What Inspired Joey Sarson To Start Writing Fiction?

I picked up a slim chapbook by accident and kept thinking about one character for days; that kind of haunting stuck with Joey Sarson and nudged him toward longer work. He seems like the sort of writer who learns by following obsessions—an image or a voice that refuses to leave—and then patiently drafts around it until a story takes shape. For him, inspiration wasn't dramatic thunder or fame, but accumulation: overheard arguments, bus rides, the way city maps fold, and the music he played while writing. He used these fragments to build characters who feel worn-in and deeply human.

There was also an ethical impulse in his beginning. He wanted narratives that didn't flatten people into tropes. Influences ranged from the empathetic prose of 'Norwegian Wood' to the structural daring of 'house of leaves'—titles that show how form and feeling can fuse. He learned to listen to readers too, treating critique as a form of conversation rather than judgement. That humility—plus serious discipline—turned small obsessions into a steady output. I admire that patient ferocity; it makes his fiction feel alive and keeps me checking what he does next.

Sunlight through the cracked window of a secondhand bookstore lit up the spine of a book I wasn't supposed to buy, and that small, guilty thrill pushed me into writing. For joey Sarson, it wasn't a single thunderbolt moment so much as a pile of tiny ones—late trains, sketchbooks, cassette tapes, and the smell of coffee in the margins of novels. I picture him as someone who hoarded sentences: lines from 'Sandman', awkward courage from 'The Catcher in the Rye', and the weird honesty of zines folded into his pockets. Those Fragments started to glint together and begged for a structure that wasn't just a playlist or a moodboard. Fiction became the place to arrange them into people who could actually move and make mistakes.

There was also a stubborn, practical side that fed the fire. He wanted to talk back to loneliness and the small injustices of everyday life, to turn a awkward memory into something that felt inevitable on the page. Workshops and late-night critique groups—sometimes generous, sometimes brutal—gave him tools: how to cut dialogue that padded a scene, how to refuse clichés. He borrowed techniques from music—repetition, tempo, silence—and from films—visual cues, montage—and mixed them with the intimate, messy interiority of literary fiction.

Mostly, I think what pushed him was the discovery that fiction could change how people feel about each other. That the right sentence could make someone feel seen, furious, or hopeful. That rare, electric moment is infectious; once you taste it, you want to make other people taste it too. I'm still moved imagining that small bookstore light, and it makes me want to re-read his early stories with a cup of tea nearby.

Curiosity, I think, was the simple engine behind Joey Sarson's start in fiction. He was curious about who people are underneath the polite skin, and curious about what stories could do when you let them get messy. Early on he read everything from 'The Last of Us' narratives to experimental short stories, and that mix of videogame pacing and literary introspection gave him permission to play with form. He wrote to answer questions that no one else seemed to ask in his social circles—questions about small betrayals, about whether regret can be useful, about how memory cheats us.

He learned fast that writing is less about waiting for inspiration and more about showing up: notebooks, awkward emails with peers, and rewriting scenes until they became honest. He also loved community—zine swaps, late-night forums, and tiny reading nights—places that made writing feel less lonely. In the end, what inspired him was both a desire to understand people and a selfish need to make something that mattered to him, and that mix is exactly why his early stories still hit me in the chest.