William Gibson, On Creating Characters and Plot

00:08 [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. That was something I shot for when I started writing fiction. I can't remember the initial moment of realizing that I was

00:30 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 accreting a big ball of stuff and fitting it together and polishing it and working on it in different ways. And yet it remains inert,

01:00 and the characters I try to place in it remain inert, and to me, unconvincing, 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,

01:30 don't have any control over, and at that moment 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

02:00 have to be evident. I accidentally 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.