The “little black box” is introduced early on, and with every revisit we learn something about it – the fact that it’s older than the oldest man in the town, that it’s scuffed and cracked, that it is annually called upon etc.

Secondly, Jackson makes use of the technique of recycling objects to greater meaning each time they’re described. And then, in terrible technicolor: “ The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready”. “ Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones”, Jackson writes. Importantly, as readers we’re given a single sentence warning – an opportunity to have the penny drop – before it’s spelled out for us. And a few thousand words later, they’re used to stone the selected to death. We initially see only a childlike game, a setting of the scene. In this novel, Jackson expertly plants her ‘gun’ immediately in front of you, even going back to its seemingly innocuous form numerous times: “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix-the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”-eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.” WHEN have you set the clock to run out and WHERE have you planted a seed of the element which will bring down the third act? “Where’s your gun?” is one of Chuck’s favorite questions to ask writers.

The first being the act of hiding the gun in your story. In ‘Consider This: Moments in my writing life after which everything was different’, Chuck Palahniuk uses Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ specifically to illustrate many of the techniques outlined in the minimalist writing approach used by Tom Spanbauer and himself. In interviews, Jackson talks about the insidiousness of the very first sentence about luring the reader into a false sense of comfort by hiding such violence in a beautiful setting: “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”Ĭhillingly, when asked in an interview why she thought her story was so hated, she answered that “people at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.” Could there be a more clear indication of why this violent narrative hit a nerve with the audience? The story addresses a number of different themes in its short text that of violence, of mob mentality, of conscription, of meaningless sacrifice and scapegoats, of men and women carrying out their ‘duty’ unquestioningly no matter the human cost.

The lottery shirley