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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.

-Dan Chaon

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When I Was Younger

Dan Chaon

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Plot Was Always Secondary In My Mind.

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

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.

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.

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