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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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Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
Connect
Read
Hope
Tell
Feel
Feels
Work
People

More quotes by Dan Chaon

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You know, the biggest indicator of where you live is your income. If you live in this suburb you make this much money, and if you live in that suburb, you make that much money, and if you don't have any money you live where you're allowed to live.
Dan Chaon
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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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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.
Dan Chaon
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Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.
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 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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The thing that grounds you, and the thing that really gives you a sense of wholeness, is your family, friends and your community. Those are the things that can mirror back to you what you're experiencing, and can affirm to you that the stories you are telling are true.
Dan Chaon
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I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.
Dan Chaon
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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
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Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.
Dan Chaon
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I guess I've been blessed with insomnia because I do a lot of my writing at night. Because I don't sleep as much as I probably should, I have that extra time to write weird stories and think odd thoughts.
Dan Chaon
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I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.
Dan Chaon
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Plot was always secondary in my mind.
Dan Chaon
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My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.
Dan Chaon
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It is not like a premonition of death. It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just now remembered it.
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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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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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
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At a certain point, you must be able to slip loose. At a certain point, you found that you had been set free. You could be anyone, he thought. You could be anyone.
Dan Chaon
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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