William Gibson, On How He Writes a Novel

00:08 [William Gibson] I start from the beginning and the process of rewriting or overwriting is very, very dense at first. The first page of a novel of mine

has probably been rewritten three or four thousand times. The final page

00:30 was probably, you know, written in one go. It's not that I become more lazy through the process, but that it takes all of these false starts to sort of generate the matrix of random marks I need to call up whatever it is that's meant to inhabit the space. Most of the work

01:00 is the invocation of the state that allows the work to happen. Once you're in that state, there's a certain just basic discipline. Like, it's hard but you have to get there. I actually think of it as once it's starts, I think of it as like driving from New York to Los Angeles, when you just get in the car and go, and you're not sightseeing.

01:30 And it's always kind of tough. I have a page that I tore out of an old notebook years ago that I keep in my desk drawer. When I'm just about to collapse in this process, I take it out and look at it and it's all yellowed and grungy, and it says, "We're almost in Arizona." That was a note I'd written to myself like five novels ago when I was just about to

02:00 pack it in. And I thought, no, we just have to get past Needles and then we'll get to the coast. It'll be okay, you know? And it's that way for me, but most of it is the process of entering it.