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In the first installment of our interview with best-selling author Dave Eggers, Eggers told us about 826 National, the network of community-based centers he co-founded to help students with their expository and creative writing skills.

In this second installment, Eggers describes his strategies for motivating reluctant writers. These strategies include:

Hear a recording of highlights from the second installment of the Eggers interview here [5 minutes]:

Or check out the transcript below:

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  Do you think it's possible for public schools to draw some lessons from the work you're doing to try to get more one‑on‑one attention to the students?

EGGERS:  I think so.  When it comes to writing, especially for the reluctant writers, sometimes that concentrated attention...Anybody who comes into 826 or who we are working with in a classroom is given automatically two or two and a half hours of attention to their writing, even if it's one paragraph.   That's an extraordinary thing, and it can have a transformative effect.  You have somebody pointing out every word and every sort of grammatical problem.

It's a little bit different from getting a paper handed back with a few things marked and not being able to necessarily go over every last thing.  The teachers we know might have 200 students a day, and it's a big problem to assign 5‑page or 10‑page paper and then grade it.  [They have to] go through everything-all of the grammatical and spelling errors, and improving the content, the structure and the form, all of these things-with 200 papers.  I teach one high school class a week with about 16 students.  Anytime I assign a paper, I'm up till 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning with those 16 to try to do it as well as I can.

So we're just trying to aid in that a little bit, and bring a little bit more attention to the writing. A lot of times you can point out things that otherwise might get lost.  You might be able to bolster [students'] confidence a little bit.  You might be able to open their minds a little bit to possibilities of their own writing, especially to those who are reluctant, who come in to us and say, "I'm not a writer.  My brother says I'm a bad writer,"-whatever it is.  Sometimes this adult next to them, shoulder to shoulder for two hours, can really ask questions and focus and shine a light on their work in a pretty profound way.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  I wanted to get back to the question of students who might not be motivated writers, or might be disaffected, or might be struggling writers.  I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about how you engage those students' interests in writing.

EGGERS:  It is the same way you have to engage a lot of these kids with their reading, too.  It starts with subject matter.  With reading and writing, I think a lot of kids assume it has to be boring.  They sit down and they write, and they think they have to write like a textbook, and a textbook from the '40s.  They don't think it can be interesting or conversational, or [that] their thoughts are going to match what ends up on the page.

So most of the way that we teach writing is a combination of the way I was taught, because I had this uninterrupted string of amazing English teachers, and also what we've learned from teachers here in San Francisco.

There was one great teacher named Jesse Madway at Thurgood Marshall High School, who had been working there for a little while.  And Isabel Allende suggested a book-that we could compile essays from students' writing, essays about "How is peace possible in a violent world?" We brought it to Jesse and his students, and they all wrote these essays. We sent him tutors for about four and a half months, and then this [project] ended up being a paperback book called "Waiting to be Heard."

The way that he taught was: Before you institute "five paragraphs," just put [the words] down in any way you want to, and then we'll worry about the structure on the back end.  This is the way I write, and this is the way I learned to write, but I think that sometimes the kids feel paralyzed by all the rules before they sit own, and they're trying to check a list of boxes.  [Their writing] has this clinical desiccated feel to it because all they're doing is fulfilling the obligations.

But instead, if you can take something, this lightning in a bottle, and just have the kids just throw it out there with all their passion and heart, and then afterwards say "Okay, let's restructure this a little bit, so that this is here and that's there" and put it into a more manageable structure...I feel like that's always the best way.  Letting them know that, first of all, they should be writing about something that matters to them.  Because if you have reluctant writers in the first place, your first assignment [shouldn't be] writing about the Louisiana Purchase.

You really have to find something that they care about to get them writing in the first place.  We can build up to the Louisiana Purchase and get them passionate about that.  But even then, if you're going to write about that, the world does not need another dry paper about the Louisiana Purchase.  So if they want to write it in conversational form between two guys sitting on a bridge, they should be able to do that, or if they want to write in some other innovative format...We have to recognize that writing of any value is innovative-any writing that we've ever remembered.  So we have to remember that it is supposed to be a fun process, and it's supposed to be untethered.

Most often, if you're willing to open them up and you let them write about their most personal feelings and painful thoughts, they'll go at it.