When a group of student writers asked Dan Chaon yesterday where he got the idea for the opening chapter in Await Your Reply, he said, "I was interested in severed hands just because they're cool."Students were surprised to learn that the three separate narratives intertwining in Await Your Reply were not planned out in advance but just grew out of his interest in things like severed hands and Hitchcock movies. "It's important to go in not knowing what's going to happen," he said, and then "it kind of branches out fractally in a lot of directions." This leads to very messy first drafts and a lot of deleted writing, but it results in writing full of energy and amazing surprises.
"I learned a lot about cliffhangers from Lost," he explained, but his writing is also informed by a lifetime of reading. "All fiction is a kind of fan-fiction," he said. "You're writing back to the people that you love."
Now Dan Chaon is one of the people that we love. I wonder how our students will write back to him?
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