William Gibson on writing
“My wife says that when I emerge from my office and declare that not only am I writing a bad book, I’m writing the worst book anyone has ever started, then she knows that I’m two-thirds of the way there.”
Excerpts from article: With ‘Spook Country,’ William Gibson is still carving out his corner of cyberspace, By Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2007:
“I don’t think anyone told me that I was crazy,” William Gibson recalled last week, sitting on the leafy patio of a Creole restaurant near his home.
“But they didn’t read science fiction, they didn’t care. I suspect they sort of thought it was sad, to become obsessed with doing this stuff.”
Gibson, almost three decades later, has had the last laugh. The black hole he disappeared into, day after day after day, became “Neuromancer,” the 1984 “cyberpunk” novel about a keyboard cowboy that envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality years before either existed….
His ninth novel, “Spook Country,” which came out this week, takes place in the same world as its predecessor, “Pattern Recognition,” the tale of a “coolhunter” who is allergic to logos and brands….
Gibson, who hardly seems like the slick technophile his novels suggest, often has this trouble describing his work. “The part of me that walks around, that conducts interviews and behaves in the world, has no idea how to write a novel,” he said. “I never start with ideas and intentions at all.” …
And despite the exuberance of his prose — his early novels are positively psychedelic, and “Spook Country” inhabits so many different cities and subcultures it carries the reader on a bewildering rush — he admits he’s a bit of a grind when it comes to writing a book.
“If I sit there long enough and become sufficiently frustrated at the page being blank, little windows open up… little glimpses of mood and territory,” he said. “And very slowly bits and pieces emerge, and I find myself in the company of a character. But I don’t know what the character is doing.
“My wife says that when I emerge from my office and declare that not only am I writing a bad book, I’m writing the worst book anyone has ever started, then she knows that I’m two-thirds of the way there.”
At that point he can tear up what he’s written and reassemble it in a way that works. “I’ve trained myself to do something that’s nonrational or pre-rational,” he said. “If I had to pitch one of these things in any detail, I don’t think I could do it. I don’t think anybody would go for it.”
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