Dan Chaon Quotes

There was a time when I thought I turned terrible things over in my mind because I read and wrote too many scary stories. (Note self: start writing about unicorns and bunnies)

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.

I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.

I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

I think that people who can't believe in faeries aren't worth knowing. I just think that alternate realities make you a good writer. If your work is any more than one dimension, you believe in faeries.

I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.

Writing I think, out of what all of us do, writing is the hardest. You're the only who start with nothing except what's up here. You do that. It's really hard I think, acting is not.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

I was headed for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don't think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I'd come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.

I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along.

I don't really know how writing process happens, how these songs are arrived at. One of the things I like about the writing process is, I don't necessarily know where it's going, and even if I think I know where it's going, it'll turn out different. I find that exciting and rewarding.

Street skating, which is what I grew up with, is completely free of rules. You can do anything. When I see a skater go by, I think, What is this person going to do here? It's the same with people who write, who make music, who draw, who make movies. Creative people tend to have all of those different avenues in them.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

Ultimately, I think writing is a mixture of craft, inspiration, and being incredibly, courageously explorative with yourself - and being brutally honest, too.

I think one of the good things about writing novels is that you always start from scratch.

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

I think the thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. It's the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical.

The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.