Chatting with Jared Chen-Wynn

Jared Chen-Wynn's first novel, Zen and the Art of Dying, was a winner in the 2017 RevPit contest. One of his recent short stories, "Gone but Not Recycled," won an honorable mention in the 2024 1st Quarter Writers of the Future Contest and was featured in a recent issue of Corner Bar Magazine. He can be found at jaredwynn.com.

Jared is the author of “Absolution” from Issue 11.

Q: What real-world parallels do you want readers to come away with after reading “Absolution”?

A doctor once told me that, whenever a new patient came in with a set of symptoms he couldn’t diagnose, the first thing he’d do is take them off all their meds to “reset their system.” Because what often happens is, they’ll get a drug prescribed to address one problem, but the side effects of that drug will get diagnosed as another symptom, which they’ll then address with another drug resulting in another new side effect. This pattern leads people into an unending downward spiral of creating and addressing new symptoms that don’t end until they either stumble into the ER or die.

Similarly, it seems like every time a government comes up with a novel solution to a problem, that just creates a new problem—like alcohol prohibition giving way to the rise of organized crime, three strikes laws leading to the prison overpopulation problem, removal of the cash bail system to address that, and so on.

So what I’m hoping readers will come away with is not a specific parallel so much as an endemic pattern of compounding solutions and side effects.

Q: Do you consider Chili to be an unreliable narrator, or perhaps that the reality Chili lives in itself is dystopian and unstable?

Both: He’s an unreliable narrator because of his memory gaps, but his memory gaps were caused by a dystopian and destabilizing criminal justice policy.

Q: Do you think Chili ever escapes the absolution cycle? Or is he stuck in its retributive cycle like our current prison system?

I initially conceived this as a sort of serialized procedural where Chili, who believes he’s not a killer, tries to solve the riddle of who he is only to become one every time he succeeds. But I think repeating that cycle will become too predictable for readers. So, in my mind, it’s pretty much a closed story, at least for now.

Q: Tell us about your first novel and what contest it won?

I’d wanted to write a Zen-and-the-Art-of type story since college and eventually got around to drafting a screenplay that landed me an offer within the first week of pitching it. It happened so fast, I knew the producer hadn’t read the story, that the offer was based on the pitch. But the offer was basically a spec option, a contract that would tie up the story for years with no initial payment. I took it as a sign that the story had legs, but I didn’t take the deal that came with it.

Around that same time, I went through a really bad breakup and needed to take some time off from dating. So for about a year, I holed up in my apartment and wrote until my brain turned to mush. Eventually, with the help of my mom, I managed to turn that script into a novel. A screenwriter friend recommended I enter what was then called the RevSub contest, which later was renamed RevPit. So I sent in a pitch with the first five pages, an editor reached out to me about how much she loved the opening line, and next thing I knew, we were working together.

Q: Is the RevPit contest ongoing and would you recommend it to other authors?

It is very much ongoing, and I would very much recommend it to other authors! The way the contest works is, a group of freelance/independent editors selects material from a pool of submissions. Except the pool of submissions is so large, they use a team of first readers, of which I am now one. It’s an annual contest, with multiple winners each year—one or two for every editor—who guide the winners through a detailed but fast revision process that mirrors the editing process one would go through with an agent or publisher.

They also have an online summer camp for writers called Camp RevPit, a two-week experience where writers are given daily prompts and exercises, coaching from “camp counselors” (I’m one of those too), and are paired off with other writers to trade reads and notes. Best part of it all is, it's free. Anyone can enter the contest, and anyone can participate in the summer camp.

Q: What was your Writers of the Future contest experience?

This is another free one, and it’s for short stories, although their limit is 17k words, if I recall correctly. I’d written a piece that was too short for a novella and too long for a short story, but which came in just under the Writers of the Future word cap. I submitted it online, waited a few months, then got a congratulatory email informing me that I hadn’t won but they were giving me an honorable mention. Ever since then, I get a quarterly email from them encouraging me to submit again. This last time, I’d made a mistake in filling out the submission, the sort of mistake that would result in an entry being discarded by most contests. But instead of rejecting the submission, a member of their technical team reached out to assist. They’re friendly, helpful, and, like Radon Journal, very much pro-writer.

Q: What exercises do you most suggest writers engage with?

Find some prompts for flash fiction and short stories that are outside your preferred genre(s). I’m a sci-fi/fantasy guy myself, but I’m writing a psychological revenge/thriller right now with the goal of developing and acquiring a better grasp of thriller tropes. This will help me move beyond the conventions of the speculative genres I already know.

Q: You are currently streaming a video-story called “Katie’s Dead” on Instagram and YouTube. How do you compare this short and visual form of writing compared to standard fiction writing?

I’m also on TikTok, which is the only place where I’m actually getting any traction. The Katie project is distilled from an old series of novellas I wrote, and it’s ginned up a moderate increase in book sales and downloads without advertising or promo stacks. 

I do think it’s useful in getting eyes on stories, because people who don’t want to watch ads will often still sit through a short episode. But I’ve got a lot yet to learn about this streaming, hyper-short episodic format. Every social media site has a different algorithm, and with it a different set of unwritten rules that one has to decode in order to be seen.

Q: Do you believe that there are formulas for writers to create jokes?

This can be a polarizing question among writers, like the never-ending argument between the skill of writing from an outline and the virtue of pantsing a story. Personally, I believe in the middle path; I tend to come up with a brief outline—often just a paragraph—followed by pages and pages of character bios. Once I’m satisfied with the bios, I’ll expand the outline. But ultimately, the characters determine the story’s direction, so I have to be ready to adjust if one of these imaginary people inside my head wants to go and do something that’s not in the outline.

And I’m the same way with joke writing. There’s a knack to it that comes from practice, but that knack develops faster when someone understands the basic structure of a joke, and the psychological triggers that make the jokes work. I spent years doing stand up comedy in Los Angeles just so that I could learn those structures, and I even wrote a book about them, titled Laughing Matters: Joke Writing Formulas for Writers.

Q: Which of your many previous jobs do you most often find yourself coming back to for writing inspiration?

I spent maybe a decade and a half teaching Jujitsu, and then later went on to teach a system called Taiho-jutsu, which is often oversimplified as 'Jujitsu with guns and knives.' I integrate a lot of action into my stories, so that’s probably the one I draw from the most. 

But a close second would be the time I spent living with a Bedouin tribe in Saudi Arabia. It was a short job, I was only there for fourteen months. But being a fish out of water in an old and radically different culture without any knowledge of the language taught me a lot about nonverbal communication, which also informs my writing.

Q: What are you working on for the remainder of 2025?

I wrote a novel last year about a plastic surgeon who became a vampire in the 80s to escape justice after he was caught dating a teenager. He becomes embroiled in an ancient war between vampires and gods when an orphaned vampire girl stumbles into his life and adopts him.

It’s a really daunting and delicate story about a former creep becoming a parent—basically a coming-of-old-age/redemption story—but it was incredibly difficult to write, and it’s in dire need of a rewrite. So, I’m going to start tackling that later this month.

I’m also going to pitch another short story to Radon Journal. It’s been such a pleasure and privilege working with you guys, I’m hoping I’ll get to do it again sometime!