We've talked before about how Fight Clubauthor Chuck Palahniuk is tantric sex videoswriting a disturbing coloring book for adults, who seem to love coloring these days.
While on tour to promote his graphic novel, Fight Club 2,Palahniuk took some time to talk to Mashableabout that coloring book due out this fall. Don't let his pleasant attitude distract from the fact that this looks to be one of the most insane coloring books on the market.
SEE ALSO: Morbidly colorful tales fill Chuck Palahniuk’s adult coloring bookWhy did you decide to do a coloring book, since that’s kind of an unusual medium?
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On one hand, I was shocked at how popular coloring books were. I saw some of my friends coloring, and I kind of teased them, and they explained to me, “No, this is the new sudoku, this is what people do now.”
At the same time, I had these associations with the variant cover artists, like Joëlle Jones, who had done the variant covers for Fight Club 2. And I didn’t want to lose those relationships, I didn’t want to drift away from these people.
The coloring book was a really nice interim project to do to maintain a relationship with these artists. Like David Mack (who illustrated Fight Club 2) is doing the author’s portrait, which is also going to be a coloring piece.
What sort of stories are in Bait?
Baitis mostly stories about parents and children. And the few stories that aren’t, are still stories about caregivers, powerful people taking care of things that have seemingly no power.
It's this juxtaposition of the powerful with the powerless. And all the stories allows for the caustic, back and forth power reversal in each story.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable What was it like writing a coloring book? How did including artwork designed for coloring impact the stories?
My editor asked me to go back through the stories and mention very specific colors. In particular, [the editor focused on] this one story that takes place in a snowy landscape, and a snowy landscape is not very much fun to color because it’s all gonna be white. So I had to fudge some passages about how snow is never justwhite. It’s every color of the rainbow, it’s whatever color is next to it, the color of the sky.
And then we had to make the illustrations as dense as possible, what we referred to as “coloring opportunities.” So the wallpaper always had to be patterned, cloth always had to be patterned, there had to be jewelry or something small, insects or something in the air. So there would always be a huge selection of things to color in each illustration.
How closely did you work with the artists?
I would suggest revisions to the sketches. And they would suggest counter-revisions, and it was kind of a bargaining back and forth.
We would kind of escalate the nature of the illustration and make it more extreme than either of us had the nerve to do on our own. We would suggest things that neither of us would have the nerve to ask for upfront. And in doing so, we would ultimately make the finished drawing edgy and challenging to both of us.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Why do you think adult coloring books have become so big? So many of them have come out in the past year.
There was a piece in the New York Times that said coloring books allowed people to attain the peaceful brain state that artistic endeavor allows them, but without the risk of worrying whether or not the artwork is going to turn out. It’s creativity without risk.
It’s non-language, and people can talk while they do it. You can hold a conversation while you do this. So in a way, it’s like knitting, it’s like so many things that are manual and physical.
You're working on a second coloring book. Is that going to be something similar, in terms of themes and stories?
It will be, yeah. But this book is going to be so beautiful. So it just seems like a shame not to try to put out one every year, or every other year. So eventually there’s a set of them, and readers complete them. In a meticulous way, they will ultimately be really gorgeous, gorgeous books. And they’ll be books worth keeping.
Do you do any drawing or coloring in your spare time?
No, I do not. But I find that most writers throughout history had a kind of secret art. Tennessee Williams did oil painting, Norman Mailer drew, and Truman Capote did collages. They all had some sort of a secret little amateur art thing that they did.
And as I travel, I collect semiprecious stones. And when I come home, I combine them with pieces and chunks of jewelry that used to belong to my mother. And I create bookmarks for people who write to me. So every year, I send out a certain number of these bookmarks to people. But it’s just my mindless tactile activity, that doesn’t require any linguistic thinking.