I went to a reading/Q&A/signing with William Gibson; he was very insightful about his writing process and the editing he goes through. It sounds a lot like my own: compulsively and constantly editing our writing as we go, shifting the entire structure even when it seems as if we’ve reached a stage of completion. They are never finished, of course, only “taken from me,” he says, but at that point there’s not much of a need to correct in the same fashion because we’ve given everything we could to reach a satisfactory point in time. Afterward, with some novels, he gives advanced reading copies and asks readers to spot factual errors; he mentioned gun nuts having a many-page debate thread over whether a specific type of rifle could in fact be the caliber Gibson had noted in his most recent book, Spook Country (which he rightly moved away from after no conclusion was readily agreed upon).
Someone else later asked him in more words how he comes up with these novels, specifically where he starts from at the very beginning. What he said was eerily similar to what happens to me: it begins with an atmosphere, an environment with a certain feel to it; in Spook Country’s case, it was a black and white location of a few blocks of the city it takes place in. Only then do characters begin to come out, born from that place and time, and bring with them the beginning or near-beginning of the story. After that, when the beginning and some of the middle have congealed, the end is directed, even dictated by what came before it. This also means he never sees how things are going to end until they’re about to end anyway, and while I’ve never been capable of properly ending a novel-length piece of writing, I see this in my short work a great deal.
He mentioned his amusement with steampunk having become the subgenre it is now; he thinks of steampunk as “a Pantone chip” in a book of swatches. Another small point I just now remembered: Cyberpunk, science fiction and indeed any “future” proposed in a piece of fiction is best written, Gibson said, from the exact time in which it’s being written; that is, 1984 was written from the point of view of 1948 with sensations and motivations derived from the time, and one couldn’t hope for more, otherwise the story is not set in a future that could truthfully exist and someday look like life does now.
I asked him while he was signing my copy of Neuromancer if he still blogs, as I had read his before it went on hiatus a few years ago; indeed he does, you can find it here. There are also some short but good interviews with him floating around, specifically one from Wired that addresses topics more involved readers of his would find interesting.
