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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.

-Dan Chaon

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How Can You Come

Dan Chaon

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Never Wanted To Get To A Point In My Life Where I Knew What Was Going To Happen Next. I Felt Like Most People Just Couldn't Wait Until They Found Themselves Settled Down Into A Routine And They Didn't Have To Think About The Next Day, Or The Next Year, Or The Next Decade Because It Was All Planned Out For Them. I Can't Understand How People Can Settle For Having Just One Life.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I Usually Have More Than One Thing I'm Working On At Once - I've Been Working On Three Different Novels. When I Get Stuck On One, I Hop Back And Forth.

A Conclusion Is Simply The Place Where You Got Tired Of Thinking.

A Novel Requires A Certain Kind Of World-building And Also A Certain Kind Of Closure, Ultimately. Whereas With A Short Story You Have This Sense That There Are Hinges That The Reader Doesn't See.

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.

I Feel Like I Go Back And Forth Between Being Fairly Fatalistic And Really More Hopeful About The Possibilities Of Things Changing. And Will See How That Goes In This Election Cycle. That Will Probably Strongly Affect How Fatalistic I Am.

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.

When I Was Younger I Was Attracted To People Who Had That Kind Of Artifice - People Who Were Incredibly Polished And Had A Complex Persona That Always Seemed To Be Turned On. I Was Really Interested In These Kinds Of People Because I Felt So Unformed.

It Doesn't Matter What You Do. In The End, You Are Going To Be Judged, And All The Times That You're Not At Your Most Dignified Are The Ones That Will Be Recalled In All Their Vivid, Heartbreaking Detail. And Then Of Course These Things Will Be Distorted And Exaggerated And Replayed Over And Over, Until Eventually They Turn Into The Essence Of You: Your Cartoon.

There's A Lot Of Effort Expended Once You Begin To Completely Trash Your Life. Sometimes, Writing Feels Like This To Me.

If No One Knows You, Then You Are No One.

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.

I'd Read An Enormous Amount But Had Spent So Much Time In My Own Head That I Didn't Have Extensive Social Skills. Suddenly I Was In This World Where I Was Surrounded By These Incredibly Polished And Wealthy Kids Who Had Gone To Prep Schools, And I Felt Daunted By Them. I Don't Think People Were Aware Of How Full Of Anxiety I Was... For A Long Time I Felt Like I Was Living In A Place Where I Shouldn't Have Been.

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.

In The End, There Probably Isn't Much Difference Between Being In Love And Acting Like You're In Love.

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.

I Still Think About The Writers I Loved When I Was A Kid.

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.

Fiction Is Fun Because You Get To Steal An Identity And Try To Make It Authentic.

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.

Plot Was Always Secondary In My Mind.

I've Always Been A Horror Movie Fan, Since I Was A Kid. And I Was Also A Really Scared Kid. I Was Easily Scared Of The Dark. One Of The Ways I Would Try And Get Away From My Fear Of The Dark Was To Pretend Like The Monsters Were My Friends.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even When Our Death Is Imminent, We Carry The Image Of Ourselves Moving Forward, Alive, Into The Future.

Writing About Women's Sexuality Is Very Scary For Me Because I'm Always Afraid I'll Get It Wrong.

I Keep A Daily Journal Of Whatever Weird Thought Comes Into My Mind, Like When I Had A Dream I Was In North Dakota In The Middle Of A Blizzard And For Some Reason The Egyptian Pyramids Were There, Too - That I Was Able To Shuffle Into The Book.

Egyptian Pyramids

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.

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.

I've Had A Lot Of Different Lives. I Was Adopted, I Grew Up In Nebraska, And Then I Went To Northwestern... Then I Had This Really Extraordinary, Different Life Than My Parents.

For Me, The Process Of Writing A Novel Happens Mostly In Your Head Before You Actually Start Writing.

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.

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.

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.

I Read A Lot, But At The Same Time I'm Not A Particularly Good Or Diligent Or Discriminating Reader. I Go Through Maybe Close To A Thousand Or More Books A Year, But A Lot Of Times I'll Only Read Bits And Pieces Of Any One Individual Text.

I Knew I Wanted To Play Around With Genre-esque Imagery, And The Identity Theft Stuff Came In The Middle, When I Was Figuring Out How The Characters Were Connected To Those Images.

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.

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.

One Of The Things I Rarely Do Is Write About Sex.

You Can't Tell People How To Feel When They Read Your Work. You Can Only Hope To Connect.

It Had Occurred To Him That If The Undead Don't Realize That They Are Dead, He Might Easily Be One Of Them Himself.

I Can't Understand How People Can Settle For Having Just One Life. I Remember We Were In English Class And We Were Talking About That Poem By - That One Guy. David Frost. 'two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood-' You Know This Poem, Right? 'two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood, And Sorry I Could Not Travel Both And Be One Traveler, Long I Stood And Looked Down One As Far As I Could, To Where It Bent In The Undergrowth-" "i Loved That Poem. But I Remember Thinking To Myself: Why? How Come You Can't Travel Both? That Seemed Really Unfair To Me.

It Is Not Like A Premonition Of Death. It Is As If She Died A Long Time Ago, And She Just Now Remembered It.

What If You Believed That Everything In Life Was Like A Prize? What If You Thought Of The World As A Big Random Drawing, And You Were Always Winning Things, The World Offering Them Up With A Big Grin, Like An Emcee's: Here You Go, Hollis. Here Is A Motorcycle. Here Is A Little Boy Who Loves You. Here Is A Weird Experience, Here Is Something Bad That You Should Mull Over Because It Will Make You A Better Person. What If You Could Think That Life Was This Free Vacation You'd Won, And You Won Just Because You Happened To Be Alive?

I Think We're Always In Some Ways Writing To The Teachers Who Gave Us Early Love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here Is The Door Of My Mom's House, Well-remembered Childhood Portal. Here Is The Yard, And A Set Of Wires That Runs From The House To A Wooden Pole, And Some Fat Birds Sitting Together On The Wires, Five Of Them Lined Up Like Beads On An Abacus.

Our Sense Of Self Is A Kind Of Construct. It Is In Some Ways Like A Novel, And It's Like A Fabric Of Fictions That We Patch Together From Memory.

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.

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.

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.

A Novel Requires A Certain Kind Of World Building And Also A Certain Kind Of Closure, Ultimately. Whereas With A Short Story You Have This Sense That There Are Hinges That The Reader Doesn't See. I Would Say That All Short Stories Have Mystery Naturally Built Into Them.

My Main Reader Was My Wife Sheila, And I Haven't Written A Lot Since She Died.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Plot And Scene Are Still The Hardest Things For Me, Though I Think They're The Building Blocks Of What Makes A Story Work.

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.

I Was Worried That, As A College Teacher, If I Wrote Too Much About Intergenerational Sex My Students Would Be Creeped Out.

I Would Say That All Short Stories Have Mystery Naturally Built Into Them.

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.

I've Been Reading Peter Straub Since I Was A Teenager, And His Work Is Hardwired Into My Brain. A Dark Matter Contains Echoes Of All That Has Been Great About Straub's Previous Work And Builds Upon It. This Rashomon-like Tale Is As Spooky And Frightening As Anything He Has Written, But It's Also An Intense And Moving Celebration Of Love. Out Of The Darkness Comes, Ultimately, A Surprising And Haunting Sense Of Joy.

Imaginative Empathy Is One Of The Great Gifts That Humans Have, And It Means That We Can Live More Than One Life. We Can Picture What It Would Be Like From Another Perspective.

I Usually Have More Than One Thing I'm Working On At Once -- I've Been Working On Three Different Novels. When I Get Stuck On One, I Hop Back And Forth. It's Sort Of Freeing: I Can Say I'm Abandoning This Thing That I Hate Forever And I'm Moving On To Something That's Good. I'll Find That I'll Go Back To [the Other Project] In A Day Or A Week And Like It Again. But That Moment Of Wanting To Trash Something -- That Virginia Woolf Moment When You Have To Be Stopped From Filling Your Pocket With Stones -- Comes Pretty Regularly For Me. Switching Is Probably A Good Thing.

There Is A Stage You Reach, Deagle Thinks, A Time Somewhere In Early Middle Age, When Your Past Ceases To Be About Yourself. Your Connection To Your Former Life Is Like A Dream Or Delirium, And That Person Who You Once Were Is Merely A Fond Acquaintance, Or A Beloved Character From A Storybook. This Is How Memory Becomes Nostalgia. They Are Two Very Different Things - The Same Way That A Person Is Different From A Photograph Of A Person.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Have Long Admired Caroline Leavitt's Probing Insight Into People, Her Wit And Compassion, Her Ability To Find Humor In Dark Situations, And Conversely, Her Tenderness Towards Characters.

In Some Ways All Of My Fiction Is Like A Conversation I'm Having With The Writers I Read When I Was First Falling In Love With Books.

Falling In Love

Maybe Love, Like Suffering, Is Relative.

There Is Your Car And The Open Road, The Fabled Lure Of Random Adventure. You Stand At The Verge, And You Could Become Anything.

The Happiest I Have Ever Been Is In The Life That I Led With My Wife And Kids.

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