In this bonus episode, fiction editor Joshua Essoe explores why Chuck Palahniuk’s "Fight Club" excels in pacing, withholding information, and creating compelling dialogue. Joshua breaks down key storytelling techniques that make the book and movie memorable, from the strategic use of "time bombs" to powerful social commentary embedded within the narrative. Whether you're already a fan or wondering why the story resonates beyond its tough exterior, you'll find valuable insights into what makes this controversial classic work so well.
In this bonus episode, fiction editor Joshua Essoe explores why Chuck Palahniuk’s "Fight Club" excels in pacing, withholding information, and creating compelling dialogue. Joshua breaks down key storytelling techniques that make the book and movie memorable, from the strategic use of "time bombs" to powerful social commentary embedded within the narrative. Whether you're already a fan or wondering why the story resonates beyond its tough exterior, you'll find valuable insights into what makes this controversial classic work so well.
Joshua's "Pacing and Cutting" Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshuaessoe/guides-to-writing-pacing-and-cutting
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MIGNON: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I am here with Joshua Essoe, longtime fiction editor. I've known him for years and always appreciate his books. We're talking about his current book that's just launching a Kickstarter right now called Pacing and Cutting. In the main section, we talked about the general things about pacing and cutting and a lot of our little tidbits about our favorite books and movies. But, Joshua, I know, happens to be a big fan of Fight Club, the book and the movie. So we're gonna go really deep into that one particular piece of creative work. So, Joshua, thank you so much for being here.
JOSHUA: Yeah, you're welcome. I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to still be talking with you.
MIGNON: I know. So what is it that you love so much about Fight Club?
JOSHUA: I found Fight Club not only a really refreshing change of storytelling; it tells its story in such an interesting and different way that I felt immediately hooked by it. And of course, since we're talking about pacing, the pacing of the story was immaculate. Both the book and the movie itself.
I think I saw the movie first, but I'm actually not positive anymore. I've read the book several times. I've watched the movie probably a couple dozen times.
MIGNON: Which one do you like more?
JOSHUA: Which one do I like more? I think ultimately probably the movie. Movies and books — it's difficult. Like how vivid is the movie playing in your head while you're reading a book versus how vibrant is it while you're watching it on a television or in a movie theater?
You have to contend with actors like Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, who are just imminently watchable. Both of them are fantastic at what they do. They're very compelling, and so I really like watching their portrayals of the characters on screen. So I'd say I would edge towards the movie being my favorite.
But the book is great. The book is really great, and it's a fast read.
MIGNON: Yeah, so what is it? What is it about the pacing that works so well?
JOSHUA: What I just said, it is a fast read. It is a page-turner. It's so interestingly well laid out. And Chuck Palahniuk, the author, has such an amazing voice and style. Like you, you're not gonna find other authors who sound the same as Chuck does.
And so I think I have an example of one of his openings. Yeah. So in my book, in "Pacing," I'm using this as an example of a tactic, a technique called time bombs. Basically, a time bomb is where you set something up that has a countdown to where it explodes later in the plot. The beginning of Fight Club, the very beginning, it starts with
Four minutes. I tongue the barrel. I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend Tyler, man, I'll make you a legend. I've been here from the beginning. I remember everything. Three minutes.
And it continues to count down.
And what we find out about that countdown is the building that they're in, that they're at the top of, no less, has explosives planted all over the basement, and it's going to explode.
MIGNON: Oh, yeah, a literal time bomb.
JOSHUA: A literal, yeah, a literal time bomb using the literary technique of a time bomb.
MIGNON: And that's how it opens.
JOSHUA: Yeah. Yeah. It's a rollercoaster right from there. He starts with introducing the situation, not as much as the character. And he does it in such an interesting way that it makes you want to keep reading to find out who these characters are involved in this crazy incident.
MIGNON: Great. Does it do withholding? Implied information. Does it do those things well?
JOSHUA: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I think that withholding is one of its primary techniques in keeping you involved in the story because you never quite understand what's going on the first time you go through it. You never quite understand what's happening. There's some funny stuff happening, but you don't know exactly what all of those clues amount to.
How often you plant and withhold information affects the feel of the pacing through how invested you make your readers. With those little clues being thrown in continually, like in Fight Club, Chuck throws in clues, hints, and then foreshadowing so often. I bet you every single page you can find at least a couple of examples.
I think that a common slip for newer writers is that they often do give readers too much information. We've all been there. Okay. As a writer we've all been there. It's easy to question ourselves in the clarity of our storytelling because we don't know how it's going to impact who is reading it.
And we know everything that's going on because it's in our head. It's just as easy to question how smart our readers are, right? And this can lead to a whole lot of over-explaining and a lot of babbling. When you're over-explaining your story, you're killing your tension.
So here's a pro tip for all the writers out there: your readers are smart.
As writers, we students start to realize that holding things back until readers absolutely need them is actually really good for our stories. In Fight Club, you see this done over and over again. Withholding details creates tension; it creates mystery.
What you're doing is you're offering another opportunity for readers to imagine, and guess, and make their predictions about what's happening, where the plot's going, how a certain conflict is going to resolve. As long as you keep them guessing and making predictions, you know that they're invested in your story; you know that they're gonna keep reading your story.
MIGNON: Great. So what else about Fight Club? What else do you think it does extraordinarily well? Is the dialogue good?
JOSHUA: The dialogue.
MIGNON: You can tell I haven't read it.
JOSHUA: You haven't?
MIGNON: No, I haven't. I know, and every time I read one of your books, I'm like, I've gotta go read that.
JOSHUA: You've seen the movie, though.
MIGNON: No, I haven't seen the movie either.
JOSHUA: Mignon!.
MIGNON: I know. I need to.
JOSHUA: Okay, so your homework for the rest of today is, after we finish talking, get some lunch, get a nice, hot beverage. Actually, you're in California; it's probably not cold there. You can tell. It's a little chilly here.
MIGNON: Oh, yeah.
JOSHUA: Sit down, put on Fight Club, and watch the whole thing.
MIGNON: I will. Maybe not today, but I will.
JOSHUA: Oh my goodness. After all these years. Yeah, the dialogue is fantastic. And like I said, Chuck has a really dynamic, really unique voice. And so the way that he writes his dialog, dialogue and the words that he says and the way that he has his characters speak is very identifiable I think.
And one of the things that David Farland was able to do, and I'm still working on it—I'm not as good as he was, and maybe I won't ever be. It was just one of the things that he was just naturally, he naturally excelled at. He could read a story and be able to tell from the voicing who the author was. It was amazing. It was very cool. He could do this not only with big names like Chuck— I don't know if he ever read Fight Club, but he could do it with authors from his workshops and from Writers of the Future, and people that he taught at seminars. If he had a sample of the writing and he was familiar with it, he could tell what you were doing when he was looking at other samples of writing.
It was amazing. He was very cool.
MIGNON: He was great.
JOSHUA: He was great. It just goes to show you that a writer's voice can't be trained. I wanted to say it can't be trained, but it can be strengthened, right? Everybody has their unique voice, like we've all got fingerprints, right?
Your voice can't be given to you. Your voice is. The more you work at your voice, the more you practice writing, the more stories you pen, the stronger your voice will become. The more evident its cracks, creases, and rolls will all become prominent in your writing, and that's great. That's a wonderful thing because it allows your writing to stand out from the crowd.
There's a lot of white noise out there right now. So if you've got a strong voice and you have a strong style, that's going to help you tremendously stand out from everybody else out there. And Chuck is a very lucky master of those.
MIGNON: Yeah, so the thing about Fight Club — okay, so maybe you can convince me why.
So when I hear about Fight Club, I think I don't really care about men hitting each other, right? So it does not sound like a movie for me. Like what? Why is it more than that? Why is it more than just a story about tough guys?
JOSHUA: Yeah. It's so much more than that. True. It's called Fight Club because there's a fight club, right? And so dudes fight. Yeah, that's true. But that, I feel, is really just a background to the story. It's a metaphor for the story and for what's going on. There's a lot in there.
There's a lot of social commentary in Fight Club, which is very interesting. It's talking about expectations of manhood. There's this scene where I think they've gotten on the bus, and Edward Norton happens to be looking around. You can tell they're sizing up everybody on the bus with them.
Who is physically capable of what? Can I take them in a fight? And he sees this poster, this advertisement on the side of the wall. It's like a Calvin Klein or something like that. It's just this black and white photo of this ripped dude; he has got all the abs, and he has got the pecs, and he is in his underwear.
And Edward Norton, like, smirks at it. He goes and points at it too; he points it out to Tyler and says, "Is that what a man looks like?" It's such a great moment. And it's true there's a lot of detail in there that is directly resulting from their actual fight club.
But what that really is it's commenting on, is this picture, this media picture, this thing that is being promoted and advertised into everybody's faces. Is this what we should be aspiring to? Is this really it? This is what we should be working towards, or is this something different?
MIGNON: Yeah.
JOSHUA: That's a great message. It's a great thing to think about.
MIGNON: Okay, cool. I always appreciate your recommendations, and actually, let's move on to get even more recommendations. My favorite part of the show, really, is becoming getting the guest book recommendations at the end. So I can't wait to hear yours.
JOSHUA: So do you want recommendations for fiction or for nonfiction?
MIGNON: Just for pleasure reading. So it could be new, it could be old, it could be a cookbook.
JOSHUA: Oh.
MIGNON: Like literally, what are you telling people? If we got together for lunch, you would say, "Mignon, you have to read this. I loved it so much." That's what I'm looking for.
JOSHUA: So I'll give you two; I'll give you a few examples. I'll give you one from my book recommendation list for writers. Actually, I'll give you two. The first one is a book called The First Five Pages by Noah Luman. It's just such a good read on how to write an opening of a story that grabs your readers.
And the second one is The Power of Resonance by David Farland. That one, especially, because not a lot of people are talking about that. Resonance in writing is such a powerful thing. I'll briefly define it for you. Resonance is basically drawing on common experiences and using that to make readers feel comfortable and drawn into a story.
So if we go back to Fight Club, if we're talking about an actual fight club and you have a martial artist, he's going to find resonance in all of the different ways that fighting is actually spoken about. So that's going to resonate with that fighter, with that martial artist. That's going to be one way that Fight Club draws him in as a reader, as a target audience.
Now, if we're talking about fiction books, oh man, there are so many. I'll start with the first one because I was thinking about this morning. Unfortunately/fortunately, my wife and I were talking about how there are thresholds in writing, and I was talking about emotional beats in our main interview.
You can easily surpass—pass, maybe not easily. You can surpass a reader's threshold for how much intensity of emotion they can take. And so the book that I was thinking about this morning is Where the Red Fern Grows.
MIGNON: Oh, yeah.
JOSHUA: This book is from the sixties, but it is literally one of the very first books I ever read, cumulatively speaking.
And I'm not even sure if I was a teenager yet when I read it. This book has stuck with me for decades, and I think it always will. There it is not possible for me to explain. Like when my wife asked me, "What's that about? What's Where the Red Fern Grows about?" So I was like, okay, keep it together, Josh. Keep it together. And I was like, I can do this.
And I tried to very succinctly and very quickly tell her what Where the Red Fern Grows was about, and I cannot make it through describing the plot of that story without breaking. Apparently, it's just not possible.
MIGNON: Yeah, I think if I remember correctly, when I was in grade school, I went to school in Seattle, and when it rained really hard, sometimes we had recess indoors, and they would show a movie. I was in like second or third grade, and they brought us all in and played this movie, and they had a hundred sobbing children in this auditorium.
It was a true disaster.
JOSHUA: Little mistake there. Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah, I guess they didn't think that through real well.
MIGNON: No.
JOSHUA: Some other ones that I think are freaking amazing are The Guardians of the Flame series by Joel Rosenberg.
MIGNON: I don't know that one. What's it about?
JOSHUA: This is like lit RPG before lit RPG was a thing.
MIGNON: What is RPG?
JOSHUA: Role-playing games.
MIGNON: Yeah. So lit RPG is basically fiction that takes the video game or the board game or whatever game it is and makes it real.
MIGNON: Oh, okay.
JOSHUA: So in Guardians of the Flame, we have a group of college students who are meeting with their professor every week, and the professor is running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign for them. But what they don't know is that their professor is actually a wizard. And in their last session, he takes all of them, including himself, and puts them all into the universe of the campaign, which turned out to be a real place.
And so each of the college students is actually transformed into the character that they were playing. And it's just, it's such a good story. Yeah. And that's another example of where I had a threshold broken. When we get to book four, something so crazy happens that when I read it, I didn't believe what I was reading.
I literally went back and read it a second time. It was like, did I understand that correctly? And I went back and read it again. And then the author, Joel, he's such a bastard. He didn't relieve us; he didn't answer the question for a whole other book. Like, it was excruciating. But yeah, that great series, such a good series, really captivated me. If we're talking about something …
MIGNON: Hate the author.
JOSHUA: Yeah, hate, hate, love the author. If we're talking about something a little bit more modern, one of my favorite, my very, very favorite book for quite a long time was "Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson.
MIGNON: I love that one.
JOSHUA: So good, right? Yeah. Back in 2010, that's what started my man crush on Brandon Sanderson. I guess it wasn't 2010, I guess, it was like 2009 or something.
MIGNON: No, me too. The foreshadowing. That is amazing.
JOSHUA: Good. In the world-building and the character development and the ideas behind the story just—chef's kiss. And that's the book that actually drew me into — cause and effect here — that's what drew me to Superstars, where you and I met in 2010. In a strange, roundabout way, I guess you can say that Mistborn is what led me to become an editor.
MIGNON: Yeah.
JOSHUA: It took me to, it led me to Brandon Sanderson, which led me to Superstars, which led me to asking Brandon to edit a story of mine at Superstars, which he did. And then the result of that conversation, through a series of events, was me becoming an editor.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's been a lot of years.
I got to the end of that book, and I'm like, I can't believe I missed that. Yeah. And I've recommended that to multiple people. Yeah, it's a great book, Mistborn.
JOSHUA: I'm glad we're not hitting another Fight Club debacle here.
MIGNON: I'll try. I'll try. Joshua Essoe, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you and your new book?
JOSHUA: So the new book, Pacing and Cutting, is launching on Kickstarter on April 1st, which, as I said before, is not April Fool's Day. It's Anne McCaffrey's birthday. Important distinction there. Yeah, it's launching on April 1st on Kickstarter. And I'm going to run the campaign for about three weeks.
I think I'm gonna end it on the 21st. And if you want to find me, you can find me on my website, joshuaessoe.com, or you can find me on Facebook. Super easy to find there and interact with me. I'm very available.
MIGNON: You are. Yeah. I like that about you too. Thank you so much for being here.
JOSHUA: Yeah, thank you for having me. Love talking with you.