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

Categorized in : Writing Mom Everyday

There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything.

lure car adventure

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my w... by Dan Chaon

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.

my-wife wife kids

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 mistake sleep

I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gav... by Dan Chaon

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

writing teacher thinking

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

twenties people years

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.

light dark writing

If no one knows you, then you are no one. by Dan Chaon

If no one knows you, then you are no one.

ifs knows

I've never been able to sleep very much, even when I was a kid. I used to hate being forced to lay in bed in the darkness, and just shifting in bed and staring at the shadows.

hate sleep kids

You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell you: There is no bottom.

goes-on long thinking

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

alive moving-forward moving

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative. by Dan Chaon

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

maybe-love relative suffering

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to.

issues character thinking

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.

cells color eye

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.

littles lying way

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.

eye trying thinking

I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call "contemporary headline horror," stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news. And, you know, lastly, probably things that have happened to me in my own life.

horror strange attention

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.

next-day writing two

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.

grief loss years

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.

psychosis reading kids

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.

grief character thinking