Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggersis an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He is also the founder of McSweeney's, a literary journal; the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and a human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 March 1970
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
Loneliness is just a thing that I'm not personally interested in. So far, it hasn't been on my docket of things to write about.
Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.
Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.
Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.
I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
The kids sit facing the white board and collectively tell a story, ... As they're coming up with the story, there's a typist sitting here, so they see their words coming up on the wall.
What can I do for you, my man?
So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.
I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.
I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning. I just have an affection for paper, and that's no secret, I guess.
We've lost that very simple transaction that's so pure, where a reader can say, "I support what you're doing, here's my dollar. I know that you guys are gonna be watchdogs or keep the government accountable, so here's my 50-cent contribution each day." It's just so tidy, and I think so inspiring.