Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Dan Chaon
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
Pages
Writing
Hundred
World
Danger
Lost
Ends
Wells
Well
Sometimes
More quotes by Dan Chaon
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
Plot was always secondary in my mind.
Dan Chaon
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.
Dan Chaon
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
The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.
Dan Chaon
Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.
Dan Chaon
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
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
I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.
Dan Chaon
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
One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.
Dan Chaon
You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.
Dan Chaon
I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.
Dan Chaon
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
I think at a certain point the book develops a certain weight, or pressure. You've been pushing the rock up the hill for a long time and then it starts to roll and things do start to come together in the last two thirds.
Dan Chaon
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
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
I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.
Dan Chaon
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
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