[MUSIC PLAYING]
WILLIAM GIBSON: I was very, very impressed when I was young with E. M. Forster's dictum that if the author was in control of the character, the author was not doing his job. And that was something I shot for when I started writing fiction. And I can't remember the initial moment of realizing that I was not in control of the narrative, but I'm sure that it was a Eureka moment for me. The process for me, like over the length of the book, is really one of just creating a big ball of stuff, and fitting it together, and polishing it, and working on it in different ways. And yet, it remains inert. And the characters that I try to place in it remain inert. And to me, I'm convincing. And it's an incredibly painful, frustrating process that invariably leads to a moment of absolute despair, collapse, some kind of surrender. And then invariably, I'll discover that this construct has been inhabited by a character who I don't understand, don't have any control over. And at that moment, you know, I'm deeply grateful to whatever it is that causes that to happen. Consequently though, I can't plot. I don't plot these books. And I think for some readers the weakness of that would have to be evident. I accidently create things that are plot-like sort of artifacts of my process that I try to present as though I had known what was going to happen.