I’ve worked in publishing for the entirety of my adult life, the first half as an editor, the second as a writer. For a few weeks back in the mid-90s, it was my job to help Pat Conroy, in a very small way, bring his novel Beach Music across the finish line. It was a long book, with complicated edits, and it was very important to the business, and very late. So the publishing house relocated Pat from his home in San Francisco to a hotel in New York, where he could work without distractions, where someone could decipher his yellow-pad chicken scratch, and check in with him every day, help him stay on track; something like an editorial babysitter. That was me.

I was a young man who wanted to be a novelist, and here I was, spending time with a famous novelist every day. But every time I tried to turn the conversation toward something about Pat’s career, his process, trying to get some advice out of this guy, he’d deflect, he’d turn the conversation to me—my family, my job, my dating life, whatever. It was very frustrating. Then, suddenly, our time together was over. We took one final walk in Central Park. Passing through the zoo, he said, “Pavone”—Pat spoke Italian, and he was tickled by my family name, which means peacock—”I know you want advice from me. So here it is: listen to other people’s stories.” He turned to me in the cool spring drizzle, to hammer home his point: “Listen carefully.”

That was when I understood: Pat’s questions about me weren’t deflections. It wasn’t that he’d been avoiding talking about himself. It was that he’d been working. Being a novelist isn’t something you do only when you’re writing. It’s something you do all the time. Because writing fiction isn’t writing about yourself; that’s memoir. Writing fiction is writing about other people, made-up people, and the best made-up people have elements of real ones.

Beach Music is the book that changed the course of my life, and it had nothing to do with the book itself.