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Posts tagged "dan chaon"
When he goes on reading tours, David Sedaris takes advantage of the audience by reading new material and seeing how it goes over. He has a marginalia system to keep track of how the readings go for later:
He makes a check mark in the margin when something gets a laugh…
When audience members start coughing (or audibly clearing their throats or shifting in their seats), Sedaris draws a little skull in the margin.
The readings are also practice for when he eventually records the audio books.
I know of at least one other author who does this: Dan Chaon.
Chaon kicked off his reading in a way unlike anything he, or many other authors, have ever done. Instead of reading material already published, Chaon decided to give those in attendance a treat of some of his works-in-progress.
Chaon read an excerpt from six of the different stories he’s working on and told the audience to offer suggestions or criticisms.
Filed under: show your work
If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader.
My friend Dan Chaon (author of Stay Awake) illustrates the problem with modern lit: everybody wants to be a writer, and nobody wants to be a reader.
The writing community is full of lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in. These people deserve the rejections that they will undoubtedly receive, and no one should feel sorry for them when they cry about how they can’t get anyone to accept their stories.
As a teacher, he runs into a lot of what I call the “I like to write, but I don’t like to read“ students:
[I]t has surprised me, over the years, how few of my creative writing students have made any effort to engage with the community that they supposedly want to be a part of.”
He then offers up a really great analogy: students who want to be rock star musicians.
They have started a band, and they are spending their weekends and off hours writing songs and practicing. Without fail, these kids know everything there is to know about new music. They are listening all the time—they can discourse on Bob Dylan as easily as they can talk about the new e.p. from a new band from Little Rock, Arkansas, or wherever, and they have a whole hard drive full of demos from obscure artists that they have downloaded from the internet.
I wish that my students who want to be fiction writers were similarly engaged. But when I ask them what they’ve read recently, they frequently only manage to cough up the most obvious, high profile examples. What if my rock star students had only heard of …um….The Beatles? We listened to them in my Rock Music Class in high school. And…. And Justin Timberlake? And, uh, yeah, there’s that one band, My Chemical Romance, I heard one of their songs once.
How awful would that be?
Young writers, if you want to be rock stars, you have to read.
It bears repeating: if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.
Every writer I know worth their salt is a voracious reader, and many of them have the opposite attitude of the students mentioned above, summed up here by William Giraldi: “I don’t enjoy writing. I enjoy reading.”
See also: Blake Butler’s call to “Be an open node,” where he talks about concrete ways you can join the literary community:
(1) When you read something you like, in any form, write the author and tell them.
(2) Write reviews of books you like… You can’t expect to be recognized for your work if you aren’t recognizing others for their work. Open the doors.
(3) Interview writers… I have done this for years and have made friends by doing it, have ‘opened doors’ so to speak: in other words, by helping others, you are also helping yourself.
(4) If you have free time, start an online journal. Start a blog, a review, an anything. If you don’t know how I’ll help you. Say stuff. Mean what you say.
(5) If you have a journal already, respond faster. Pay attention to your inbox.
Filed under: reading
“Writer—Dan Chaon” directed by Ted Sikora. Disturbing revelations throughout!
Nice video of Dan talking about his correspondence with Ray Bradbury, the midwest landscape, the pain of throwing away writing, and using autobiography in fiction.
He really pays forward the generosity he received from Bradbury — I used to live in his neighborhood in Cleveland and he was way nicer to me than I deserved, having coffee with me a few times and inviting me to events at Oberlin. It really meant a lot.
Oh, and he’s a fucking awesome writer. If you like novels, get Await Your Reply, if you like short stories, get his new book, Stay Awake.
Dan Chaon writes a first draft on color-coded note cards he buys at Office Max. Ideas for his books come to him as images and phrases rather than plots, characters or settings, he says. He begins by jotting down imagery, with no back story in mind. He keeps turning the images over in his mind until characters and themes emerge.
His most recent novel, “Await Your Reply,” which has three interlocking narratives about identity theft, started out as scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy’s severed hand, resting on ice. He described each scene on a card, then began fleshing out the plotlines, alternating among blue, pink and green cards when he moved between narratives.
During the early stages of writing, he carries a pocketful of cards with him wherever he goes; as they accumulate, he stores them in a card catalogue that he bought at a library sale. It often takes two years before something resembling a novel takes shape. He eventually transcribes the cards onto the computer and writes furiously from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.
And of course I still have her books, her novel, her stories, the words that she put together to create imaginary worlds. I know that she believed that a work of art was the one way for us to stay on in the world after we are gone, that was the urgency that she put into her students, this is the piece of you that will last, this is you, so you’ve got to do it right.
Re-reading her work, I think I can find her, just for a moment. A hint of perfume in the backyard, a tiny light outside in the distance, winking on and off like a firefly. Yes, she is there, briefly, I can feel her–though in the end, I’m sorry, I would rather have the flesh.
