Dave Eggers

29:37Yeah, 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, And 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 if you're allowed to just keep doing it, that's 99 % the measure of success is...

30:18You get to keep doing it. Get to keep doing it. That's great. 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 going to 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 what to do or how to do it.

30:57They might say no, but for the most part that no one has any of that sort of nudgy input. There's no managers. There's nobody in between you and whatever you do.

31:11Tell me about working with an editor. What's that experience like? Well, I had a book called The Eyes and the Impossible, which was 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. 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. it's our don't touch it yeah 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.

32:13It 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, 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.

32:57And then he's the one that can go spread the gospel. When Taylor suggested taking out that 15-page thread, what was your first instinct when you heard that idea? No way. This is essential. I worked on that. I feel like we need this thread. How did you come around? 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, knew what was best for it. So I was like, geez, I really don't think she's right here.

33:37But in my bones, I was like, she's probably right. And so, you know, 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 this vestigial name is still there. Nobody caught it.

34:16Tell me about your relationship to books in general over the course of your life. 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.

34:56and then we were publishing pretty basic things for a while but then i went and saw i went to reikovic and walked the floor of the printing plant it's all these blonde men with blue jumpsuits i mean it was like a oompa loompa type of thing but i could walk around and i'd see by they printed all the bibles in iceland and i could see like the gilt 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? Two cents. How much does that cost? Three cents. And you realize that all of these things that make books really beautiful cost pennies to do.

35:36And how it's such a shame when somebody's not spending the extra six cents to take it from a cheap looking thing to make something really beautiful. And so we became determined to just invest and 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, fold-outs and pop-ups and munch boxes. 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. you 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 the die cut with the 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.

36:54You 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, you know, 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. go to Europe and it's quite rare to see hardcover books, which is really too bad.

37:44So 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 that took hand work which really means that somebody by hand is doing that i always buy the buy these things and then we'll bring them into mcsweeney's and the art director whose name is sunra uh 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.

38:29We did one recently with like woven fabric as the cover, 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. They wrapped them around hardcovers. They smell terrible, but you can do it. What was the first book you published at McSweeney's? It was Jonathan Lethem called This Shape We're In. And he was a very well-established novelist at that point, but it was a weird book that he gave to us because he was always supporting us.

39:11And so we published. And then after that, Lydia Davis is, 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 is just like the dream of dreams. Like you get to publish your hero with another hero's work on the cover 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.

39:55And you know how it is. 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? Oh, absolutely. And we get to do it more often. So you can't write as many books 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.

40:38Wouldn't that be... But we wouldn't have to work. Yeah, yeah. Like you're just wandering through it 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. 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. It's not like anyone had any good idea.

41:16It just, something happens and it changes and all of a sudden it's good. 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 the, 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. Where do your musical tastes tend to run? Well, so when we were kids, it was, you know, we spent all of our summers listening to the Beastie Boys and Run DMC when they came out.

41:54We 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 Bunnymen who I saw last week. Oh, great. You know. How were they? They're great. Yeah. They sound great. Great. It was the worst crowd I've ever seen in any concert in my life. Like no one moved. Wow. It was like there was some kind of fog on over everybody that had paralyzed them. And I felt like it was like a prank. It 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.

42:36But they sounded great. And Ian McCullough 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 and 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.

43:19But 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 listen to more old music or new music? 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. How many people could fit on this boat? Three outside, one inside. So it just fits me 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.

43:59So 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, 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 than ever was. She's unbelievable. 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 this otherworldly sound to her.

44:40She'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 that 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. Yeah, he's a great guy.

45:21When you're reading books, do you write in books? Do you fold down pages? Do you do any of those things? Everything. I abuse every book. 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. Yeah, I think it depends on... 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.

46:01Have 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 dollar or two dollar used books so that I can draw and write on them and and tear them up because I always think I'm going to be able to find that passage or I'll look at it I'm like no I gotta tear this out and just have it next to me write notes on the back of it do you write on the boat yeah that's my office so during COVID we never had internet at home so I can't write near the internet.

46:41So I had to get an office outside the house. Explain you can't write near the internet. Well, like I have a flip phone, right? And so I can't be near the distraction. Do you write longhand? No. I do for all my notes, but when I compose, I compose on a, it's a 1998 MacBook Pro. So it's about 20 pounds, 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, 10 feet this way, 8 feet that way.

47:27There's pelicans and sea lions. Are you at a dock or are you out in the water? Oh, no, it's on a slip at a dock. I see. But I have to be really away from any possible distraction. How much time do you spend in the boat? Like a riding day would be eight hours, you know? I mean, then I have to get up and there's no bathroom, so I got to bike around this bay to the port-a-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 riding. This gets me outside. It's far prettier. and I don't have any possibility of any interruption.

48:06Nobody knows I'm there. Is most of your time writing or thinking? The first couple hours are journaling for procrastination. So I always have to spend two hours wasting time and that's usually just writing. Is that also on the same device or do you write down? 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. You need that time in that space. 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.

48:52You'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 yeah just because you were there yeah 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 big 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. 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.

49:36I 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. At the end of the day, do you feel tired from doing that or 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'm really very lucky to be able to do this, so God damn it, get something done.

50:38And, 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 a cradle. I mean, it's called the cradle, my boat. So I renamed it, which you're not supposed to do, but I renamed it. Why are you not supposed to name it? It's bad luck to rename a boat.

51:15Oh, is that true? If you change the name of a boat, it's bad luck. They say it's a curse. I've not known that. Yeah. Wow. 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, unsleep 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. How long have you been using the boat? 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.

51:53Yeah, I mean, it's a shitty old boat. The setting sounds great to allow something to happen. 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 an 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. Do you have a favorite bookstore? I can't say. There's too many up there. You know, San Francisco's like the, it's got the most indie bookstores. Could be anywhere in the world.

52:34Doesn't have to be in San Francisco. Well, let's go to Paris then. Then it's not, I don't get anyone in SF mad. Shakespeare and Company right there in Notre Dame is, those are old friends of mine. 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.

53:16You see a few books somewhere in the distance and then this vast expanse of sort of airport. Looks like an Apple store. Looks like an Apple store. 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 got to 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, or 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.

53:52and 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 so we're going to give them more screens. It's such a strange impulse to sort of channel everything through this one narrow portal, as opposed to saying, painting will be painting, books will be books, tech is fine over here.

54:38We 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. Have you been in The Strand in New York? 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.

55:22So because I thought libraries were tracking what you checked out, I was mistaken about this for a while during my privacy anti-tech era. So I stopped checking out books. I would go to the used 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 ended up donating them back a year later.

56:02How's your relationship to magazines different than your relationship to books? 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 had a 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 and small venues when they were coming up.

56:50But 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 at coming back, especially if you just make space for it.

57:39Give them the paper. Give them the staplers. Have a copier, and you won't be disappointed. Do you have any rituals before you write? So I wake up. I read for about an hour and a half with coffee. What might you read? 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. 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.

58:20I 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, 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.

59:04I 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 forums 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.

59:46But if you set aside space and time and say, this is our reading period or whatever, then they will use it, but we have to do this stuff thoughtfully.

1:00:01When you sit down to write, do you expect a certain outcome at the end of the day or no? 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.

1:00:45And that goes back to the community part of it. It's like, you know, so much you're writing is actually talking. You know, 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. How many people do you have like that that you could share a chapter with? Maybe 10, 15. That's a lot. I've been around a while. Oh, that's great, though. All the people I came up with.

1:01:19And we all do it for each other. Yeah. 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 going to see things that you won't see. They're going to push you through a rough patch. They're going to 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 making sense. Keep going. He never edited a word until the end. and I so recommend that to everybody.

1:01:53It's my first bit of advice for anybody trying to finish a first book. Have a receiver. 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. Do you write every day? 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. How many writing days are there in a year? These days, probably 250, you know?

1:02:39Good 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. When it goes good, do you get excited? Do you have a good feeling? 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.

1:03:16Because if they get excited, that redoubles your own energy, your dedication, your confidence in it. Is there a momentum that builds as well? Like if you have a couple of good days in the road, is it easy to ride that? 100%. Yeah. Famously, Ray Bradbury down here in L.A., you know how he finished Fahrenheit 451? But 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. Ten 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?

1:04:00Wow. And the momentum, and that's why you read it. It's like a really furious, passionate book. But some of that is 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 the coherence that comes from art made in the crucible of a short amount of time.

1:04:48Even a mad kind of period of your life, sometimes those things, the best art is made as opposed to, they say, write drunk, edit sober. Have you ever heard that? It's 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.

1:05:29Like, that's the stuff you have to leave. Yeah. You know. Do you only work on one thing at a time? Oh, no. Always many things. Really? 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... I was writing a picture book about a bird like that. I just had an idea that'll go in the bird. And then once you're getting to the very end, the last six months or so, then it's pretty much just the one. Is there some part of the craft of writing that you had trouble with that you feel like you're getting better at?

1:06:09Yeah. 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. Every novel is wildly different from every other one. And especially when nonfiction, it's really unpredictable whether you have something or not, or you can make 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 a mastery, but you're closer to knowing the path, you know, before you start.

1:07:02But 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 let's say How much of your first draft will end up in the final book? The raw material is all there most of it but you've ideally fixed every sentence, you know?

1:07:44My first drafts are not, are very rough. Are they longer or no? You know, a really good writer, your final draft is shorter than your first, right? Because you've distilled. 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, you are cutting out the fat. You're making it leanest self. I did just finish a book for all ages where I cut a hundred pages in three weeks and it was so much better. And it was a gift to the poor reader that was going to have to slog through this overlogged book, but other people were ready to sign off on it.

1:08:25And 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. If you see real discipline in film in particular and really tight editing, it's just such pleasure. And then if you see something drag or a little bit lazy or a little bit too forgiving of some long, languorous take, then you're 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. 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 should be some equivalent phrase that's just like the gift of a very tightly edited work of art.

1:09:16It 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, right? Makes a difference. Yeah. If you have a story in mind, can that story be told many different ways? 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 jet pack or whatever. So I went to Kitty Hawk to pay pilgrimage to the Wright Brothers and the Kill Devil Hills and the dunes.

1:10:06And 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 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. And it's silent, yes? It's silent, utterly silent. And you feel it's the closest thing to being a bird, even for 20 feet of just being aloft.

1:10:46And I was like, is this a novel? Is this a movie about, is this nonfiction piece about this culture 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 where a plane pulls you up and then lets you go 3 ,000 feet up. I still don't know what to do with this. And I take notes. And just from your experience, will there be a breakthrough moment where it's like, aha, I know exactly what to do with it. Where the fuck has it been? It's just waiting for that. And waiting for it.

1:11:22So that's like contrapposto this book, 20 years of notes waiting for the structure to arrive. What was the key? I think just like I wanted it to be about their whole lives, but I was bored thinking about having to describe every year. Yeah. Allowing yourself to jump 10 years each time. It's such a simple thing, but it hadn't occurred to me. It's always a simple thing. 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.

1:12:02So great. And I think so much of the time you are, you're losing things as opposed to putting more in. Yeah. The solution often is less. Do you always want there to be a moral at the end of the story? No. 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 neandering 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. 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?

1:12:53It's just like, it's everywhere now, especially with picture books. I write books for kids too. 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 to, 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. When you're sitting in the boat, do you feel like you're making it or do you feel like you're finding it? I would say they're both everyday occurrences. You definitely know sometimes I have to flesh out this character.

1:13:38This 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 just like 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. thing 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 those those characters actually become really different in your mind and and kind of more beloved because they arrived unannounced and without much of your own doing.

1:14:33Have you had any mentors? 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. Great. 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.

1:15:10He was always 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 of days ago in an email. And I was like, oh my God, I haven't never had anyone but Mr. Ferry do this, 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.

1:15:49It 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 was made us write a book and I'm going to see her in Chicago in about a month. So it was mostly teachers that I stayed close with, especially when my parents paths 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 have you ever read something you wrote a long time ago and realize that it means something different than you thought it meant when you wrote it.

1:16:44Yeah. Or you don't remember it at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it never happened. 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. Yeah. So sometimes, you know, 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 like dream storytelling and you know the kind of stuff you do when you're when you aren't awake yeah and then that's that's some of the most interesting stuff and why is it that i'm writing this scene that takes place underwater water 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 he can describe it perfectly perfectly but has no idea why 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 or maybe even well prior to him you know For sure.

1:18:28You know, why is there a dead person 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're, you've got to allow that. You don't have to know why. 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 yeah 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 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.

1:19:43And 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... It's made up. It's made up. It's just make work. Do you ever start projects and not finish them? Always. 92 % of the time. Really? 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.

1:20:32but 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 100 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.

1:21:19And 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, you know, even if it's like outside of the realm of writing, you know, 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 pier 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 say, well, why don't we take mentors, teach aspiring artists for free. Everybody shares space, studios and all together.

1:21:56So I pitched this for five years to different people and nobody told me it was a dumb idea. 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 in the summer. So it'll be like 50 artists all sharing studio space and teaching each other and no money exchanged. So you have to come down and see it. It'll be a thing. Tell me more about your thoughts on education in general. Well, this has been the sphere. we've been in with our nonprofit since 2002. I went to public schools all the way through college, so I think schools should be free and I think the teachers should be better paid.

1:22:36Those 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. Really? Yeah, we did a whole documentary.

1:23:12Matt Stone funded it, actually. It was directed by Arthur Bradford called You Be Destroyed. And I had a book called The Circle. It now is on the banned list. Do you know why they banned it? 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 data-fied.

1:23:53So 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, is 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. Wow. And so that's why they were marked to be destroyed on the official document.

1:24:27Wow. So that's what we called it. 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. Yeah. 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.

1:25:11These 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 mitzis and said if we'll pay for it will you offer all five banned books there are 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 you walk in and so far more kids have read these books and they all have them at home now whereas they wouldn't then 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 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.

1:26:15Like Rapid City, South Dakota is an awesome town. It's right near Mount Rushmore in the Badlands. And so there's a lot to see there, but. It's a great story. 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.

1:26:54So 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, the right-wing extremists, but you do have to vote and you've got to be informed. What are your thoughts on free speech? I mean, I'm an absolutist. Yeah, 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 got to 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.

1:27:35Well, 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. Tell me about your editing process. 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.

1:28:21And 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.

1:29:02Toni Morrison was an editor, editor for 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 ongoing practice. Are there any popular rules or ideas about writing that you disagree with? 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 like box you in box you in everywhere you 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 is the five paragraph essay it needs to be obliterated.

1:30:07And 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. There's a bunch of novels about suburban mailmen. 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.

1:30:44Maybe it's good advice, but generally speaking, it's to be ignored immediately when it's presented to you.

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