“Brain Worms”: the song that inspires Chuck Palahniuk’s prose

Posted On June 1, 2024June 1, 2024

Authors hail from all manner of backgrounds and bring their experience and passions to distinctive subjects and writing styles. In the case of Chuck Palahniuk, the modern literary icon behind such triumphs as Fight Club and Adjustment Day, his aims are first to entertain and, second, guide the reader on a journey of sociological and psychological reflection.

Palahniuk studied for a journalism degree at the University of Oregon and subsequently juggled work as a journalist and mechanic before taking up writing full-time. Experience in the cutthroat business of journalism and macho-mechanics in the garage engendered a succinct, uncompromising and fast-paced storytelling style that characterises some of Palahniuk’s most popular works of fiction.

A journalist at heart, Palahniuk’s stories often profit from dark comedy, bizarre characters, and societal taboos. These plots are effortlessly engaging, thanks to a minimalist writing approach and short, snappy sentences that help build pace and suspense in moments that call for tense page-turning and furrowed brows, such as the closing face-offs between the narrating insomniac and the mysterious Tyler Durden.

Another critical element of Palahniuk’s writing style is repetition. Used alongside short, simple sentences, repetition can give the prose a lyrical quality for optimal artistic impact and highlighted significance. In a past Q&A session, Palahniuk spent more than three hours conversing with his fans, offering writing tips, discussing his catalogue, and revealing his passions in literature and other subjects.

During the session, one enthusiastic reader joked, “I still hate you for making me buy all your books, though. Besides always making me think, they’re terribly fucking catchy.” normally, such a sentence might come off as a little rude, but the fan clearly understands Palahniuk’s sense of humour. Although not strictly a question, the sentence had Palahniuk’s mind wondering: “You wanna know a secret? I fuck’n love catchy ‘hooks’.”

Deftly trading the fan’s “books” for “hooks”, Palahniuk set the scene to explore his taste for repetitive music and explain how it inspires his writing style. Hooks, “like you’d see on inspirational posters or hear in songs,” or “brain worms”, as Palahniuk described them, inspired his 2012 novella Romance.

He noted that repeated lines in the book were modelled on Bill Withers’ “‘I know, I know, I know, I know…’ section in ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, a song he lives “to rehear”. It’s like a mantra,” Palahniuk explained, “this repetition where language begins to break down and sound like music like a bird’s repeating song/call. Near the end of the story Romance, I tried the same trick by repeating, ‘And life goes around, and life goes around, and life goes around…’ chanting as many cycles of that sentence as possible. It feels like being a human prayer wheel atop a mountain in Nepal.”

Although his most blatant use of this Withers repetition arrived in Romance, Palahniuk notes a similar idea found in a famous line from 1996’s Fight Club. “That’s why Fight Club is so ‘sticky’. The repetition, ‘the first rule, the second rule, etc.’ If your reader comes away from the story remembering even one line, you’ve succeeded.”

“Why CAN’T stories be more like songs?” Palahniuk concluded with an intriguing rhetoric.

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