1: Establishing Your Authority By Chuck Palahniuk In: Voice Chuck teaches two principal methods for building a narrative voice your readers will believe in. Discover the Heart Method and the Head Method and how to employ each to greatest effect.

2: Developing a Theme By Chuck Palahniuk In: Theme At the core of Minimalism is focusing any piece of writing to support one or two major themes. Learn harvesting, listing, and other methods, after a fun excursion into the spooky side of Chuck's childhood.

3: Using “On-The-Body” Physical Sensation By Chuck Palahniuk In: Voice Great writing must reach both the mind and the heart of your reader, but to effectively suspend reality in favor of the fictional world, you must communicate on a physical level, as well. Learn to unpack the details of physical sensation.

4: Submerging the “I” By Chuck Palahniuk Narrator In: Guts First-person narration, for all its immediacy and power, becomes a liability if your reader can't identify with your narrator. Discover Chuck's secret method for making a first-person narrator less obtrusive. Bonus: This essay includes the story 'Guts.'

5: Nuts and Bolts: Hiding a Gun By Chuck Palahniuk In: Objects Sometimes called "plants and payoffs" in the language of screenwriters, Hiding a Gun is an essential skill to the writer's arsenal that university writing courses almost never touch upon. Learn to identify and use multiple forms, including the Big Question, the Physical Process, and the Clock.

8: Nuts and Bolts: Using Choruses By Chuck Palahniuk In: Phrases This verbal repetition can create a beat of bland time that lets your story breathe, or it can refresh previous plot points and trigger strong emotions. Steal this natural aspect of spoken rhetoric to enliven your prose.

10: Beware the ‘Thesis Statement’ By Chuck Palahniuk In: Abstracts Abstract and summarizing lead statements feel natural to journalism and academic writing, but will suck the life from your fiction. Learn to unpack and rearrange these abstractions for greater effect.

18: Textures of Information By Chuck Palahniuk In: Research Lists, recipes, documentaries--almost everything verbal or textual is storytelling in some form. Chuck makes the case for lifting from various non-fiction forms and quick-cutting between them to enrich the textures of your fiction.

19: Effective Similes By Chuck Palahniuk In: Similies Every time you compare something inside of a scene to something that's not present, you distract your reader. Learn to limit the use of "like" or "as" and to unpack static verbs, along with other methods for forging stronger comparisons.

20: Talking Shapes: The ‘Thumbnail’ By Chuck Palahniuk In: Plot In this second "talking shapes" essay, Chuck explores a basic paradox of storytelling, while revealing what you can do about it. The Thumbnail opening foreshadows major plot points in advance and creates authority, without giving too much away.