Dave Eggers

**Dave Eggers** (0:23)
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.
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. Also, if you're stuck with something, you're just stuck right there, whereas you could just go just around that barrier and keep going. You know, you've got to fix something here, but just keep going. But I do know a few writers, older writers, write straight all the way through, and that's where I think you get this idea of writers block and the person pacing around the room and throwing crumpled up pieces of paper into the corner. I think it's because 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. Do you ever change the order? Yeah, for sure. Especially when it's like memories, flashbacks, that kind of thing, those could occur anywhere. You have options.
This new book is the first one I think that structured strictly linearly, where it starts when the characters are 8 and 9, and then it ends when they're 74 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.
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. 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, 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 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. Are the characters you write all rooted in something familiar? 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 it makes a very awkward interactions with your friend or your neighbor, your colleague, or your relative. So you get to the point where you're so determined to go far afield of anyone you know so that nobody is confused. If anything, you borrow or I do it, 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 1000 people in real life. You can't use any other 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. Has anyone mistakenly thought they were in your book? Books, movies, for sure. 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.