So I took this quiz that determines which famous writer you write like (hey, all the kids are going it), and was a bit surprised - not unpleasantly so - to learn that my writing style mostly closely resembles Chuck Palahniuk’s.
The only book of Palahniuk’s that I’ve read is Fight Club, which I really enjoyed, but I wouldn’t have said that he’s influenced my writing. I don’t read a lot of fiction in general. When I do, I tend to read short stories; I don’t have the attention span for long novels.
What I do enjoy is non-fiction. George Orwell’s essays are a favourite. I also like a lot of books by Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel, How Proust Can Change Your Life) and Geoff Dyer (But Beautiful, Paris Trance (well, OK, this one is fiction), Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It).
I wish there was more information telling me what it was about my writing that makes it Palahniuk-like. This is what I entered in for the quiz - an unfinished piece (yes, one of many) that I started on the day I left for New York at the beginning of February.
Purgatory, just in case you forgot, is that in-between plane between Heaven and Hell. It’s not really good, it’s not really bad, it’s just… there.
The Molson Pub in Terminal 1 at Lester B. Pearson International Airport is not entirely dissimilar. After all, you’re in a place that’s neither really here nor there, it just… is.
There is fountain pop. And chicken strips that are nicely done, accompanied by fries that are rather less well done, but not irredeemably so. So here you sit, waiting to be somewhere else and you think… this isn’t so bad.
And then the opening strains of Jefferson Starship’s “We Built This City on Rock and Roll” reach out like one of the flaming tongues of hell to sear your brain, and you think… ouch.
Oh, cheer up.
The baggage carousel at LaGuardia International Airport is less like purgatory and more like the ancient Coliseum in Rome. You are now a spectator, anxiously watching a cold cruel track and waiting for your chariot - er, suitcase - to reach the finish line and meet your outstretched hand. Then it’s on to the taxi stand, to wait for another kind of chariot to whisk you into Manhattan.
New York. New York, New York. As Alicia Keyes rhapsodizes in a soaring contralto, “concrete jungle, what dreams are made of.” It’s what lesser cities reach for, yearn to be, and as your taxi ferries you through its streets and avenues, you gape at block after block of towering steel and glass and think that, maybe if you stayed here long enough, you too could just reach out and scrape the sky.
You wish.
Is it the phrasing, maybe? Perhaps I ought to read more Palahniuk and find out…
