Dan Chaon
Dan Chaon
Dan Chaon is an American writer. He is the author of three short story collections and two novels, including Among the Missing, which was a 2001 finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon's stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and Literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
eye cells color
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.
mistake sleep eye
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.
eye thinking trying
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.
falling-in-love book way
In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.
mind plot
Plot was always secondary in my mind.
character play identity
I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.
writing process novel
For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.
wife sheila reader
My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.
writing knowing worry
I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.
writing world pages
The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.
character writing plot
I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.
dream book egyptian-pyramids
I keep a daily journal of whatever weird thought comes into my mind, like when I had a dream I was in North Dakota in the middle of a blizzard and for some reason the Egyptian pyramids were there, too - that I was able to shuffle into the book.
writing stories daydreaming
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.
feelings identity way
The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there's anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it's that feeling. I always feel that way.