William Gibson, On Writing Narrative and Science Fiction

00:08 [William Gibson] The narrative point of view didn't come naturally to me. And in a way, in a very real and kind of rather funny way, the whole conceit of cyberspace and virtual reality and all these things that are very much associated with most of the fiction I've written so far,

00:30 I can see very clearly right at the beginning of my career, how that sprang from an inability to physically move my characters around in the notional space of literature. I didn't know how to get character A from point B to point C. I didn't know how to get him to leave the room and walk up the stairs and go in the other room. And out of a frustration with that,

01:00 I came up with this conceit that allowed me to move him without having to move him physically. And almost from the beginning I had characters who were sort of shuttling backwards and forwards through various kinds of memory constructs and plugging themselves into very dense flows of media, and it really sprang from my inability to just

01:30 physically get them off the boat. But by the time I'd learned how to do that, I already had this other alternative set of strategies, which continued to intrigue me and be very handy, and as time went on seemed to very nicely able to describe aspects of contemporary reality, in ways that more traditional fictional techniques couldn't.