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You know those movies that start with an alarm clock going off, and then the main character rolls out of bed, yawns, puts his bare feet on the floor, goes to the bathroom, brushes his teeth, takes a shower, then has a delicious cup of coffee and a good breakfast while reading the newspaper?

I hate those kinds of movies, and I have vowed never to subject anyone to those scenes.

Besides which, I hate waking up, and I avoid it as much as possible. I have actually built my entire life around not doing it. I have arranged my teaching schedule so that I don’t have any classes until afternoon, and I have trained my dog, Ray Bradbury, to ignore the rising sun and the ringing of neighborhood church bells and the chirpings of nasty little birds.

Usually, around the time that most people are beginning their day, I am just crawling into bed. I am kind of a night person to the extreme. I even wrote a book about it, called Stay Awake, which is militantly anti-morning.

When I was a young writer, I remember being fascinated by the question of “how a writer spends his days.” I think I thought there would be some key or clue to how to conduct my own life as a writer, some secret, maybe.

One of the very best books on this subject is Becoming a Writer by Dorthea Brande. “First of all,” she says, “becoming a writer is mainly a matter of cultivating a writer’s temperament.”

On the one hand, the writer must keep “the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness of a child … the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeon-holing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word “trite” has hardly any meaning for him…”

On the other hand, she says, “But there is another element to his character, fully as important to his success. It is adult, discriminating, temperate, and just. It is the side of the artisan, the workman and the critic rather than the artist.”

This is how, I think, most writers try to figure out their days and parcel them out. For me, the coffee-drinking, temperate side comes first, usually in the early evening after dinner; the spontaneous side comes at night, often after midnight, when the rest of the world is asleep and I can pretty much be guaranteed that I won’t have any interruptions.

But it’s also a conscious decision to make a break from the world of the living. To cancel out the “morning world” and find a way to get by without it for much of the time. The real secret to a writer’s day is how much time you’re willing to be alone, how much you like being lonely, how much you crave it.

Some mornings, when the dog Ray Bradbury nuzzles me awake, I’m embarrassed by the morning I’ve missed; I’m aware that I’ve made weird choices, and that part of the world is going on without me. But I’m also strangely glad that I have found a way to live in an alternate universe. I’ll touch down in the real world with my classes and my students, at the supermarket and the dry cleaners and so forth. But I love the idea that my own personal cave of nighttime is waiting for me at the end of the day.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• I just started reading Oliver Sach’s new book, Hallucinations, because I think my new novel will have some in it. I just finished Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, which is a very erudite and beautifully written exploration of the hemispheric functions of the brain; and Victor LaValle’s wonderful new novel, The Devil in Silver, which takes place in a mental asylum. Strangely, I didn’t realize how closely these were connected until I wrote them down just now. Yikes.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• As a teacher, I’m always most excited when my students are not only writers but voracious readers. To me, the two things must go hand in hand. My best writing advice is to read everything you can get your hands on, in many different genres; and furthermore, to give yourself permission to stop reading a book that isn’t working for you and move on to another one. You’ll never read all the books you want to before you die, anyway, so there’s really no shame in not finishing.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• As mentioned above, I tend to read in bites, and I probably finish maybe a tenth of the books I start. It’s the same for me with writing. Most of my time is spent generating fragments of stories and novels, most of which get put aside and never used. It’s only when I find myself going back to one of these fragments over and over that I realize it’s time to commit.  I know this makes me sound like I’d be a very bad boyfriend.

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By Dan Chaon:

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

December 1, 2012: Dan Chaon
At Vermont College of Fine Arts
July 2011

I was so impressed by Dan’s informal talk at VCFA in July of 2011 that I not only immediately bought Await Your Reply, the novel he discussed, but I also immediately read it. Then I did a series of five posts on it: three threads, nods, repetition with new detail, image, and parceling out your life.

In his talk, Dan said that with Await Your Reply, he began with three images and a story, but that he had no idea how they were connected until the end of the first draft. He said that the second draft is always “super important” to him because he’s looking for iconography, like tarot cards, to signal where the power is–where an image and/or a moment is important.

For you short story lovers, Dan also gave a terrific reading of a new story, and he has a new book of stories out this year, Stay Awake. Past stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories of 1996 and 2003. His stories have also won the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award.

Dan has written one other novel, You Remind Me of Me, and two other story collections: Among the Missing and Fitting Ends. He teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

Come back on December 1st to read how Dan Chaon spends his days.

The next writer in the series is announced on the 8th of each month so you can read ahead!

And you wipe the snow out of your hair and get back into your car and drive off toward an accumulation of the usual daily stuff–there is dinner to be made and laundry to be done and helping the kids with their homework and watching television on the couch with the dog resting her muzzle in your lap and a phone call you owe to your sister in Wisconsin and getting ready for bed, brushing and flossing and a few different pills that help to regulate your blood pressure and thyroid and a facial scrub that you apply and all the rituals that are–you are increasingly aware–units of measurement by which you are parceling out your life. (92)

This passage from Dan Chaon’s 2009 novel, Await Your Reply, reminds me of so many things:

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”  

  Mark Strand’s “The Continuous Life”: Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,/That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;”

the Zen saying: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: “Laura reads the moment as it passes.  Here it is, she thinks; there it goes.  The page is about to turn.”

that surely there is more than this

and just as surely, no there’s not.

What are the units of measurement by which you are parceling out your life?

await your reply

~last in a series
~cross-posted at Contrary Blog

Without the image:

Her thoughts were not clearly articulated in her mind, but she could feel them moving swiftly, gathering.

“What are you thinking about?” George Orson said, and when he spoke, her thoughts scattered, broke up into fragments of memories.

That’s good, right?

With the image:

Her thoughts were not clearly articulated in her mind, but she could feel them moving swiftly, gathering.

“What are you thinking about?” George Orson said, and when he spoke, her thoughts scattered, broke up into fragments of memories, the way that the birds separated out of their formation and back into individual birds. (219)

A passage we will remember.

PS:

Dan Chaon’s words recall Toni Morrison’s from Beloved, and not wanting to miss an opportunity to share one of my favorite passages of all times, here it is:

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind. (272-273)

~4th in a series
~cross-posted at Contrary Blog

For example, on page 246, Miles wakes up in bed with a woman and gropes for his underwear, which he puts on. So the assumption is they’ve had sex.

On page 248:

He was standing there in his underwear, still a bit groggy, still a bit dazzled by the fact that he’d had sex for the first time in two years… [new detail bolded]

Then on page 249:

He was standing there in his boxer shorts with their ridiculous hot pepper print… [new detail bolded]

What this technique does is to roll the scene along, allow the reader to move in for a quick close-up, and then continue along with the story.

It keeps things moving. It adds texture. It reinforces image.

~3rd in a series
~Cross-posted at Contrary Blog

As a writer, I feel like I’m always in conversation with the books that I’ve read.

Yiyun Li, the author of The Vagrants, feels the same way: “I believe a writer writes to talk to his/her masters and literary heroes.” About William Trevor, she wrote:

I write stories to talk to his stories. And a story can talk to another story in many ways–a line, a character, a few details, or sometimes it is the mood of the story, the pacing and the music of the story…”

I found two of these nods by Chaon as I was reading Await Your Reply. When I found two, I got such a warm feeling inside. Here they are:

On page 81: “She might’ve been a good mother, Miles thought, if their father had lived.” >>>Flannery O’Connor, from “A Good Man is Hard to Find:” She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” [Here’s a very cool link to Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” at Vanderbilt University in 1959–amazing]

On page 203: “Your jitters are starting to rub off on me. I’ve got the fucking fantods, man.” >>>David Foster Wallace throughout Infinite Jest.

A lovely practice.

~2nd in a series
~cross-posted at Contrary Blog

On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

Enough said?

Dan Chaon’s second novel and fourth book, Await Your Reply, which was published in 2009, intertwines 3 seemingly unrelated narrative threads that exude echoes of each other, assuring the reader that they will eventually come together. And they do. But no spoilers here.

3 threads. 324 pages. 3 parts–each one divided into numbered chapters.

Chaon gets each of the threads off the ground in a hurry: the 1st chapter is 2 pages; the 2nd is 5 pages; the 3rd is 3 pages. Bam. In 10 pages, the reader is aware of all 3 plot lines.

The “severed hand” scene comes first and takes place at night in a car. Chapter 2 begins with Lucy and George leaving town in the middle of the night. “Not fugitives–not exactly.” AND “They would make a clean break. A new life.” (Chaon has a sense of humor.) In Chapter 3 again a character is driving a car. And I wish I had time to count how many times the word hand or hands is used in each of the threads.

As I said, because of the repetition of images and details and echoes of themes, the reader knows that these threads are related. So the reader’s mind is fully engaged as she is reading, trying to answer the question of how. It’s like a treasure hunt. We’re looking for clues, reading carefully because we don’t want to miss anything. All of this creates energy and narrative drive.

In July in Vermont, Dan said that with Await Your Reply, he began with 3 images and a story, but that he had no idea how they were connected until the end of the first draft. He said that the second draft is always “super important” to him because he’s looking for iconography, like tarot cards, to signal where the power is–where an image and/or a moment is important.

Each image distinct and capsulized, like tarot cards laid down one by one. (147)

Read it, if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed.

~1st in a series
~cross-posted at Contrary Blog