How I Wrote Fight Club

What if there was a place you could go and get into a fight as casually as you would go ask someone to dance? What would the rules be for that place? It was a such a miserable time in my life.

I was right out of college and I had a job doing something I hated doing and I was so desperate that somebody said, "Come join my church! " and when you're right out of college you've left behind all of your social structure you've lost all your friends and I was so desperate to be with people, that I went to church. And the church had a giving tree and it was covered with ornaments and you just plucked an ornament and one ornament that I plucked said "Take a hospice patient on a date.

" The idea was that you would go to a hospice and you would ask out someone who was dying and you would take them to see the ocean for the last time and more often than not it was "Will you take me to my support group? I need a ride. " So, I would drive them to their support group and I would have to stay at the support group and no matter how much I tried to hide, people would assume that I had whatever everyone had.

There was no polite way of saying "Whoa hey whoa whoa whoa no don't have hepatitis! Good for you, but not me! " and so I started to kind of create this narrative in which a man attends these groups, because the next day when I went back to work I felt really good.

That no matter how shitty and boring my life turned out with my journalism degree and all my student loans I still owed, at least I didn't have cancer. JACK: When people think you're dying and they really really listen to you instead of just-- MARLA: Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. JACK: .

. . yeah.

I had gone on a vacation I've been hiking and camping and I had gotten into a really big fight with some people over noise at night in the woods You know, some people who just had to camp right next to our camp just had to bring some huge radio up to 3,000 feet on the Pacific Crest Trail and have a some big blowout party in the middle of the night and I came back to work at the end of my vacation with my face just bashed. My face was so awful and so trashed that nobody would acknowledge it, because to acknowledge it somehow they would have to find out something about my private life they just did not want to know and so for three months as my face slowly changed color eventually coming back to white people would look at at my chest and they would talk to my Adam's apple and they would say, "So, how was your weekend? " "Did you do anything interesting?

" And I'd be looking at them with two huge black eyes, saying, "No, how about you? " If you looked bad enough no one would dare ask you what you did with your free time. TYLER: The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.

The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. And that goes back to the Cacophony Society because Cacophony was basically an organization of people who had really boring jobs. They were letter carriers for the post office, there were bookstore clerks at Powell's, there were people who had really structured hourly job lines and they needed a way to have chaos in their lives for a very structured window of time.

If we do this kind of a theme party we can be crazy we can be insane anarchists from four o'clock until midnight. People would host it. People would come up with concepts the way you did when you were kids and you would play a game.

"The boards are safe but the ground is lava so if you touch the ground. . .

" and you would do that you just arbitrarily come up with rules you know "The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk. . .