William Gibson's Latest: Spook Country

[georgy]

Do you sometimes come across works (in music and cinema), people, events or places that strike you as being exactly what you were thinking of when writing your novels ?

Of course I don't mean works derivative of your own creations, like "The Matrix", but things that YOU identify as being a concrete realization of your designs.

How do you feel then?

[4Rchie]

Hello Mr. Gibson,

With regard to new technology and applications, particularly when it comes to the Internet, do you tend to get more "Ah ha!" moments when the application is put to use in silly ways, or when it is used with world changing, altruistic goals in mind? For example, on youtube, Randy Pausch's Last Lecture has over 2.5 million views, while the "Leave Britney Alone" kid has over 6.5 million views.

P.S. Thanks for all the books and thanks, especially, for Rydell.

[CoreyMaley]

Greetings Mr. Gibson,

In interviews and in person, you speak about the process of writing as partially involving discovering characters, who seem to be rather autonomous. From there, it seems that the characters dictate what will happen, rather than you controlling the characters to get a particular narrative arc out of their actions.

Looking back (or perhaps looking forward), does it seem to you that these characters could have done something else, something other than what they did in their respective novels, perhaps resulting in a very different story arc? Or does it seem that their actions really were determined all along, just unbeknownst to you at the time?

Thanks very much, and it was good to see you in Princeton.

Corey

[William_Gibson]

Anybody without an artistic bone in their body is a hypothetical construct, for me.

[William_Gibson]

Awareness of accent is modulated by the POV character. Hollis is more aware of Odile's accent than Alejandro, say, might be. And Hollis is less aware of it the longer she hears her.

[William_Gibson]

No. Nor am I author of The Miracle Worker.

[William_Gibson]

Celebrity makes me uncomfortable, either side of the fence.

[William_Gibson]

I think we have selves, rather than "a self".

[William_Gibson]

I do sometimes finds bits of my "world" in the world, but I think of myself as a naturalistic writer.

[UberDog]

"I think we have selves, rather than "a self"."

I'm going to put that in the Sartrean category then.

Getting over The Miracle Worker thing will take more time.

[Gromit]

Hi!

Hubertus Bigend is a wonderful creation. What led you to him - did he come into existence because of the need for a character to trigger Cayce's actions in PR, or did you already have a proto-Bigend lurking somewhere - just waiting for the right narrative?

(And do have any idea just how unnerving the thought of Tom Cruise with more teeth is?) ;-)

Message Edited by Gromit on 06-18-2008 09:34 AM

[digitalprimate]

Dear Mr. Gibson,

When you are writing a passage for the first time, are you conscious of how some sentences or paragraphs are more latinate and flowing in an almost Faulknerian sense versus passages where you take a more direct, almost clipped approach? Or is that something determined by character POV or are you simply too engaged in the process to be aware of it?

[colinpeters]

Mr. Gibson,

I recall you having said that you are no longer writing science fiction (or at least fiction set in the future) because it is no longer possible to imagine the future. Is this just for you, personally, or do you think this applies to other writers as well? Or, to put it another way, are writers who write SF now wasting their time?

[UberDog]

You just mentioned that you had more strata behind Hollis' career than made it in the novel. I was wondering if you had any gristle like that left over regarding why 1911 was such a huge nodal point besides the Currie association.

[remotepush]

as has already been suggested, your writing can be almost poetic. i have found this to be most pronounced with spook country. on my first read i felt that at times i was deciphering artifacts with every sentence. i really didn't get that with the second read, but that was a more stolen read, so to speak.

as someone who dabbles in writing, i am particularly fascinated by how sentences unfold. to what extent do you get the words down first time, and to what extent do you get the rough, and have to go back through a draft writing the *good* stuff into what is already there?

[William_Gibson]

Bigend actually emerged from the experience of sitting up late at night in the otherwise deserted offices of Ridley Scott Advertising, in Soho, talking with Chris Cunningham. The Blue Ant offices in Pattern Recognition are a lot like RSA's offices. In fact I assumed the Blue Ant had replaced RSA there and that it was the same building.

The characters generally arrive via a process akin to seeing faces in clouds. Except that the clouds are loose mental accumulations of "stuff".

[William_Gibson]

Variation in sentence structure feels like switching drums. And is as instinctive, as non-cerebral. Or like dancing. I can neither drum nor dance, BTW.

[William_Gibson]

The only science fiction I'm really interested in reading now is science fiction that would have been literally impossible to write a decade ago. Not much of that around. John Clute has been suggesting for a while now that sf is in process of becoming an "historical category" (not an actual quote).

[William_Gibson]

The nodal point idea, for me, was that nodal points are not "events", but something else. Fractal shifts in the fabric of the zeitgeist.

[William_Gibson]

I revise constantly, more or less from the top. Everything is deeply overwritten, but less so toward the final third. Word-processing did away with "drafts", for me.