Growing up, I liked the idea of telling stories, but I always despised writing in a classroom setting.
Second grade held the worst period of my childhood. I would sob and plead with my mom to not make me go to school on Fridays, often opting for a two hour one-way car ride with her for her methadone treatment. Fridays meant spelling and vocabulary tests. I knew what the words meant. I could spell them on my own (most of the time). But we would have to write a short story. Five sentences. It may as well have been five pages to my anxious mind. A daunting task with a time limit. I dreaded it every week.
From the ages of three to thirteen, I constantly had a book in my hands. Daniel Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events still is a cherished favorite of mine. I even ended up getting the VFD insignia (as illustrated by Brett Helquist) as my first and only tattoo. But something happened. As I grew older and my classes introduced required reading and essays of analysis about text I struggled to connect with, I even began hating reading.
This was really jarring.
But, I was growing older. Life was changing quickly as I was becoming more aware of my surroundings. Of my home life. Of my mother's addiction and what those trips to the methadone clinic meant. I understood the complexities of my parents' relationship more, often through arguments.
I started understanding the media my parents would watch in the living room. Ranging from comedians with streaks of dark humor, to horror films, to racy cable network television where it seemed like life was always on the downward spiral. These things felt closer to the world as I was beginning to understand it. The fiction I found in classroom libraries started feeling too sanitized. Too safe, too far from reality. No more boy wizards. No more dystopian fantasies. Nothing felt grounded enough in the bleak reality I saw around myself to matter.
Then in my sophomore year of high school, I was introduced to an author I had never heard of before. Chuck Palahniuk. I started with Haunted, a wonderfully dark set of anthologies strung together in this overarching plot of writing as a means of survival.
I devoured the book and soon moved on, reading Fight Club only after hearing my English teacher say that she kept it on a special shelf behind her desk because of the novel having components of IEDs within its pages. This book truly re-ignited my love of reading.
Palahniuk's non-linear storytelling, drenched in the harsh realities of modern American life that can make us go mad, combined with a near reliance on unreliable narrators, struck a cord with me. These were the types of stories I could write essays about. These were the types of stories I would want to write.
My favorite fiction is filled with darkness just as our world is. Humans in all of recorded history have faced troubles and twisted triumphs at the costs of one another. Sometimes reality itself feels exaggerated, much in the way that derelict warehouses filled with bombs and soap, stealing pills from the medicine cabinets of the rich and famous after birds ate your face, or breaking your grandfather's dick at a glory hole all can feel exaggerated.
Originally, when I started typing this post, it was meant to be an introduction to a piece of fiction I started writing (but never finished) about 8 years ago. Inspired heavily by Palahniuk's Fight Club beginning as a seven page short story. But! I have decided to make this post separately.
