Dan Chaon Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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

  Mom, Writing, Everyday

  Interview with Tom Barbash, www.believermag.com.

• For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Process, Novel

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15th, 2009.

• I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

  Dan Chaon

  Fun, Block, Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think that the way that I write stories is by instinct. You have some basic ideas - a character, or an image, or a situation that sounds compelling - and then you just feel your way around until you find the edges of your story. It's like going into a dark room... you stumble around until you find the walls and then inch your way to the light switch.

  Dan Chaon

  Wall, Writing, Character

  Interview with Tom Barbash, www.believermag.com.

• One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.

  Dan Chaon

  Sex, Writing

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15th, 2009.

• Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.

  Dan Chaon

  Cheating, Writing, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I wanted to write a horror story. But in some ways, I have always thought of myself as a kind of ghost-story/horror writer, though most of the time the supernatural never actually appears on stage.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Ghost Stories, Horror Stories

  Interview with Tom Barbash, www.believermag.com.

• Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Scary, Sexuality

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15th, 2009.

• 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

  Blessed, Writing, Sleep

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Writing, Two, Next Day

• A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, People, Trying

  Interview with Tom Barbash, www.believermag.com.

• I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen.

  Dan Chaon

  Teaching, Writing, Years

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15th, 2009.

• 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

  Loneliness, Writing, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• People write fiction in their minds all the time - every time we read a 'human interest' news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we're trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, News Stories, People

  Interview with Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. February 15, 2012.

• 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

  Writing, Stories, Daydreaming

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15th, 2009.

• I know a lot of people don't listen to music when they're writing because it distracts them, but for me it's almost a way to get into the self-hypnotic state that I need to be in to write.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Self, People

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15th, 2009.

• 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

  Writing, Dark, Light

  "An Interview With Ficton Writer Dan Chaon". Interview with Sara Peyton, www.pw.org. July 19, 2004.

• 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

  Writing, Character, Plot

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dan Chaon". Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15, 2009.

• I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.

  Dan Chaon

  Teacher, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15th, 2009.

• I tend to like order in almost every other aspect of my life, but for me, the process of writing is really chaotic and decadent and indulgent.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Order, Process

  Interview with Tom Barbash, www.believermag.com.

• 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

  Writing, World, Pages

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15th, 2009.

• 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, Vision, Realizing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, People, Drunk

  Interview with Tom Barbash, www.believermag.com.

• 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.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Knowing, Worry

  Interview with Molly Antopol, therumpus.net. September 15, 2009.

• I also have just my own limits about stuff. I'm not interested in writing graphically about sexual assault for example. I feel like the stuff that I'm fascinated by is the stuff that's part of the public imagination of what horror is. The bleakness is a different issue. I think that just stems from my personality. I wish that I offered a little more glimmer of hope sometimes.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Thinking, Imagination

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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