[CEAD #12] Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs by Chuck Palahniuk
Introducing Craft Essay a Day: what it is, why I'm doing it, links to CEADs #1-11, and breaking down the most popular, misunderstood craft essay I've ever read.
In 2023, I began Craft Essay a Day on my tumblr in an effort to make it through my ever-growing collection of craft books and anthologies. Every morning for several months, I would sit outside with my coffee and read however many pages, highlighting them, annotating them, and leaving little Post-Its in them for my future self—ideas for lesson plans, summarizing complicated ideas in simpler terms, modernizing some of the older material, or translating insights to a fanfiction context. Or, in the case of today’s CEAD, outright debunking the thesis.
A lot of people don't even know craft books exist, let alone that they’re an entire genre. If you ask a random person “What is the best book about writing?” they would answer “never read one” or maybe On Writing by Stephen King, a book I haven’t read yet but have an inkling I’ll hate.
Writers, beginning writers especially, tend to be thirsty for a writing rulebook, something that tells them to do this but not that. Avoid this, this, and this. Here are 10 things agents hate to see in the first ten pages of a manuscript.
I know I did. And I took all those things to heart, accumulated them until they grew mountainous and I could no longer write a single sentence for fear of breaking a rule and coming across like a beginner (which I was). No adverbs, no adjectives, action verbs only, and so on and so forth, as established by Strunk & White and disseminated as random pet peeves of English middle school teachers everywhere.
If you were to follow every popular writing rule, you would end up with some mindless thriller written in the style of Hemingway. If your passion is to write mindless thrillers in the style of Hemingway, I support you, but most of us are not. As I like to say, you don’t have to be Hemingway. Hemingway was Hemingway, he did a good job of being Hemingway, and we don’t need more Hemingway. Your task as a writer is to be yourself and find your own style. It doesn’t even need to be a good or unique style, just one you enjoy writing in.
Good writing advice doesn’t tell you what to do or not do; seeking out advice about do/do not will only cater to the preferences of the rulemaker with the assumption that you, the learner, want to become just like them, which completely defeats the point of creativity, which is to make new things in a new way.
Good advice teaches you what can be done and why you may or may not want to do it. A good craft essay therefore is one that zeroes in on some aspect of writing, expounds on it, and encourages you to play around with it in your own work to see what happens.
However, craft essays are written by creative writers and therefore are rarely as clear as a Wikipedia page. They’re more like entries in a recipe blog that begin with getting buried in an avalanche on a ski trip and 10k words later meander to a kid-friendly shrimp scampi recipe.
Ergo, I began CEAD as a way to translate (so to speak) essays in a way that would help me retain and apply their principles. Initially I intended to create an index so I could refer to specific information, but I thought it would be better instead to create entries in a series where I read an essay or a chapter of a craft book, summarize it, pull out the most salient quotes and key terms, and then commentate on it. And, obviously, share it. This way, you get the core info without having to read it all yourself (some of these texts are sooo dense), and I'll have working reference documents for my own purposes. Everybody wins.
CEAD doesn’t mean I’ll be posting daily. It means I read daily and post every 4 weeks or so. I just finished Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, and that has 10 chapters so I’ll probably break it down into 2-3 different posts.
Today’s post is free to read because it’s mostly full of content that can be accessed elsewhere, but going forward, they’ll be for paid subscribers only. So if you’re interested in future CEADs, consider subscribing!
CEADs #1-11
These are all available on my tumblr. Links go to the original posts.
#1: “Beginnings” by Ann Hood, The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House
Hood begins the essay by talking about process, namely that she has to know her first sentence before she can start writing a novel, but that once the novel is finished, the beginning changes anyway.
#2: 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley, Chapter 1: “Introduction”
in the introduction, Smiley narrates the story of how she came to write this book, and how her identity as a novelist has changed over the years. infuriatingly, she talks about how easy writing has always been for her, and that she wrote all of her very well-regarded, award-winning books in different ways but mostly painlessly.
I only ended up writing CEADs on chapters 1-3 of this book, but I did finish reading it and it turned out to be maybe my favorite craft book of all time. So I do intend to go back through it and write future posts about the remaining chapters.
#3: “Don’t Write What You Know” by Bret Anthony Johnston, The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House
Johnston’s last rule is “don’t write what you know.” (why not “write what you don’t know” which is, you know, encouraging?) his very long-winded yet simple point is that you shouldn’t write fiction that is an exact replica of your own life. the result of doing this is creating a work that is self-referential and thus meaningless (which he later contradicts by saying intending meaning in fiction is Bad).
#4: “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” by Zadie Smith
Smith opens the essay by describing what it feels like to have the voices of so many fictional characters in your head all the time, and quotes the Whitman “i contain multitudes” poem that has now been distorted by internet meme culture in the vein of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” and William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say.” she uses Whitman to introduce the idea of “containment”: that we as writers contain identities other than our own, and in writing about them, face the adage of “writing what you know.”
#5: “On Imagination” by Mary Ruefle
Ruefle declares that imagination is not necessarily good; imagining things can hurt us as equally as help us, and we don’t really have control of it.
#6: “The King of the Birds” by Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
Mystery and Manners is Flannery O'Connor’s book of collected essays and lectures. i’ve taught some of these essays in intro to cw, not because i agree with them, but because i disagree with them, and generally like students to disagree with them also, to introduce what it means to have a dialogue with what you’re reading. to be an active participant in what you’re reading and not a passive recipient of it.
#7: “Funny Is the New Deep: An Exploration of the Comic Impulse” by Steve Almond, The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House
Almond asserts that humor is the result of being able to look at understand the wider picture, and that’s why comedy can be so rooted in politics and current events.
#8 & 9: 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley, Chapter 2: “What Is a Novel?” and 3: “Who Is a Novelist?”
Smiley begins chapter 2 by defining the novel as an object. in the past decade or so, with the invention and rise of ebooks, it’s easy to forget that the novel is a physical thing, and moreover, because reading a novel is entirely mental, we can often forget its thing-ness. you can hold a novel, but you cannot experience the novel until you open it and read its contents.
#10: “Research in Fiction” by Angela Barrett, The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House
the very big point Barrett is making (and a great point it is) is that when you research for fiction, you’re not invoking the facts of a time or place or trade, but translating those facts into a lived experience that will shape and affect your characters.
#11: “The Sword of Damocles: On Suspense, Shower Murders, and Shooting People on the Beach” by Anthony Doerr, The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House
Doerr believes that the draw of suspense is the ability to create a kind of anxiety outside of reality where one can feel emotions within the safe bubble of narrative structure. the story, after all, must always end, but life continues on.
Now it’s time for today’s CEAD…
I truly think this essay changed contemporary prose conventions for the worse. I am constantly rallying against its effects, though I don’t disagree with a lot of what it says. I think it just really needs some context to land—context that is not provided at all.
“Nuts and Bolts: ‘Thought’ Verbs” by Chuck Palahniuk
From litreactor (2013)
beginner | intermediate | advanced | masterclass
filed under: prose, exercises, bad advice
Summary
Palahniuk urges writers to remove “thought” verbs from their prose in an effort to encourage them to “unpack” the thought using exterior details.
He says that by following his advice that “in six months, you’ll be a better writer.” This is untrue. You’ll be a better writer insofar as you’ll have more practice being able to convey thoughts and feelings externally. But that also means you’ll be sacrificing meaningful interiority. More on that in a moment.
His list of no-no verbs includes: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, Loves, and Hates. He adds, “And it should include: Is and Has, but we’ll get to those, later.”
He considers these verbs “short-cuts” and that by eliminating them in your writing, you’ll be left only with action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling. In other words, he’s taking a bossy approach the common adage “show, don’t tell.”
He goes on to say that “thought” verbs induce “Thesis Statements,” or sentences that define the sentence a writer goes on to describe. He then urges writers never to leave their characters alone, lest they introspect and step away from the action, thereby slowing the pace of the story.
And now we return to the utterly absurd request to remove “is” and “has.” He compares the sentences “Ann’s eyes are blue” and “Ann has blue eyes” to
“Ann coughed and waved one hand past her face, clearing the cigarette smoke from her eyes, blue eyes, before she smiled…”
which is worse.
This is because 1) it assumes a narrator who is distant enough from its subject to describe images, thereby removing any possibility of alternative styles of writing, of which there are many (for example, unless they’re looking in a mirror or at a photo of themselves—or if they’re Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way—would a limited POV narrator describe their own appearance?), and 2) none of this action is really relevant to a conflict. It simply renders an image. If all you want to do in storytelling is render images, make movies. Take up photography. Draw. But don’t bother with one of the few artistic mediums where images are tools whose meaning is always, by definition, interpreted. What the writer sees in their head will never be what the reader sees. Something will always be lost in translation.
And forever after, once you’ve learned to Un-pack your characters, you’ll hate the lazy writer who settles for: “Jim sat beside the telephone, wondering why Amanda didn’t call.”
Right, because Proust and Henry James and Woolf and modernists in general who explore consciousness are sooooo lazy. Here’s a paragraph from the famous madeleine scene in In Search of Lost Time. I’ve gone ahead and bolded all the words and phrases that Palahniuk tells us not to use:
And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
Imagine Marcel Proust hearing the author of a book called Fight Club tell him that the pursuit of rendering the conscious mind in relation to a meaningful stimulus is inherently inferior to describing what that stimulus looks like. For context, this passage defined what’s now called The Proustian Moment, or involuntary memory—the experience of taste and smell to conjure a rush of seemingly forgotten memories. You’ve probably experienced it countless times. If Proust had limited himself to describing the look, taste, and smell of the madeleine, we wouldn’t have this beautiful and vivid description of otherwise abstract cognition.
That’s the point and power of prose: rendering the conscious mind. No other medium does this as well as prose does.
My Thoughts
If you take nothing else away from this, take this: any writing advice telling you to deprive yourself of an important tool is not advice worth listening to. Good writing advice tells you what the tools are and how to use them. A carpenter wouldn’t tell his apprentice that he should stop using a hammer and that learning to do a hammer’s work with a screwdriver will make him a better carpenter.
That said, I don’t firmly disagree with what Palahniuk is saying but I think the way he’s saying it is terrible pedagogy. Here’s what I do agree with and why:
Thesis sentences — I call these “topic sentences.” For anyone coming to creative writing from essay writing, especially the American public school system, you’ve probably internalized “say what you’re going to say, say it, and say it again.” The cognitive process of paragraphing almost requires us to make topic sentences. We have to get the gist of what we’re trying to say and then we can lay it out. So, yes, I agree that it’s good to get into the habit of removing topic sentences in revision. But in drafting, go ahead and write them so you can get to the next sentence more easily.
Trying out this exercise (temporarily) — I honestly think this is a great exercise in developing stronger exteriority. Trying it out for a month or so might be useful, or even combing through an existing draft looking for opportunities to use it can be a great approach to revision. By all means, do the exercise. But don’t believe that it’s inherently superior, or that you should aim to write this way all the time.
Palahniuk’s writing style — I love Fight Club, the book and the movie. But I recognize it’s a work of its time and market, not just in theme but in style. Everything has historical context, even our idea of what “good writing” looks like. I think this writing advice is great if you want to write the next Fight Club. But if you don’t, it’s pretty worthless.
Unpacking — Another great revision tool is taking sentences you’re feeling meh about and practicing what Palahniuk is preaching in terms of “un-pack[ing] your characters.” Especially if you struggle to write long-form works, this can be a solid practice in description and expansion.
A much stronger text that tackles this subject—which is actually called point of method—is The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock, which will eventually be a CEAD series of its own. It was first published in 1921 and it’s in dire need of some updated terminology and modern context.
In 2023, I wrote a workshop series for Books on tumblr. The following is how I summarized Lubbock’s point of method and a few other concepts that lend some additional context to Palahniuk’s pedantic assertions of the misuse of “thought” verbs.
From “A Narrative Imperative”
The point of method is the relationship of the narrator to the rendering of the story. Lubbock separates point of method by pictorial and dramatic, arguably the beginning of the adage “show, don’t tell” that we talked about in Week 1. A pictorial method is one that renders or “shows” a story; a dramatic one is one that “tells” a story. But The Craft of Fiction was first published a century ago and narration has changed a lot since then, so I’m going to offer some other ways of defining point of method.
Although it’s a false binary, I like to think of point of method as “in scene” or “in summary.” Screenplays are beholden to scenes—film is a visual medium and so it’s limited to what literally can be shown. In its simplest form, a scene is a discrete section of a story where a character interacts with their environment in some way. A scene is often portrayed in direct discourse, which means free and clear access to the actual dialogue the characters are speaking. In other words, we can trust the words in quotes to be what is really said—not an interpretation, summation, or distortion of what is said.
Many writers I work with develop a block when they pigeonhole themselves into scenic writing. Fanfiction is largely written in direct discourse and relies on sequences of scenes, I suspect because a lot of fics are based on canonical texts of visual mediums. When I point out that fanfiction is prose and can therefore access the interior thoughts and perspectives of a narrator, I think it can be pretty freeing for some writers. In prose, scenes are optional.
On the opposite side of the scenic spectrum is summative writing. Writing in summary is kind of a zooming out of the narration, where events are rendered in a single paragraph or sentence. Summary can evoke indirect discourse, or interaction between characters conveyed within the narration. For example, “‘I’m sorry I rang the doorbell,’ she said” is direct discourse. “She said she was sorry she rang the doorbell” is indirect discourse.
It’s important to remember that all narration is a negotiation of the internal and the external, or what I call interiority and exteriority. Interiority encompasses all thoughts, feelings, and interpretations of a narrator. Exteriority includes everything outside the narrator. “She heard the doorbell ring” is an interior sentence. “Someone rang the doorbell” is an exterior one.
Scenic writing is not inherently superior to summative writing. Direct discourse is not inherently superior to indirect discourse. Exteriority is not inherently superior to interiority. They’re all just spectrums, and you get to define where your narrator lands on each of them.
I later expanded on point of method and some of Lubbock’s terminology in this ask I replied to about actor writers vs. director writers.
Palahniuk’s essay was written 10+ years ago and I think writers have internalized it so much that it’s reshaped the way they’ve approached sentence-making. I notice in commercial and genre fiction a hamfisted attempt to comply with “no internal thoughts/feelings” and “turn verbs active” that manifests in compulsory personification that goes something like “Rage ripped through her” or “Fear gripped my throat.”
This is not inherently stronger than “I felt rage” or “I was afraid.” It might be stronger in some contexts, in some styles, in some genres. But there is no sentence form or styling thereof that is better than any other. It all depends on how you use them.
Remember that all sentence forms and parts of speech are tools. You use writing tools to create effects. What Palahniuk is saying is that his writing style, in depriving himself of one tool, emphasizes the effect of another and thereby—in his opinion—strengthens it. But don’t deny yourself any tools that might help realize the effects you intend.