Dave Eggers

Whereas Great Gatsby is like basically a short story.

It's a novella.

It's 120 pages, maybe.

It's incredibly rich, but short.

It's gestural.

It 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, you know, 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 response.

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've got to listen to that, too.