Quote

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

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Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
Like
Dark
Story
Turning
Ends
Findings
Stories
Finding
Light
Short
Littles
Walking
Little
Room
Writing
Rooms

More quotes by Dan Chaon

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So this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up and up until finally you couldn't see it anymore, and you knew that you had to start over.
Dan Chaon
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You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn't. I'm becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.
Dan Chaon
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Plot was always secondary in my mind.
Dan Chaon
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The kind of person I find myself interested in is a cross between being very emotionally complex and very immature. That's what I felt I was like when I was younger.
Dan Chaon
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I like to sleep about four or five really solid hours at night, and then sometimes take a nap in the afternoon or early evening after dinner. I love naps.
Dan Chaon
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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
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The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.
Dan Chaon
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A lot of time, with stories, I'll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes - a kind of subconscious exercise in which I'm trawling for some kind of entryway into fiction.
Dan Chaon
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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
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Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.
Dan Chaon
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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
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A lot of times in my short fiction there isn't much dramatized scene - there are a lot of short, interconnected bits, snippets of conversation, continual action, and so on. I frequently rely pretty heavily on voice.
Dan Chaon
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Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These are terrific stories-wise, compassionate and haunting.
Dan Chaon
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You can't count on notoriety lasting very long, and there's no way to predict whether anyone will care about your books or you in three years, let alone ten or twenty.
Dan Chaon
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I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.
Dan Chaon
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Maybe it's because I grew up during the MTV generation, but to me a perfect song is one I can imagine a music video to, a song that can take you into a dream.
Dan Chaon
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You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.
Dan Chaon
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There are all kinds of strange threads in American culture, and places where sympathy is extended and places where it isn't, and places where outrage is extended and places where it's not. It's this constantly shifting barrel of eels.
Dan Chaon
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In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.
Dan Chaon
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Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.
Dan Chaon