Dave Eggers

Yeah.

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.

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 and they so no not any one person is the 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 starts feeling more like ai 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 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, the 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 a cafe.