That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing. Dan Chaon More Quotes by Dan Chaon More Quotes From Dan Chaon There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Dan Chaon lure car adventure The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids. Dan Chaon my-wife wife kids Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep. Dan Chaon eye mistake sleep I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love. Dan Chaon writing teacher thinking There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years? Dan Chaon twenties people years Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story. Dan Chaon light dark writing If no one knows you, then you are no one. Dan Chaon ifs knows I've never been able to sleep very much, even when I was a kid. I used to hate being forced to lay in bed in the darkness, and just shifting in bed and staring at the shadows. Dan Chaon hate sleep kids You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell you: There is no bottom. Dan Chaon goes-on long thinking Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future. Dan Chaon alive moving-forward moving Maybe love, like suffering, is relative. Dan Chaon maybe-love relative suffering Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to. Dan Chaon issues character thinking How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning. Dan Chaon cells color eye It's not like it ruined my life, I was going to say, but then I didn't. Because it occurred to me that maybe it had ruined my life, in a kind of quiet way--a little lie, probably not so vital, insidiously separating me from everyone I loved. Dan Chaon littles lying way Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced. Dan Chaon eye trying thinking I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call "contemporary headline horror," stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news. And, you know, lastly, probably things that have happened to me in my own life. Dan Chaon horror strange attention For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually pretty hard to manage. Because I'm not allowed to do a make-up day. I can't do two pages the next day. The punishment for not completing my page is that I have to eat a vegetarian meal the next day. Dan Chaon next-day writing two I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years. Dan Chaon grief loss years I have to admit that 'Psychology Today' was one of the first magazines I started reading, back when I was 13 or 14, because I was the kind of kid that was curious about the mysterious human mind - I hoped to learn about telekenisis, multiple personalities, psychosis, and various other cool and terrible things that happened inside people's heads. Dan Chaon psychosis reading kids I don't think anybody deals well with tragedy or grief, but maybe my characters are particularly bad at it. Which is why I love them. Dan Chaon grief character thinking
