Dan Chaon Quotations

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.

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

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.

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

My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.