Dave Eggers

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin — Dave Eggers

Date: June 17, 2026
Host: Rick Rubin
Guest: Dave Eggers

Overview

In this episode, Rick Rubin sits down with acclaimed author and publisher Dave Eggers. They explore Eggers’s idiosyncratic writing process, the evolution and philosophy behind his work, how McSweeney’s reshaped literary publishing, and his deep advocacy for libraries, free speech, and the creative freedom of young writers. The tone is relaxed, candid, and often playful, with Eggers delving into the joys and struggles of art-making, his views on the tactile beauty of books, and his commitment to education. The episode ranges widely—from creative process tips to stories from the literary trenches—offering practical wisdom for writers and insight into Eggers’s mind.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Writing Process & Structure

• Non-linear Creation

  • Eggers rarely writes scenes in order; he considers his books a "patchwork" that is stitched together later.
  • "It feels not at all fun if I don't know where I'm going at all... So it's always set pieces and scenes and I don't write in order." (00:23)

• Writer's Block & Avoiding Obstacles

  • Observes that linear writers may hit blocks more severely; Eggers prefers circumventing obstacles by jumping ahead and returning to connect pieces later.
  • "If you're stuck with something, you're just stuck. Whereas you could just go just around that barrier, keep going." (00:23)

• Story vs. Form

  • Early in his career, Eggers prioritized formal experimentation over narrative, but now finds deeper interest in storytelling and character.
  • "Only in the last 15 years or so, I'm much more interested in and invested in just the storytelling." (02:35)

2. Character Creation

• Distance from Real Life

  • To avoid awkwardness with acquaintances, Eggers invents characters far removed from his own circles (e.g., invented names like 'Cricket' and 'Olympia').
  • "You get to the point where you know a thousand people in real life, you can't use any of their names." (03:46)

• Specificity & Realism

  • Stresses the importance of observation—taking details from real people to ground characters in specificity.
  • Used street interviews with students as an exercise to improve writing realism.
  • "The contradictions of actual humans... are far more complex than generally what we’re gonna come up with from scratch." (06:20)

3. Gathering & Managing Ideas

• Constant Note-Taking

  • Maintains drawers of categorized notes and observations—sometimes collecting for decades before a project coalesces.
  • "It's just like this relentless nut gathering... you think, well, I've got a tree full of nuts... and then you're still like, oh, that's a really good one over there. I'm gonna cross this highway to get it." (09:40)

• The Burden of Collection

  • Notes the psychological burden of always being "on" as a writer, observing and preparing material for future work.

4. The Role of Luck & "Magic" in Art

• Unpredictable Alchemy

  • Eggers attributes the resonance of masterpieces to "accident" and happy serendipity more than calculated craft.
  • "Every masterpiece is an accident... There's this, like, alchemy that happens." (11:58)

• Letting the Work Breathe

  • Warns against over-explaining or over-stuffing work; champions reader participation and ambiguity.
  • "There's no more participatory art form than reading. You're the cinematographer... the narrator... you can’t control it." (12:37)

5. Deciding on Form: Story vs. Novel vs. Mosaic

• Scale and Theme

  • The "size" of an idea—how many themes or how much narrative weight—is how Eggers determines its vessel.
  • Discussed working on mosaic-like series ("The Forgetters") combining stories into grander wholes, yet allowing each to stand alone.
  • "For a novel, you’re talking about 25 (themes). You know, there’s a scale and a scope of it for me at least." (16:27)

• Jumping Across Timelines

  • Enjoys the freedom to fill in gaps, trusting the reader to participate actively.
  • "But that's the pleasure of being participant in it. As a reader, I can't tell you exactly where they were and it doesn't matter to me." (17:42)

6. Teaching, Exercises, and Empathy

• Listening as an Act of Love

  • Eggers’ experiences teaching high schoolers through community interviews and peer portraits fostered empathy, observation, and oral history.
  • "Most people, you never have anyone notice everything about you and write it down artfully." (22:52)

• Writing for Self-Understanding

  • Advocates for memoir-writing—even privately—as a therapeutic and unifying act.
  • "What you get down on the page half the time is as good as a hundred therapy sessions with a professional." (26:13)

7. McSweeney’s: Origins and Philosophy

• "Island of Misfit Writings"

  • Founded as a home for rejected, too-weird, or idiosyncratic stories—valuing experimental forms and physical objecthood.
  • "It was a home for rejected stories from other magazines... we were the island of misfit writings." (29:25)

• Artistry of the Book as Object

  • Obsessive attention to tactile, unusual book design—a way to preserve the value of the physical book over screens.
  • "We became determined to just invest in cloth and color art inside and foil stamps and all of these things... you do have to make these things radically better than looking at a screen." (38:13)

8. Working with Editors

• Trust and Letting Go
  • Describes powerful collaborations where the editor’s faith can prevent detrimental changes, and tough cuts (like a 15-page thread) lead to a better book.
  • "At a certain point I stopped rereading it myself and I just completely gave myself over to her vision of it." (35:07)

9. Daily Routine & Writing Environment

• The Boat as Office

  • Writes on a sailboat in San Francisco Bay—detached from Internet and distraction.
  • "I can’t write near the Internet... So I take that out to the boat and I sit. Boat sort of shifts, you know, 10ft this way, 8ft that way. There’s pelicans and sea lions." (52:07)

• Rituals

  • Eggers reads old books each morning, listens to Sinead O'Connor, and journals as procrastination before actual drafting.
  • "Three cups of coffee, an hour and a half of reading and you just feel like the most Zen person alive." (63:10)

10. Editing, Discipline, and Quality

• Tightening the Work

  • The best revision involves ruthless cuts; the final work should be shorter and tighter than the first draft.
  • "A really good writer... your final draft is shorter than your first... you are cutting out the fat, you're making it lean itself." (74:48)

• Rejects Rules

  • Dismisses dogmatic writing rules ("write what you know," five-paragraph essays), which he sees as stifling creativity.
  • "The five paragraph essay... needs to be obliterated. And you’ll see everything open up the sky." (98:34)

11. Censorship and Free Speech

• Book Banning

  • Eggers’s books have been banned and even destroyed in U.S. schools, typically over content others misinterpret or preemptively remove.
  • "It was marked to be destroyed on the official documents... Not one authentic complaint." (93:39)

• Absolutism on Free Speech

  • Firmly opposes all censorship, arguing that giving anyone the right to ban one book leads to empty libraries.
  • "If everybody has a right to ban one book... that library is empty very quickly." (96:24)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Mystery of Art:
  "Every masterpiece is an accident. Everyone, I think... there's this, like, alchemy that happens." (11:58)

• On Reader Participation:
  "There's no more participatory art form than reading. You're the cinematographer... the narrator." (12:37)

• On Book Design:
  "If you make a cheap or an ugly book, I think you're doing a disservice to whatever work went into that writer's task." (29:40)

• On Teaching:
  "Listening is an act of love... There’s so few opportunities to just really listen and then also make art from it." (22:52)

• On Editing:
  "You become a very good self editor, especially if you're editing other people. I always think you got to edit other people's books to be a good self editor." (97:22)

• On Writing Rules:
  "There can be no rules about writing... Anytime you hear a rule, take it with a grain of salt... generally speaking, it's to be ignored immediately." (98:34)

• On Trusting the Creative Process:
  "You don’t have to know why." (87:55)

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Timestamps for Key Sections

• Approach to Structure & Nonlinear Writing: 00:23–03:40
• On Character Creation & Realism: 03:40–07:54
• Collecting Ideas / The Nut Gathering Metaphor: 08:02–10:39
• Art’s “Alchemy” and Unpredictable Success: 11:54–14:25
• Choosing Story Length and Form: 16:18–19:58
• The Power of Listening and Teaching Exercises: 21:51–26:07
• Founding McSweeney’s, Book as Object: 27:45–38:13
• Editor/Author Collaboration: 35:04–38:08
• Writing on the Boat & Rituals: 51:53–57:18
• Book Banning & Censorship: 92:22–97:18
• Editing & Revising: 97:22–98:29
• Railing against Rules: 98:29–99:41

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Conclusion

Throughout their lively conversation, Dave Eggers and Rick Rubin discuss the wild freedom and subtle discipline of writing, the beauty and craft of physical books, the lasting importance of teachers and empathetic listening, and the necessity of creative and intellectual liberty. Eggers’s reflections on creative process, collaboration, literary culture, and the defense of free speech offer encouragement to writers and readers seeking deeper meaning and connection—in art and in life.

Transcript

[Narrator/Announcer]

Tetragrammaton.

[Dave Eggers]

I almost always know how it ends because it feels not at all fun if I don't know where I'm going at all. You know, like you're saying you're going to Alaska, it could be any which way you get there, but this is our destination. So I don't outline in any traditional way, but I'll jot some stuff down and then I'll write scenes. So to me it's always set pieces and scenes and I don't write in order. So this new book, I wrote a scene. The first thing I wrote is now, I guess in page 100, I think. And it was a scene I wrote because I wanted to write it. And then I knew generally where it would fit. But it becomes a patchwork that you stitch together later. I've never been able to write linearly and I find it really boring to do that. And also, if you're stuck with something, you're just stuck. You're stuck right there. Whereas you could just go just around that barrier, keep going, you know, you gotta fix something here, but just keep going. But I do know a few writers, older writers, that write straight all the way through. And that's where I think you get this idea of writer's block and the person pacing around the room and throwing crumpled up pieces of paper into the corner. I think it's because they're just. They've structured their work in such a way that they can't go around the obstacle. But it is harder in the end to stitch everything together.

[Interviewer]

Do you ever change the order?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, for sure. Especially when it's like memories, flashbacks, that kind of thing. Those could occur anywhere. You have options. And this, this new book is the first one, I think, that structured sort of strictly linearly where it starts when the characters are 8 and 9 and then ends when they're 74. And it's like to me, that was not the kind of book I read when I was young and experimenting. It has a little bit more of a traditional structure. And so I was really used to be pretty much more interested in the form than I was the story. I never read mysteries because I didn't care who did what to who. You know, now I really love them. But at the time I was like, I don't know, we know this didn't happen. Why do I care? But so I was always interested in like, well, how are we breaking the form? How are we reinventing what happens on the page? And that was what I was interested in. And that's what A lot of what McSweeney's did, we always welcomed formal experimentation, even if it failed. Like, the problem with that and conceptual art or anything is that much of it in retrospect, it doesn't age well. But in the moment, you're like, oh, that's interesting, that's something new. And then you look back on it and something has superseded it. And now it looks a little embarrassing. But we did a lot of that. And only, you know, just in the last 15 years or so, I'm much more interested in and invested in just the storytelling and just going as deep as I possibly can into the characters. And especially in this case, where it's two that are just like entwined for 70 years. But it's a really different place where I am now from where I started,

[Interviewer]

are the characters you write all rooted in something familiar.

[Dave Eggers]

What's funny, my wife had to talk about this a lot because on a purely like living in the world level, if you base something on someone in your life and they know it, then makes a very awkward interactions with your friend or your neighbor, your colleague or your relative. So you get to the point where you. You're so determined to go far afield of anyone you know, so that nobody is confused. And if anything, you borrow, or I do borrow a few things from my own life. Like, I went to art school for a little bit and this guy went to art school. So you borrow one or two things that you might know about, but all the other secondary and tertiary characters and down to their names, you get to the point where you know thousand people in real life, you can't use any of their names. Even you run out of names. So these two are Cricket and Olympia. Two names. I've never known anyone in real life, but it becomes a challenge because you do want to be able to just move through the world and not have anyone mistakenly think that they're in your book.

[Interviewer]

Has anyone mistakenly thought they were in your book?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, books, movies, for sure. And it's always the person that you never had a moment's thought about. Like, I know that elf character that you wrote in Lord of the Rings that was based on me. I mean, it's always something out of left field and you worry about your next door neighbor growing up, misunderstanding something. And it's always like your cousin Ted, who is sure that the whole book about the cowboy in New Mexico in the 18th century is about him. It's really strange, but it hasn't happened in a while because I think you get a little bit Better every year at making sure that there's nothing remotely close.

[Interviewer]

But I would think that knowing that can happen, that would free you up the other way to just use anything you want.

[Dave Eggers]

Well, for sure. That's how most novelists work. And, you know, most novelists will. For a given character, it's an amalgam of 50 people. So they'll borrow a note that they just saw at the beach about how somebody walks. They'll map that onto the way that their uncle dresses. And then they'll map that onto the speech pattern of their college professor. So not any one person is a majority of that character. But you. Drawing from life for these bits is key because if you make it all up out of whole cloth and, like, you end up in a far less naturalistic or believable world.

[Interviewer]

Starts feeling more like A.I.

[Dave Eggers]

right. Thank you. That's actually what it would be like. It's just like milk toast. Like, nothing specific. Everything's sort of borrowed and generalized. So when I taught writing at. To high schoolers for a lot of years, the first thing we would do is, I'd say. They'd come in. This is in the Mission District of San Francisco. I'd say pair up with somebody and go out and interview anybody on the street. Most interesting person and the person you're least likely to talk to otherwise. And then you're going to write a story that has aspects of that person in it. And they would come back just like a glow because they'd never had a reason to talk to some stranger in a bookstore or cafe. And then they would write something far better than whatever they would just imagine because they're using specific details of actual humans. How they look, what they talk, and also their contradictions. So there was a street busker that used to play all the time on Valencia street. And leather and studs everywhere and boots and like. And turns out he was a Republican and lived with his mom. And all these things that they found out in minutes from this guy. I was like, that's the contradictions of actual humans. But you gotta talk to them, and you have to observe because they're far more complex than generally what we're gonna come up with from scratch. Especially if you're 16 and you've only met nine people in your life, you know, so being able to just bring a notebook out in public and write a few things down and catch those details.

[Interviewer]

Are you always paying attention in that way? Are you listening for a phrase that you think, I'll bank this for some later date?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, I Mean, so I have a garage and in the garage I have just dozens of sets of drawers that I bought from like Restoration Hardware type, but much cheaper type. And each has a piece of paper, you know, strip of tape that says what that is, details, conversations or ideas for this book that might never come to be. And I usually just write on loose leaf copy paper and that sheet goes into that drawer. And at the end of the day or in the morning after, you know, I'm writing stuff at night, I have to file everything. And then once that stack is a certain half a foot or so, then maybe you're onto something. And that like, contrapposto, this book was like 20 years of taking notes and finally it was like, all right, it's time to make something of this. But it can be a burden too. You really want to turn off sometimes and not have to listen or remember this thing or, God, that's good. And you know, just there are a lot of times that you do have to be like, I've got nothing to write with. I'm going to let this one go. I can't tether to this responsibility at all times. Like Susan Sontag, I think when she finally stopped writing, she called it like the, you know, described this incredible liberation because she was free of the burden of converting her life or what she saw into prose.

[Interviewer]

It's truly a full time job, the way you interact with the world to have the material that can then someday turn into something else.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, it's just like this relentless nut gathering. And you, you think, well, I've got a tree full of nuts. I've got, I've been saving for, you know, 20 winters, there should be plenty. And then you're still like, oh, that's a really good one over there. I'm gonna cross this highway to get it. It's a habit, especially when you're finished with something. In this case, like, I finished this book about eight months before it's coming out, which is like a big long time for me. It's usually a much tighter window. So I've been a little bit more on mental vacation, I guess, than I usually am. And in general, you just get a little bit less hyper about these things and then there's just like a backup. There's too many things and books take a long time. It's not like I'm so jealous. Not to say that writing a song is easier, but I do have a lot of friends that have written a song in a day.

[Interviewer]

We have friends who've written songs in 10 minutes.

[Dave Eggers]

There you go.

[Interviewer]

I don't know anyone who's written a book in 10 minutes.

[Dave Eggers]

That's why I love, for me, drawing is that so I like to be able to finish something in a day or even an hour. And they become like. Like a riff, you know, or a quick melody. And you can put a figure on a page and be done with it. And maybe somebody wants it, some, maybe somebody doesn't, but it's done. And that's a palette cleanser for me, when I'm working three years on the same book, it's feeling like you can finish something. It's necessary because I have a lot of friends that spend eight, nine, ten years on a book. And it's really tough to think about. Like, you hope that that was worth the 10 years, but some fatal flaw could say, you know, what, be brilliant. Language, characters are fantastic, but there's something that's not working. And all of that time you might have been applying clay or whatever to the wrong interior structure, and there's something that's wrong about it. And I've had that experience where you're like, it looks like a book, it reads like a book, but somehow it doesn't take off.

[Interviewer]

Do you think it's something that could ever be figured out, or is there a magic aspect to it?

[Dave Eggers]

Oh, for sure. For every kind of art, every masterpiece is an accident. Everyone, I think in the middle sometimes, you know, you might be onto something. But then there's this, like, alchemy that happens where it's like, I have no idea why. Why that song after this or why this particular book is resonating with people and this one isn't. I think a lot of it has to do with letting it breathe, letting light into it, like through it, you know, like not trying to overstuff something. And I think sometimes you think that you can make it work by overworking it.

[Interviewer]

You know, muscle through it, muscle through

[Dave Eggers]

it and more words are going to fix it, you know, like, well, if I just explain a little bit more and add another hundred pages. Whereas Great Gatsby is like basically a short story. I mean, it's novella. It's 120 pages, maybe it's incredibly rich, but short. It's just gestural. Doesn't over explain anything. It doesn't have to build an entire world in some way that people feel necessary to do now. So you do have to let the weird, odd take be part of it. The unfinished thought be part of it. Something that you don't have to connect certain dots and explain it to people. There's no more participatory art form than reading. You're the cinematographer. When you read, you're the narrator. You're doing all of this work. So that's where you really. You can't control it. You don't know how it'll play in someone's mind. And you really have to chalk it up to luck sometimes that somehow the assemblage of words and the way you structured it and a few happy accidents have led to this thing connecting with people. But you also know when it's not. And I'm trying to tell students now, like, if your response to your work is quite muted and you show something to the reader who you really want to, you know, boy, this book is about surfing. I'm going to show it to my surfing friend. And you get this kind of muted, kind of reserved response like, well, this is respectful. Or I see that you put sentences there, the grammar looks good, or whatever, kind of. Then you got to listen to that too. It means you have work to do. Maybe

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[Interviewer]

How do you know if an idea is going to be a book or a short story? Or do you know that before you start?

[Dave Eggers]

Well, before I start, I do.

[Interviewer]

How do you decide?

[Dave Eggers]

Well, I think it depends on how many sort of themes can fit into that vessel. You. You know, I'm writing a short story about Hang gliders and Kitty Hawk right now, which is something I researched and I didn't know what I was going to do with this research, but I know it's a short story because there's only so much about it that I'm interested in and. But for a novel, I mean, let's say pull a number out of that air and say maybe there's like five major themes in a short story, like a novel, you're talking about 25. You know, there's a scale and a scope of it for me at least. But then you do have that blurry line between short stories, novellas, short novels. But at this point I'm working on a series of books that are called the Forgetters. They're like short stories, but they're part of a much larger thing, like thousands of pages. Eventually that I'll get all in place and nobody will read it. But for me, I know the mosaic, I can see it.

[Interviewer]

I. And they work as individual pieces.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah. You don't have to know anything about the rest of it to make it work.

[Interviewer]

Is that the case in the new book, when you're writing in sections?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Do each of those sections stand alone and work?

[Dave Eggers]

I think so.

[Interviewer]

Cool.

[Dave Eggers]

That was the hope. The hope was that obviously you get to know them when they're 8 and 9. And so when you are reading about them when they're 50 or all of that history is part of your. Your understanding of them. But if you were to pick up and start on page 300 and when they're however old, I think it would make perfect sense. You don't have the benefit of all of that, sort of like that shared history. But I do really like that, the jumping ahead. So it's like 10 years, you have to fill in the gaps and where would they have been in between? But that's the pleasure of being participant in it. As a reader, I can't tell you exactly where they were and it doesn't matter to me. But like you can of fill in those gaps. And we all know that we do so many drastic things, most of us, I think, in our lives. Like more and more I meet older people. I have so many friends in their 80s that are just have reinvented themselves yet again. And they have like Gary Burden, I was talking about this art director, album designer. He told me one time he was like, I think he was 30 or 40 and he said he'd always wanted to be a cowboy. So he just like decided one day like he grew up on military basis, but he Went Montana or wherever, worked as a farmhand cowboy. And that's what he did for a handful of years. And I love more than anything the people that will just make a hard break and do some drastically different thing just because they want to. I mean, I would love to have been a cowboy at some point. Stuntman over here. And so I gave Cricket, in this case, like every time we re meet them, he's in a really drastically different place. Like he's a shipbreaker and the coast of Turkey and gets a call from Olympia, his old friend, and she needs him back in the US because he comes from rural Indiana. Is that possible? But of course, the number of really distinct and drastically different stages of our lives that so many of us have, especially if you're a little bit of a wanderer like he is. So it was satisfying to kind of give us, give it that scope.

[Interviewer]

Would you ever jump over a period of time in a character's life and during that time something really significant happens that you know about, but you never say what it is and you never talk about it?

[Dave Eggers]

Not even mentioned, not alluded to?

[Interviewer]

No. Well, you know that it determines a lot of things going forward, but you don't explain that.

[Dave Eggers]

Oh, that's interesting. I haven't done that. But it's almost like when you hear about actors writing a whole history of their character that's not in the script. And I really. I totally get why you would do that. And I don't think an actor can over prepare. I feel like all of that helps. And so I really admire when an actor will take a character infinitely further than you even wrote on the script, because it's theirs now. But for me, I guess, you know, there are all kinds of scars and things that happen to these too. And every time they come back together, they come back with all of their baggage and scars from in between. But most of it is at least alluded to, even if we don't get a full recounting of it. But it's so funny how quickly you can just gesture at something and be like, well, that was that time, you know, that stretch when I was a junkie. And like, you can pick up everything from that. And if you trust the reader, which you always should, they want that too. They don't want it be over explained and talked down to and have it like, all right, now we're gonna go through what it's like to, you know, fall into a heroin spiral and whatever it's like, especially these two talk to each other with a real topspin and a real. Like, it's quick and banter that you have somebody you've known all your life, they can't get away with anything with each other, which is the case with, you know, I've had the same friends since grade school. And there's no pretending on anything. They know you inside and out.

[Interviewer]

You mentioned the writing exercise that you gave to high school students. Tell me about writing exercises.

[Dave Eggers]

Well, I took no creative writing classes in my life outside of one in high school. I was a painter and then journalist. And so I'm, like, weirdly ignorant about how regular college or MFA programs work. But I taught a. We have this center called 826 Valencia. It's like a writing and tutoring center in San Francisco, and we publish student work. I would work with high schoolers every week, and I was always trying to give them assignments. I guess I would want myself. And the other thing that we do is interview people outside in the community. But then the other one that I'd broken classes with is like, interview each other, base a character on each other, or you can do an exact portrait of your peer. And these were all volunteer students doing this as an elective in evenings.

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But.

[Dave Eggers]

And they're 15 years old, they would write these exquisite miniatures of each other, and they would read them out loud. And you could see kids, like, going, you know, flush red, kids crying, like, just their jaws on the ground. And you realize that for most people, you never have anyone notice everything about you and write it down artfully. And they would learn what it's like to listen to somebody, what it's like to sublimate your own writing, to honor somebody else or exalt somebody else, do them justice, get it right, see things about them that are unique and beautiful. And then for the recipient, for most people, that might be the most detailed written account of who they are outside of a diary, because there's so few opportunities to just really listen and then also make art from it. And so we do a lot of oral history, too, where kids interview their parents that might have immigrated here from elsewhere. And when you see that process, where they get an excuse to really listen, there's an oral historian, Dave Issey, who says listening is an act of love. You know, we're in a position where we get to interview people and talk to people a lot, but most people have very few opportunities. And then, you know, with the idea in an oral history that it will be a written account and it'll be edited into a linear form and maybe published, you see Kids that know their grandparents came from Cambodia, that fled the Khmer Rouge, but that's the vaguest thing that they know just a little bit. But now give them six hours to do a real oral history. It's just like it's the most important thing. In their high school years, they all say the same thing. And their estimation for their forebears is just like. Goes through the roof. They see them as 100ft tall. And we really have to find space to have those moments. I always think the very first week in any class at every grade should be about writing your story of who you are now.

[Interviewer]

Great idea.

[Dave Eggers]

And every teacher gets to know every kid that much better, even if it's a page. Here's what I love, here's what I want, here's what I'm afraid of here. And there's a calm that comes over kids when they've written their truth out and they get it. Just like, you know, if you're angsty at middle of the night, you write it down, it goes away. In the chaos of childhood, if you can fence that within the boundaries of a printed page, you. You're much more calm and at ease, you've gotten it right. And then you can move on and look around. But if it's all contained and nobody's listening, then it's just like having these rabid, feral beasts all over within you. You got to let them out, put them on a leash or let them out of you. And so I think even as adults, this has to be chances to do that. Put it in a linear form. All the chaos of your life in your mind, put it in linear form, have it make sense.

[Interviewer]

Do you think most people know themselves well enough to be able to do that?

[Dave Eggers]

Not at the start, no way. But you work it out.

[Interviewer]

Has to start somewhere.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, you have to start getting it down. And I think you do get more skilled at. I've taught a lot of memoir writing to older, you know, to adults. And most of what people write is not for a mass audience or any audience. It's for them. I don't want to say that the cliche that it's therapeutic, but it is. It's like you could. What you get down on the page half the time is as good as a hundred therapy sessions with a professional.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's a cliche for a reason.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah. You understand things in some cases, like writing an angry letter that you keep in your drawer. Nobody has to see it, but it does need to get out. And if you take it that next step and make art from it. Then that's a whole different set of issues. I had an ancestor named T.S. hawkins who went across the plains from Missouri to founded the town of Hollister and wrote a book called Some Recollections of a Busy Life. And he published 200 copies just for family. And all of us that are descended from him have a copy and it unites us all. And a great book. But without him having taken the time, none of us would be connected. None of us would know anything about what he went through and also all of the particulars of that time. But I think for your descendants, for your family, for your own good, everybody should get it down. Even if it's 10 pages, just put something down and get it right. Or in what you consider to be right.

[Interviewer]

Tell me this story. McSweeney's from the beginning. Where did the idea originate?

[Dave Eggers]

Well, McSweeney's. I was. I came up in the indie magazine world and that's where I would get all the free CDs, which was like one of the points of having a magazine is you get everything sent to you for free. Every album that ever came out came through us. And we reviewed some of them and kept the rest, and I still have them all. And then we. We all went broke doing that. That was a magazine called Mite Never Made a Dime But M I T E M I G H T like the Rolling Stone of Gen X that was our hope. Didn't happen. We went broke. But we all got jobs for the first time in our lives. In our late 20s, we all were offered real jobs at real magazines. And I took one in New York and very corporate, had wear certain clothes, had to be there certain hours. All these things I'd never done before. And I realized I was not meant to live this way. Nine to five. So I quit and we started kind of the anti corporate magazine, which was just me and a few friends in my Brooklyn apartment. And we just did this little magazine that we printed in Iceland. I found a printer in Reykjavik and I thought, oh, you're kidding me. I thought it was a joke. But there was a real. Really a printer in Reykjavik. I thought that would be perfect for this because it was kind of an outsider's magazine. And then from then, you know, now we're on 27 years we've been doing it.

[Interviewer]

Unbelievable.

[Dave Eggers]

And I thought it would be four issues and then new people come on, they have new ideas.

[Interviewer]

What was the original gonna be?

[Dave Eggers]

It was a home for rejected stories from other magazines.

[Interviewer]

So if you got turned down somewhere else. This would be the place if your

[Dave Eggers]

thing was too long or too short or too weird. We were the island of misfit writings,

[Interviewer]

you know, always about writing. That was the focus.

[Dave Eggers]

It was mostly fiction, sometimes interviews with, like, strange scientists, like. But it was all just all text. There was nothing else. It was black and white too, but very like a precious, pretty object. And then we started putting more and more time into the objectness of the book. Every issue is a different form. So one will be a giant hardcover. One was a lunchbox recently designed by Art Spiegelman. We'll have issues that are connected by magnets. You know, we'll try to break the form every time so that people care about the tactile, the object in your hand. And then the subscribers are surprised each time. And so if you make it pretty, if you make an unusual object, then all the writing inside might have a chance to survive too. Whereas if you make a cheap or an ugly book, I think you're doing a disservice to whatever work went into that writer's task. And so the fact that we've been around this long is. I mean, how we publish books and, you know, is a shock to me because I saw it as like a one year experiment. And so. But you know how it is when other people join the troupe. They keep it going, they carry the next stretch and they reinspire you even when you're tired.

[Interviewer]

It also shows that even a good small idea can end up being a big idea that goes on for a long time.

[Dave Eggers]

It's always more likely because you need to incubate it among a small group of people and you just please your trio of friends. But if you seek to make something for a mass audience, boy, that's tough.

[Interviewer]

Was there a moment in McSweeney's history that was like, it got big in a way that was unexpected and things changed. Or was it just a slow, steady build forever?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, I mean, literary journals have a very low ceiling in terms of. If you have 10,000 subscribers, you're like the biggest literary journal on this planet, which just means that we're all very small, but there's small, devoted audiences, and all you really want to do. I mean, this is how I feel like with any art form. If you're able to continue doing that thing, meaning Our subscribers pay $100 to get four issues a year, which is like a lot, but that sustains the staff of five. And, you know, and then the writers that get paid and. And if you're allowed to just keep doing it. That's 99%. The measure of success is you get

[Interviewer]

to keep doing it.

[Dave Eggers]

Get to keep doing it.

[Interviewer]

That's great.

[Dave Eggers]

And I really. Same thing with writing books. If somebody's willing to, you know, kill a bunch of trees to put out your book and say, yeah, we'll do the next one too, that's like the greatest gift you could ever have. And that sense that they'll be with you even if you write a book about a wayward Catholic priest and the next one is a sci fi octopus mystery. You know, like if they're gonna give you a long leash, which I think is the way of things in publishing, it's a very lucky business because there just was never going to be anyone that tells you to do or how to do it. They might say no, but for the most part that no one has any of that sort of nudgey input. There's no managers, there's nobody in between you and whatever you do.

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[Interviewer]

Tell me about working with an editor. What's that experience like?

[Dave Eggers]

Well, I had a book called the Eyes and the Impossible, which is an all ages book a couple years ago and it was with an editor named Taylor Norman, who I'd known before. But there's a certain point where they recognize something in it. And you know this as a producer, you're seeing, hearing something and if that artist, or in my case starts to doubt it, you have to be like, no, do not touch this. Don't Touch it.

[Claude AI Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

And my wife is a novelist and we both reach a point with each other's books where we have to tell them, like, don't touch the keyboard, you will mess this up. And Taylor was that kind of editor where she saw what I was trying to do, made everything that I was trying to do better. And then she also saved me from some mistakes I took. Taking out this whole one thread. It's like taking out like the one song that wasn't working as messing up the song cycle. She took out this thread and made it better. It cut 15 pages or so from the book. At a certain point, I stopped rereading it myself and I just completely gave myself over to her vision of it. It was pretty far along. And then that person, even after it's published, that person is still your champion. You know, Jamie Bing, who? He's my publisher now in the uk, and he's that platonic ideal of the publisher that's more excited than you are about whatever you've written. And so he takes that baton. You're finished. He takes it and starts telling the world about it. And that's a really lucky place to be where you have an affirmation from that person that you're done, that it's right, that it's good, and then he's the one that can go spread the gospel.

[Interviewer]

When Taylor suggested taking out that 15 page thread, what was your first instinct when you heard that idea?

[Dave Eggers]

No way. This is essential. I worked on that. I feel like we need this thread.

[Interviewer]

How did you come around?

[Dave Eggers]

You sit with it, you walk with it, you ride your bike around the coast for a day or two. You're trying to, even before you respond, because you don't want to angrily say, no, you're wrong, whatever. I knew at that point that she knew the book inside and out and knew what was best for her. So I was like, geez, I really don't think she's right here. But in my bones I was like, she's probably right. And so after a few days I was like, all right, that's fine and help me do it. What's weird about novels is that everything is threaded so many places that if you pull one, like it takes a couple, three people to sort of make sure that everything else is intact when you pull some character out of the book. So you'll sometimes read a book, a printed book, that will have somebody's name on page 238 that doesn't exist, and it's because they changed the name or they pulled that character, but the vestigial name is still there. Nobody caught it.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your relationship to books in general over the course of your life.

[Dave Eggers]

I had teachers that made us make them first grade, fifth grade, eighth grade. So I have all these books that we made, wrote and illustrated and bound and then got into desktop publishing when the Mac was new and stuff. So that made me a publisher was the ability, because I didn't know math, I couldn't do computers in any other way. But the Mac, it was for people like us that weren't engineers. And so I fell in love with just the whole process of assembling a bunch of stories, laying them out using desktop publishing. And then we were publishing pretty basic things for a while, but then I went and saw. I went to Reykjavik and walked the floor of the printing plant. It's all these blond men with blue jumpsuits. I mean it was like a Oompa Loompa type of thing. But I could walk around and I'd see they printed all the Bibles in Iceland. And I could see like the guilt edges and foil stamping and a leather cover and a ribbon marker and all these beautiful add ons. And I was like, how much does that cost to do? 2 cents. How much does that cost? 3 cents. And you realize that all of these things that make books really beautiful cost pennies to do. And how it's such a shame when somebody's not spending that extra 6 cents to make to take it from a cheap looking thing to make something really beautiful. And so we became determined to just invest in cloth and color art inside and foil stamps and all of these things that all the printers are ready to do and willing to do. Foldouts and pop ups and lunchboxes, you know, anything that you really can imagine, some printer will be able to do it. Like we just redid, we made this new issue as a Trapper keeper which is a plastic three fold ring binding in the middle. We just sent it to our printer and said, can you create something like this? Well, of course, all these methods are still out there. They're still all. The last book I did was made of bamboo. So we have a bamboo cover for eyes in the impossible with a die cut with the words and the art cut through the bamboo. Totally affordable, totally doable. It's such a beautiful object to hold. And the printers are only too happy to be given the chance to experiment a little bit. And I think if we're going to have physical books survive, you do have to take that extra step. You got to make these things radically better than looking at a screen. It's an existential moment where if we don't do better, then bit by bit people will choose screens because everything is channeled through one object, as opposed to having to hold all of these different things and pay for them. But books so far have resisted the digitization. We haven't had the pirating that other industries do. People are still holding the American hardcover market up, which is really lucky. We're the only country in the world that still prints the number of hardcovers that we do. We go to Europe and it's quite rare to see hardcover books, which is really too bad. So I collect old books. I collect old Bibles in particular. I'll buy a book just for the spine. If I see something really unusual, anytime I see any kind of really clever book craft, you know, or like a parallelogram shaped book or a book with a Z shaped spine or anything that took hand work, which really means that somebody by hand is doing that. I always buy these things. And then we'll bring them into McSweeney's and the art director, whose name is sun ra Thompson, we'll look at it together and see how we could apply it to something with McSweeney's. And then usually these things, they might percolate for a year or two. And then finally we find the right format. We did one recently with like woven fabric as the COVID but it's done by machines. But it looks like it's hand done. But anything you want to do, they can do. Our Icelandic printer had, when I met them, they had just printed a limited edition of books with shark skin. Like actual sharks that had washed up on the shores of Iceland.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Dave Eggers]

They wrapped them around hard covers. They smell terrible, but you can do it.

[Interviewer]

What was the first book you published at McSweeney's?

[Dave Eggers]

It was Jonathan Letham called the Shape We're In. And he was very well established novelist at that point. But it was a weird book that he gave to us because he was always supporting us. And so we published. And then after that, Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson is indignant. And Lydia was like a hero to all of us and said we could bring her to a new audience. And so she went along with us for the ride. And I found all those old proofs just the other day. Like, I got to design her cover. And it was a David Byrne photograph that we used for her cover. And so that was just like the dream of dreams. Like you get to publish your hero with another hero's. Work on the COVID and nobody's saying no. And you get to go to Reykjavik and check proofs on the printer floor and then come back and get these boxes of this thing that you made. And you know how it is. Like, it's more fun as a publisher or a producer, I think, in a way, because you get an unadulterated pleasure of helping somebody else's work and be the presenter of it, as opposed to all the complicated feelings of your own stuff, right?

[Interviewer]

Oh, absolutely. And we get to do it more often. Like, you can't write as many books

[Dave Eggers]

as you can publish, right? No, my dream, honestly, my wife knows this. We've said this for years. When if some sort of version of Another Life for us would be combination movie theater where we get to show everything we want in a recording studio where, you know, it's affordable and we get to sort of pop in and just watch the process sometimes. Wouldn't that be. And. But. But we wouldn't have to work.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

Like you're just wandering through like a ghost. Because I love seeing iterations in music studio. I think it's far more interesting as a fly on the wall than being like on a film set, which is. I think if you have nothing to do, it's the most boring place to be in the world if you don't have a job. But I think being in a music studio, things move a lot faster, I think.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, miracles happen every day in the music studio. You see things go from really mediocre to really great and you don't know how or why. Yeah, it's not like anyone had any good idea. Just something happens and it changes and all of a sudden it's good.

[Dave Eggers]

I was a big Elvis Costello fan and I remembered when they. He came back with King of America and they did some live tracks on that, like the. His original. The Attractions did a few songs and they were live. And I was like. Became one of the first times I was really aware of, like, the difference between what does this band sound live in the studio? And as opposed to separate tracks and all that.

[Interviewer]

Where do your musical tastes tend to run?

[Dave Eggers]

Well, so when we were kids, it was. We spent all of our summers listening to the Beastie Boys and Run dmc. When they came out, we had all the videotapes too. We had everything. But then there was this parallel track of like English New Wave, like Elvis Costello and Echo and the Bunnyman, who I saw last week.

[Interviewer]

Oh, great. You know, how were they?

[Dave Eggers]

They're great. They sound great. Great it was the worst crowd I've ever seen in any concert in my life. No one moved.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Dave Eggers]

It was like there was some kind of fog over everybody that had paralyzed them. And I felt like some. It was like a prank. There was 3,000 people without even. Not even moving of the head. And I realized that they only knew a few songs, I Think I See. And it was like Lips Like Sugar came out and then they were interested and it was too bad. But they sounded great and Ian McCulloch sounded great. But then I got into everything. So, like, your album with Johnny Cash came to our magazine when we were all young magazine writers. And that was like a reawakening to country music for me and an entry point. But, you know, I try to follow as much as I can. I wrote about music for Spin. I had a column for a while. It was called A Now for a Less Informed Opinion. Because I didn't pretend to know anything outside of what I liked. So I get to write about Kings of Leon before they came out, and Joanna Newsom. And I felt like I was. That's that great place where you get to hear a record three months before it comes out and maybe tell a few people about it. But I did that only for like a year. I couldn't meet the deadlines. So now I get to just be just a fan. Like, I don't want to have to work at all, for sure. When I listen to music, do you

[Interviewer]

listen to more old music or new music?

[Dave Eggers]

Well, I still have every record and CD I ever had. And I write on a boat. So I have a little boat under the Golden Gate Bridge. It's just a sailboat. So I go down and I have all my CDs.

[Interviewer]

How many people could fit on this boat?

[Dave Eggers]

Three outside, one inside. So it just fits me in the underneath. And I have a little boombox crappy sound, but it's all I could fit there. And every CD I had from college on is there. And so that ends up being a lot of older music. And then I buy dollar CDs, people that I like. If I see a Mary Wells CD that I. It's a dollar here. Or I can experiment. Listening to a lot of Sinead o' Connor lately, where it's like, every last album she made was great. I can't. It's just impossible. And how as well known as she was, she's. I don't think there's a better singer that ever was. I mean, it just like, I've gone through just like endless deep dives. YouTube and everywhere else, seeing every last live performance and there's never anything but perfection and like it's otherworldly sound to her. She's the only person I think I can think of that I did feel like I knew her, but I didn't even was never within 5,000 miles of her. And now I get to listen to like a lot of Jim James and my morning jacket and stuff because Jim and I worked with Gary Burden on a movie. There was no dialogue based on an old graphic novel called God's man. And Jim made the music and I was going to write whatever there was to write. And then Gary passed before it went too far. But he left us as friends. So that was a gift that we got from the ultimate hippie.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, he's a great guy.

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[Interviewer]

When you're reading books, do you write in books? Do you fold down pages? Do you do any of those things?

[Dave Eggers]

Everything. I abuse every book.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I have a weird relationship. I'm afraid to touch them. Like I'll read them, but I really want to protect them. I view them as these holy things.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, I think it depends. I've written in every book. I guess pencil or pen, it doesn't matter. They're teaching tools for me. So if I want to remember how to do something, like how to do a really great character sketch in a short space, then I'll go to somebody who I know does that well and I'll go back to that book or I'll tear out the page or anything to keep it next to me. Have a stack of certain books near me on the boat. If I want to have them on hand, they're all beat up. They're all got salt water and mildew and everything. And I do have a separate collection of, like, collectible books and plastic and stuff, but I buy a lot of, like $2 used books so that I can draw and write on them and tear them up. Because I always think I'm going to be able to find that passage or I'll look at it, but I'm like, no, I got to tear this out and just have it next to me. Write notes on the back of it.

[Interviewer]

Do you write on the boat?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, that's my office. So during COVID we never had Internet at home, so I can't write near the Internet, so I had to get an office outside the house.

[Interviewer]

Explain. You can't write near the Internet?

[Dave Eggers]

Well, like, I have a flip phone, right? And so I can't be near the distraction.

[Interviewer]

So do you write longhand?

[Dave Eggers]

No, I do it for all my notes. But when I compose, I compose on a. It's a 1998 MacBook Pro, so it's about £20, big screen. And that's never been connected to the Internet, so I bought it. All the software is original, never updated it cracked screen, but it works perfectly. And I don't have to relearn anything. So I take that out to the boat and I sit. Boat sort of shifts, you know, 10ft this way, 8ft that way. There's pelicans and sea lions.

[Interviewer]

Are you at a dock or are you out in the water?

[Dave Eggers]

Oh, no, it's on a slip in a dock.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Dave Eggers]

But I have to be really away from any possible distraction.

[Interviewer]

How much time do you spend in the boat?

[Dave Eggers]

Like, a writing day would be eight hours, you know, I mean, then I have to get up and there's no bathroom, so I got a bike around this bay to the porta potty on the other side of the bay, which is not a long bike. But that gets me out and about. I always had trouble with being indoors all day. Part of writing this gets me outside, it's far prettier, and I don't have any possibility of any interruption. Nobody knows I'm there.

[Interviewer]

Is most of your time writing or thinking?

[Dave Eggers]

The first couple hours are journaling for procrastination. So I always have to spend two hours wasting time. And that's usually just writing.

[Interviewer]

Is that also on the same device or do you write down?

[Dave Eggers]

A little bit of both, but often just same device. And I pretend to write. I'm sitting in the writing position. So you got to do that for eight hours a day for me to get maybe an hour or two hours of work done. I see I waste a lot of time.

[Interviewer]

You need that time in that space.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah. And then there is always that thing where sometimes you're really composing, you're trying to get something done that day, or you've given yourself a crazy deadline because you're angry at wasting all that time and you're like, God damn it, just give me the. You know, let me finish this chapter. Sometimes there's a real deadline, but the being in there the whole time, sometimes, like hour six, some crazy, crucial breakthrough happens just because you were there.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

And it's not going to happen in a crowded place or among all, you know, at dinner. It's going to happen because you gave yourself that huge expanse of time. And maybe something, you know, I play music the entire time I work, so maybe something triggers it in the music. And maybe I procrastinate by reading a little bit and something breaks through there. But I wish it were different. And I wish I could be like one of these people that writes for an hour and a half a day and gets enough work done. I have never been able to do it. I need the entire expanse those days. I don't answer the phone, I don't do lunch. I don't see anybody. And at this point, I guess it's not going to change.

[Interviewer]

At the end of the day, do you feel tired from doing that or.

[Dave Eggers]

No, no, no. I mean, but you do feel like. And this goes for a lot of writers, if you haven't done anything, if you haven't written anything, if you have gotten nothing down, but you've pushed away your family and everything else to have that isolation. You've said no to some friend visiting from out of town, all of this stuff, because you just got it. And then if you don't get anything done, you just want to punch yourself in the face, like, all night. So it makes it all the more reason why. Trying to honor that time. And maybe there's, you know, kind of a. There's a sense of guilt, too. Like, boy, there's other people that really work for a living. Like, I really very lucky to be able to do this. So God damn it, get something done. And, you know, I came up through newspapers and magazines where you really didn't have any choice. You had to produce something. So I do think that it's a really. It's a good training for any profession. But for a novelist to have had daily Deadlines that were real and people counting on it and news counting on it and all that. But it is the. This is the happiest work environment I've ever had where I'm just so content there. And it's. It's a cradle. I mean, it's called the Cradle. My boat. So it. I renamed it. Which you're not supposed to do, but I renamed it. But it's. It's.

[Interviewer]

Why are you not supposed to name it?

[Dave Eggers]

You're not. It's bad luck to rename a boat.

[Interviewer]

Oh, is that true? If you change the name of a boat, it's bad luck.

[Dave Eggers]

They say it's a curse.

[Interviewer]

I've not known that.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Dave Eggers]

But because it rocks all day, it took me months when I was doing it. At first I would go down there, get all set up, and fall asleep immediately and sleep for 90 minutes. Now I'm used to it enough where I can still. I can get work done. But it's so calm. It's so womb. Like.

[Interviewer]

How long have you been using the boat?

[Dave Eggers]

Maybe five, six years now. Different. I was on a different dock, but now this is the perfect one. It's this rickety old Popeye, like, dock under the bridge, and there's just me and a couple fishermen. And that's it. Yeah. I mean, it's a shitty old boat.

[Interviewer]

The setting.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Sounds great to allow something to happen.

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah. I think it's worth it for anybody. Like, how do you really want to spend your days? Does it have to be in this kind of a environment, that kind of an office? How would you ideally do it? It makes me crazy that it took me this long to really think about it, you know, and seek out and create something that was a little bit more my ideal.

[Interviewer]

You have a favorite bookstore?

[Dave Eggers]

I can't say there's too many up there. You know, San Francisco's like the. It's got the most indie bookstores.

[Interviewer]

Could be anywhere in the world. Doesn't have to be in San Francisco.

[Dave Eggers]

Well, let's go to Paris then. Then it's not. I don't get anyone in SF. Mad Shakespeare Co. Right near Notre Dame is. Those are old friends of mine. And that's the bookstore of my dreams. And maybe everybody's. That's sort of what we modeled our new international library of young authors on. Like, just bright colors and books everywhere and no hard edges and old wood and Persian rugs and cats and, you know, all of that stuff. I really don't love the new wave of library design and stuff where it all looks like an airport. You know, it's all like spare. There's only screens. You see a few books somewhere in the distance and then this vast expanse of sort of airport looks like an Apple Store. Like an Apple Store, yeah. Not everything has to converge with tech. The things that are apart from tech need to stay apart. And I think there's always this mistake where libraries feel like, okay, we gotta be relevant. We have to look like an Apple Store. And it's like, no, no, that's actually not why we go to the library. We go because we want something really different and we want it to be screen free and read most of it. We want it to be quiet, we want it to be weird. We want it to smell like paper and glue and leather. And instead, all the new library designs have this airport look and they hide the books in the basement. And it's so sad. And what I love is that kids really want the tactile. They want soft edges and pillows and fabric and velvet and wood. And typewriters. We have all these typewriters. It's the first thing they all gravitate to, the typewriters. This presumption though, that, oh, kids love screens. We're going to give them more screens. It's such a strange impulse to sort of to channel everything through this one narrow portal as opposed to saying, painting will be painting, books will be books. Tech is fine over here. We don't all have to merge with or be subservient to the tech overlord. We can exist separately over here. And I hope things are sort of trending the other way now that they realize the catastrophe of kids writing with AI and realizing just how bad that is. But we'll see.

[Interviewer]

Ever been to the Strand in New York?

[Dave Eggers]

Of course? Yeah, a lot of times. So I spent a lot of time in the Strand. Maybe that's the ultimate one in New York. Probably. I go to a lot of sort of the ones adjacent, attached to libraries. You know, the friends of this library will have a bookstore that's my favorite because those are vast and really cheap. So because I thought libraries were tracking your what you checked out. I was mistaken about this for a while during my privacy anti tech era. So I stopped going, I stopped checking out books. I would go to the abused bookstore adjacent so I could buy the books instead and do whatever I wanted to them. I'm not a good library patron because I abuse the books. I lose them, I don't bring them back. It's just like a weird genetic flaw. So I realized I'm not good for you. I'm going to save you from me. I'm just going to buy the books instead and then I'll go through them and then I end up donating them back a year later.

[Interviewer]

How's your relationship to magazines different than your relationship to books?

[Dave Eggers]

I grew up as a magazine kid more than anything else. And I remember being 15 when I subscribed to the Village Voice out of Chicago suburbs. I think I know I was the only subscriber in my town. And that was just like access to a world I otherwise would never know. And then when Spin started, I subscribed to Spin and Rolling Stone and I thought it was very cool. Like I was I how to track where I was going to be a music writer. That was what I loved to do and get to see free shows. And I did it all through college and got to see all these bands in small venues when they were coming up. But these days, most of my favorite magazines, they don't exist or they're shadows of. I mean, there's a handful that are holding tight. But I will say, like we do have in our workshops, we have zine making classes now. So we have a whole section where it's like staples, glue, paper every week, every Friday there's a zine making class. Dozens of kids, all ages. Zines are sort of completely having a rebirth among these kids that have too much digital stuff, they don't want to do blogs, they don't want to. I mean, some of them I guess do tiktoks. But like, if you offer a zine class, it's so exotic to them that I think that these things sort of like vinyl have a chance of coming back. Especially if you just make space for it. Give them the paper, give them the staplers, have a copier and you won't be disappointed.

[Interviewer]

Do you have any rituals before you write?

[Dave Eggers]

So I wake up, I read for about an hour and a half with nights.

[Interviewer]

What might you read?

[Dave Eggers]

Almost always books by dead people. It's just more calming for me, an old book and usually something really off topic like the history of shipwrecks on the Pacific Coast. Like that's my favorite recent book. And then after that, if I feel really ready, then I go down to the boat and put on. There's an album by Sinead o' Connor that's like Irish standards. That's my first record. Always I have to listen to the whole thing and write journal or whatever, procrastinate. And then I'm usually ready to pretend to try to get something done. And that's as much of a ritual as I've had. I've never been too much of a ritual person. But when I discovered reading in the morning, and I would recommend this to anybody, I would fall asleep at night. Like reading it late at night, at 10 minutes and I'd be asleep. But in the morning, I'm sharp. Coffee's coming on. Three cups of coffee, an hour and a half of reading and you just feel like the most Zen person alive. I wish I'd discovered that 30 years ago. I would have read a lot more. It puts me in the exact right frame of mind. And without it. In the last few weeks I had an Internet connection. That's a long story, but I usually don't. But I've had one in the morning and I get online right away. It's been a fucking disaster, just wretched. I'm a totally different person. Wasting time, stupid forms about nothing that matters. Watching. At best I'm watching old concerts. But it's just night and day. And we realize if you do that to kids too, if you give them the choice or give them a connection with everything that's ever been in the world and every movie that was ever made, they're going to go there. But if you set aside space and time and say this is our reading period or whatever, then they will use it. But you have to gotta do this stuff thoughtfully.

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[Dave Eggers]

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[Interviewer]

When you sit down to write, do you expect a certain outcome at the end of the day or no?

[Dave Eggers]

Usually I have something I'm trying to do. You know, like there's writers that have a word count they're shooting for just to keep themselves generally on pace. So you might say 500 words or a thousand words, which is really not that much. Sometimes you give a deadline to a friend to give back to you. So you say, or I'll say to my wife, like, I'm giving you this chapter at the end of the day. Force me to do it. Hold me to it. Yell at me if I don't get it. So you're often employing friends and family to keep you on target. And that goes back to the community part of it. It's like so much of writing is actually talking. You're not always alone. And if you're stuck, you call up a friend or you go for a walk with somebody. You say, I'm working this out. Does this make any sense? Or am I onto something here? Or if you're writing a novel, you give chapters as you go to a receiver. I call them. Somebody that's dedicated.

[Interviewer]

How many people do you have like that that you could share a chapter with?

[Dave Eggers]

Maybe 10, 15.

[Interviewer]

That's a lot.

[Dave Eggers]

Been around a while. All the people I came up with, and we all do it for each other. Like, I'm stuck. Can we trade for a few months? And you give me yours, and I'll give you yours. But that's where you lean a little bit on somebody, and they're gonna see things that you won't see. They're gonna push you through a rough patch. They're gonna say, no, just keep going. You're not stuck. Keep going. Just keep doing exactly what you're doing. That's how I finished my first book. I gave one section every few weeks to my editor, this guy, Jeff Klosky, and he's like, you're not making sense. Keep going. He never edited a word until the end. And I so recommend that to everybody. It's my first bit of advice for anybody trying to finish a first book. Have somebody that's just there, reads it, doesn't judge, and unless it's catastrophic, says, keep going. And you'll get to the end that way. Much more so if you're just alone, spinning on a hilltop somewhere like the Unabomber, you really need to be in conversation with people and let them pull you through.

[Interviewer]

Do you write every day?

[Dave Eggers]

Every day. That's a writing day. I write. Today is a non writing day, but on a writing day, I don't see anything, I don't do anything.

[Interviewer]

How many writing days are there in a year?

[Dave Eggers]

These days? Probably 250, you know, good amount. Yeah. It wasn't that way. I used to write in the middle of the night because I was working during the day, but these days, because I can do just that and I'm not needed and my kids are older and all that stuff. Yeah, it feels beyond luxurious. You feel crazy guilt sometimes.

[Interviewer]

Nothing goes good. Do you get excited? Do you have a good feeling?

[Dave Eggers]

The rest of that night is euphoric. You rush to work the next day. Or if you show something to a trusted reader and they're like, this is really coming together, then you're just. That's jet fuel, you know? And that's another reason why you include people, because if they get excited, that redoubles your own energy, your dedication, your confidence in it.

[Interviewer]

Is there a momentum that builds as well? Like if you have a couple of good days in a road, is it

[Dave Eggers]

easy to ride that 100%?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

Famously. Ray Bradbury down here in LA, you know how he finished Fahrenheit 451? He was broke and he had a family and he had some job, but they had public typewriters at the LA Public Library in the basement, I think 10 cents for an hour. And he had just enough to, like, put in two hours a day, maybe of typewriter time. And because he was on the clock and he was broke, he wrote that thing in like two weeks, you know.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Dave Eggers]

And the momentum. And that's why you read it. It's like a really furious, passionate book. But some of that is the. Driven by that urgency and the limitations of this typewriter. So sometimes some of the books that we love the most were written in short spans of time because you're capturing a real moment. And there's even a fury of energy that you get that you don't necessarily get if you're. You can get it. But it's a lot harder if you spend seven years on something, because to capture the lightness that comes and that sort of the coherence that comes from art made in the crucible of a short amount of time. And I. You know, even a mad kind of period of your life, sometimes those things, the best art is made, as opposed to, you know, they say, write drunk, edit sober. Have you ever heard that?

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Dave Eggers]

So true. And you have to be able to go on these wild flights and then recognize that you need to leave that alone. Fix the grammar, but let it be. Because what really connects with people, I think more than anything are those flights of Just untamed stream of consciousness or passion. And the stuff that's most risky and most embarrassing. And the stuff that you, or maybe a timid editor would say, you really shouldn't put that on paper. That's the stuff you have to leave.

[Interviewer]

Do you only work on one thing at a time?

[Dave Eggers]

Oh no, always many things.

[Narrator/Announcer]

Really?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah, until the end when I'm on the finishing stage. Then it's the one thing. But I'm taking notes on many things every day. Like I'll see a bird. I'll be like, well, that's that. I was writing a picture book about a bird like that. I just had an idea that'll go in the bird. Then once you're getting to the very end, the last six months or so, then it's pretty much just the one.

[Interviewer]

Is there some part of the craft of writing that you had trouble with that you feel like you're getting better at?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah. Knowing if it'll make any sense at all. Maybe the first six, five, six books. You have no idea that it'll cohere. There's no lesson. There's no structure that you can count on. It's not like a verse, verse, chorus, you know, there's no. It's. Every novel is wildly different from every other one. And especially when non fiction, it's really unpredictable whether you have something or not, or you can make some. Something compelling out of something that happens, some moment in time. But now, having been through it 12 novels or whatever, I'm at. You get to a point of it's not mastery, but you're closer to knowing the path before you start. But then again, to make a really interesting book, you're starting over, you're doing something drastically new. I have to be interested in the form of something new, something that I haven't done before. So I'm working on something now that has a really different structure than anything I've done before. And it could be terrible, but I know better that I could finish it no matter what. I don't know if it'll be any good, but at a certain point, you know how to finish almost anything.

[Interviewer]

Let's say how much of your first draft will end up in the final book.

[Dave Eggers]

The raw material is all there, most of it, but you've ideally fixed every sentence. You know, my first drafts are not. Are very rough.

[Interviewer]

Are they longer or no.

[Dave Eggers]

You know, a really good writer. Your final draft is shorter than your first. Right. Because you've distilled.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

You ever hear that phrase, like, I didn't have enough time to make this shorter. And it's like if you're doing your job well. Yeah, you are cutting out the fat, you're making it lean itself. I did just finish a book for all ages where I cut 100 pages in three weeks. And it was so much better.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

And it was a gift to the poor reader that was going to have to slog through this over long book. But other people were ready to sign off on it. And I read it late in the game and I was like, this just. It's undisciplined. And you know how it's such. No one teaches you that.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

If you see real discipline in film in particular and really tight editing, it's just such pleasure. And then if you see it something drag or a little bit lazy or a little bit too forgiving of some long, languorous take, thinking like, why am I more bored than I've ever been in my life? Just because this one take is like, you know, a minute and a half long and. But the discipline, it's a gift to your audience to say, I respect your time. I'm going to make this tight. It's like not God is in the details, but there's. There should be some equivalent phrase that's just like the gift of a very tightly edited work of art. It seems at odds with the loose hippie magic of art to spend so much attention on constraint and discipline and leanness. But it does really matter. Makes a difference. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

If you have a story in mind. Can that story be told many different ways?

[Dave Eggers]

This is the eternal question. Every day, honest to God, I've got. Let's talk about like this. I went to Kitty Hawk. I love flight. I love experimental flight. I do a lot of different, like weird stuff and I love experimental flyers. People that will invent a new jetpack or whatever. So I went to Kitty Hawk to pay pilgrimage to the Wright brothers and the kill devil hills and the dunes. And I met this guy that teaches hang gliding and I learned some hang gliding and I just had so much. Such a rich culture there. They call themselves Dunies. All the teachers and these young men. And he's the elder statesman and he teaches them how to teach others. And they're all hanging out on these dunes with these beautiful brightly colored kites. And if have you ever hang. Glided a little bit, it's easy and safe to do it just on a hill. It's just a kite, no machinery.

[Interviewer]

And it's silent.

[Dave Eggers]

Yes, silent, utteredly silent. And you feel it's the Closest thing to being a bird even for 20ft of just being aloft. And I was like, is this a novel? Is this a movie about. Is this non fiction piece about this culture of. Of people? Is it a short story? So some things arrive, you know, right away. That one I've sat for five years now. I've gone back twice, done a tandem flight, you know, all the way.

[Squarespace Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

Where you. A plane pulls you up and then lets you go 3,000ft up. I still don't know what to do with this. And I take notes just from your experience.

[Interviewer]

Will there be a breakthrough moment where it's like, aha.

[Dave Eggers]

It should be.

[Interviewer]

I know exactly what to do now. Where the fuck is just waiting for

[Dave Eggers]

that and waiting for it. So that's like Contrapposto, this book. 20 years of notes waiting for the structure to arrive.

[Interviewer]

What was the key?

[Dave Eggers]

I think just like I wanted it to be about their whole lives, but I was bored thinking about having to describe every year. Allowing yourself to jump 10 years each time was just. It's such a simple thing. But I hadn't. Hadn't occurred to me.

[Interviewer]

It's always a simple thing.

[Dave Eggers]

I know I felt so dumb when it popped into my head. It's not like no one's ever done it before, but it liberated me. Suddenly all the baggage was, you know, it's like a hot air balloon where you dump the sandbags off and you're alone. And I think so much of the time you are. You're losing things as opposed to putting more in.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

The solution often is less.

[Interviewer]

Do you always want there to be a moral at the end of the story? No.

[Dave Eggers]

And there are themes and ideas and all of these things woven into a novel, but it's a form where these things come and go in the flow of a vast meandering river that you're traveling down. And you don't get out of the river and say, oh, I know I should always be barefoot now. You know, like some. But these days there is a little bit more that's been sort of entering into the. What do you want readers to take away? It's just like it's everywhere now. Especially when with picture books. I write books for kids too. And Maurice Sendak was a guy that Spike and I used to work with. And he was so adamant about that books should not have morals and for kids too, even though he did some. That had kind of some messages. But it's a different form. I don't think that a moral and a work of art are sort of, like, can coexist.

[Interviewer]

When you're sitting in the boat, do you feel like you're making it or do you feel like you're finding it?

[Dave Eggers]

I would say they're both everyday occurrences. You definitely know sometimes I have to flesh out this character. This is the I'm doing this today no matter what. And in doing that you realize, like, oh, they had this stepfather that they used to live with, and he was in the Merchant Marine. And this thing pops into the page all of a sudden and there's nothing better, really. I know the characters in this new book that I had not planned on at all that, like, they're there suddenly because I'm typing. I'm really not a mystical. Like, I'm not superstitious or anything. I really feel like generally we're in control of what we're doing there. But sometimes things you are catching up to what's going on in your head and you can just barely type it fast enough. And those are really fun. And those characters actually become really different in your mind and kind of more beloved because they arrived unannounced and without much of your own doing.

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[Interviewer]

Have you had any mentors?

[Dave Eggers]

Always. So I've been looking through all these old papers and I had a high school teacher named Peter Ferry who was just like my favorite guy and really funny guy. You know the teachers that like Monty Python. When you are obsessed with Monty Python, like forever, that's your guy. And so we stayed in touch. And even when I started writing books, I would send him each book before it came out so he could grade it.

[Narrator/Announcer]

Great.

[Dave Eggers]

I found all my manuscripts from Peter Ferry the other day. And he'd write all these notes and he'd always tell the truth. And he was hard on me here and there. He was always, like, firm about things. At that point, he was writing his own books. He wrote a number of novels that were published. And then he would do something that I recommend to anybody. He would write down all of his favorite lines from the manuscript and give it back to you. And through his eyes to see what he had noticed. And then the love that took him to, like, put it all back in handwriting. Somebody, a peer of mine, did this a couple days ago in an email. And I was like, oh, my God, I have never had anyone but Mr. Ferry do this. Yeah, but everybody should do it. And it made me think, I have to do this with friends, too. Because it's different than just saying good job. It makes it 10 times better. And you're like, oh, yeah, I forgot that I did that. So he did that until, you know, he passed away a few years ago. But I still have a few of my old teachers in my life and including my fifth grade teacher who made us write a book. And I'm going to see her in Chicago in about a month.

[Interviewer]

Great.

[Dave Eggers]

So it was mostly teachers that I stayed close with, especially when my parents passed. Like, they became some of the crucial adults in my life that kept in touch on purpose and were sort of careful to present that continuity with home. That's one of the reasons why we have these organizations that are teacher supporting organizations. We try to give more volunteers in the classrooms to help public school teachers in our era.

[Interviewer]

Have you ever read something you wrote a long time ago and realized that it means something different than you thought it meant when you wrote it?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah. Or you don't remember it at all.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. Like it never happened.

[Dave Eggers]

I found stuff that I don't remember. I have no recollection of writing it. I mean, from my 20s and 30s, no recollection of writing it. No idea what I was writing. I don't know where it went. I don't know what became of it or why I abandoned it, but there was some good stuff. So sometimes you do borrow things from these abandoned drafts. But at best, art, you don't always know what you're getting at and if it's coming from the deepest, most subliminal, kind of bone deep Place within you. Then you get into dream storytelling and the kind of stuff you do when you aren't awake. And then that's some of the most interesting stuff. And why is it that I'm writing this scene that takes place underwater and it's a. You can't question it sometimes. And sometimes that's the storytelling that I think is most resonant with people. Then that's why David lynch, he's the perfect exemplar of this. I'm sure he has no idea why he did certain things. And it wasn't coming from the intellectual part of himself. It was coming from like, I don't know, there's going to be this black lacquered box and then there's a key and I guess.

[Interviewer]

And he can describe it perfectly, perfectly, but has no idea why.

[Dave Eggers]

And then there's tiny people that are behind the diner and they come out like these are all dream things that he didn't question that he realized in three dimensional space and on film. And we know exactly what he's doing. He's the only sort of real dream artist, I think, out there on film. And why is it everybody else constrains it and puts it into a more rational form?

[Interviewer]

Maybe even, well prior to him, you

[Dave Eggers]

know, for sure, you know, why is there a dead person in the, in the restaurant over there? Like that kind of stuff. But in a dream, every day a dream will give that to you. So I think, you know, when you, you've got to allow that you don't

[Interviewer]

have to know why.

[Dave Eggers]

Don't have to know why. And I was telling, I speak to high school kids, I was in a class last week and they were like, well, so what kind of philosophy guides you as you wrote the Circle? This is a book about like a tech dystopia. He said, you know, like stoicism or, you know.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dave Eggers]

And I said, no, that's. Don't ever believe when you go to college or whatever. There's no, we're not being guided by some theory. It's not on a grid. You know, if we. If your college professor tells you that this story has a lot of red in it because he was influenced by a grandfather that was a Soviet dissident. No, he just put red in. He has no idea there were flowers in the room or no idea. All of these things are coming from a much more subliminal place. And so this sort of hyper intellectualization and analysis of it is something that you can do as an undergrad to pass the time, but it doesn't mean the artist has any awareness of this and shouldn't. And so I like to sort of liberate high school kids from that. And of course, sometimes their teachers are horrified that I'm saying much of what they're reading and analyzing is.

[Interviewer]

It's made up is made up.

[Dave Eggers]

It's just make work.

[Interviewer]

Do you ever start projects and not finish them?

[Dave Eggers]

Always, 92% of the time.

[Squarespace Advertisement Voice]

Really?

[Dave Eggers]

A lot, yeah. I mean, a lot of times you're waiting for somebody to tell you it's a bad idea, and then sometimes somebody else will do it in the meantime before you've finished. Sometimes you just can't get to it, and it takes you 20 years. And very often you yourself will realize, ideally as quickly as possible, that between three in the morning when you wrote it down and nine in the morning when you see the note by the bed, how stupid it is. But, yeah, I tend to sort of going in a lot of directions at once and trying to find time and reason to focus on the one thing and get it finished. But I don't know what you'd call it. I mean, I'm sure it's diagnosable now. I've never been diagnosed with anything and nor do I want to be. I think that I finish plenty enough. And I always tell people, like, there's just no shame in a hundred abandoned projects as long as you're getting that 101st one finished. They say you've got 40,000 thoughts a day, right? So I for sure believe that. I definitely have counted them. It's a lot, but I love being told, not that one. And then I'm like, oh, thank God. And then I can move on. And it's only when knowledgeable people will say, oh, that's pretty good. Then you're like, oh, fuck, I might have to do this. Even if it's outside of the realm of writing. We had this idea for this thing called Art and Water, and it's like a free MFA art school. It'll be in a piercing in San Francisco. And it's. I was upset by how art School is $100,000 a year now. No one I know can pay this. So I said, well, why don't we take mentors, teach aspiring artists for free? Everybody shares space, studios, and all together. So I pitched this for five years to different people, and nobody told me it was a dumb idea.

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And I.

[Dave Eggers]

So I was never free of it. And so now it's going to happen because people joined up and now it'll be open later on this summer. So It'll be like 50 artists all sharing great studio space and teaching each other and no money exchanged. So you have to come down and see it. It'll be a thing.

[Interviewer]

Tell me more about your thoughts on education in general.

[Dave Eggers]

Well, this has been the sphere we've been in with our nonprofits since 2002. I went to public schools all the way through college, so I think school should be free, and I think the teachers should be better paid. Those are the two main things. It could be under a tree. It could be anywhere, as long as you're motivating and paying those teachers. It all comes down to teachers and paying them better. So we have a bill before Congress right now where it would set a $60,000 minimum for all teachers in the U.S. and then, as you can imagine, that's not going anywhere super fast. But I think more than ever now that they're chasing teachers out of the classroom by banning their books and arresting them for handing out these certain books. My books have been banned all over the country.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah. We did a whole documentary. Matt Stone funded it, actually. It was directed by Arthur Bradford called To Be Destroyed. And I had a book called the Circle that Now is on the banned list.

[Interviewer]

Do you know why they banned it?

[Dave Eggers]

Yeah. So it's about, you know, they assigned it in high school because it's about the dangers of technology and social media and a lot of things. But there's three very awkward intimacy scenes that are meant to be so awkward and about how, like, in one case, during a romantic encounter, the male of the two wants her to rate him as they go along, you know, because he's so insecure, and he wants everything to be measurable and datafied. So they're not like sexy scenes, but they're in a book that's often assigned in high school. So that's often what they're banning. It's intimacy in a book that's given to kids. Meanwhile, these kids all have phones. They have access to every piece of pornography that's ever been made by humankind. But they're worried about the three scenes in the novel. So they banned this book in Rapid City, South Dakota. And they didn't just ban it, but they destroyed them all. And they pulled them out of libraries, and they've never been seen again.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Dave Eggers]

And so that's why they were marked to be destroyed on the official documents.

[Squarespace Advertisement Voice]

Wow.

[Dave Eggers]

So that's what we called. And we went back to South Dakota many times, and Arthur, the director, filmed students and parents and teachers and to Examine how these things happened. And it turns out there was nobody in the town that objected to any of the books. Not one authentic complaint. But because there had been a new Christian school board voted in, headed up by a woman with seven kids, none of whom were in the public schools. They were all sent to Christian schools. But because of this culture of sort of maybe preemptive censorship, they took all these semi controversial books off the shelves so as not to stir up any trouble. These are the principles of the schools. And then the kids found out about it. They were enraged. They felt stolen from and condescended to. And so we partnered with the local independent bookstore Mitzi's and said, if we'll pay for it, will you offer all five banned books? There were five of them to any kid that comes in in high school. So they did it. We're still doing it to this day. Three years later, we walk in and so far more kids have read these books and they all have them at home now, whereas they wouldn't than had they not banned them. But it does teach you, like so much of censorship is not coming down from on high. But it's preemptive. It's like the powers that be saying, let's just avoid trouble in case it's coming or in case the school board objects. Let's just preemptively take these books off the list. But it was really enlightening. Amazing to see these kids stand up for the right to read freely and got to see a really great part of the world. Like Rapid City, South Dakota is an awesome town. It's right near Mount Rushmore in the badlands and stuff. So there's a lot to see there.

[Interviewer]

But it's a great story.

[Dave Eggers]

Isn't that crazy? Amazing Book banning has no fans, even maga people the farthest. There's very few Americans on any part of this political spectrum that want to censor books. Anytime we had a town hall or anything. Everybody can come any side of this debate. Not one person came from the town to say, let's ban books. So then the next school board election, they voted out all the lunatics, they voted back in a bunch of moderates, and now things are back to normal. So it gives you hope. If any collector is well informed and they show up, chances are you're not going to have a hijacking by these right wing extremists. But you do have to vote and you've got to be informed.

[Interviewer]

What are your thoughts on free speech?

[Dave Eggers]

I mean, I'm an absolutist, me too. I even did this in the schools and in Rapid City. I was like, what's the one book you would ban? Because there's gotta be one, right? And I always want some kid to say Mein Kampf, like, that's one that doesn't belong. They know the trick. Because if everybody has a right to ban one book, and it sounds good in theory, like, well, just one book out of 200,000, well, that library is empty very quickly. So we're at the point where there's more banned books than in any time in history. And it's doubling every year. And it's because of technology and these banned lists that are shared from community to community and then this culture of radical conservatism. But it'll swing around again. But in the meantime, it's really rough on librarians and it makes a hard, low paying job much harder.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your editing process.

[Dave Eggers]

I'm pretty fierce, I guess, in newspapers and magazines, you know, like, there's never an unexamined sentence. Everything is subject to be chopped up and you get a thick skin. You can't be precious about much. And now, you know, writing your own books, you. You could be precious if you'd like to be. But you get very good at listening to editors and the humility of giving yourself to editing. And then you also become a very good self editor, especially if you're editing other people. I always think you got to edit other people's books to be a good self editor. And not just, I like it, I don't like it, but how could this be better? You know, I know what you're trying to do here. So I was an editor for about 10 years before I ever wrote a book. So it's a great training. Toni Morrison was an editor.

[Interviewer]

I didn't know that.

[Dave Eggers]

Decades before she was a big editor at Random House. And then she wrote Beloved. And so I recommend it as a start and as a ongoing practice.

[Interviewer]

Are there any popular rules or ideas about writing that you disagree with?

[Dave Eggers]

All of them. When you say rules about writing, that's a terrible phrase to utter. There can be no rules about writing. And this is how we discourage generations of young people from writing is when we say, here's your five paragraphs, here's your this, here's your opening this, and then have fun writing. Be inspired. We're just gonna like hold you to box you in, box you in everywhere you can possibly imagine. If we wonder why they don't consider themselves creative or good writers or whatever. And then you give them the five paragraph essay. That is exactly how you kill every generation's interest in writing. It's the five paragraph essay. It needs to be obliterated. And you'll see everything. Open up the sky. Open up everything. All these kids feeling free of those shackles. But all of the tropes are wrong. Write what you know is a terrible canard is misunderstood. People have taken it to mean that if you grew up in a suburb and your dad was a mailman, then that's what you should write is a bunch of novels about suburban mailman.

[Interviewer]

No.

[Dave Eggers]

And it doesn't mean that at all. And you should never be constrained by just the things you know. How about learn some things and then write about those things? How about the book being bigger than yourself? Anytime you hear a rule, take it with a grain of salt. Maybe it's good advice, but. But generally speaking, it's to be ignored immediately when it's presented to you. Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.

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