talk and at the same time you have during the exercise itself you have time to think and so it paces the talking versus the thinking and it's also kind of highly oxygenated and it's physically active and your mind is kind of your mind is not engaged with something else your mind is kind of disengaged like it is while you're taking a shower yeah a lot of people like to walk they like to read write read a little bit of it and then walk and bring a recorder or their phone to record on think probably along the same lines Charles Dickens walked somewhere between 12 and 20 miles a day as he wrote well and the the Lakeland poets walked constantly I mean walking is a big part of writing anything physical rightly anything we're forcing your body to move forcing the blood to flow and and also mindless so it allows your mind to wander yeah