Well, when I'm doing my editing passes, I imagine my reader, you know, just doing a little bit of reading before they go to bed at night.

They're getting tired.

It's like 1 a.m.

Eventually they get to a paragraph where they go like, okay, well, you know, this, I can, I can put the book and go to sleep down.

What paragraph is that?

What paragraph were you able to put the book down and go to sleep on?

I have to get rid of that paragraph. Right. I want to keep you up all night. I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book

review for The New York Times. And today, we've got Andy We are on the show. You might know Andy

as author of the science fiction novel The Martian,

a story about an astronaut who gets stuck on Mars and has to figure out how to get home.

That book, which Andy initially self-published, eventually became a bestseller

and then was adapted into a blockbuster film starring Matt Damon.

Several years later, Andy scored another hit with his book, Project Hail Mary,

which has now also been adapted for the big screen, this time starring Ryan Gosling.

Project Hail Mary starts with a middle school teacher named Rylan Grace.

He wakes up on a spaceship, he is alone,

he has no idea how he got there or what he's there to do.

When I talked with Andy, he said the reason that he opened the book this way is because

he wanted to start with a mystery.

And so one thing I found is that if you start with like a bunch of unknowns and make the reader

curious and you slowly

answer those questions, the reader's like, oh, they get that satisfaction of having this thing

...