[MUSIC PLAYING]
WILLIAM GIBSON: You know, the question of suspense and how it's maintained for me always takes me back to the chronic insecurity I felt at the beginning of my career, and which I can still feel on a given day. I usually do at some point. But just like desperation that I was going to lose their attention. I'd have some sort of ongoing hook. But what I've become more aware of as I've done this for, you know, more and more years, decades even, the tension in the narrative that maintains my attention as the author as I'm creating it is actually the tension between the characters' external world and their interiority. The thing that keeps me interested is how the characters move in and out of memory and their emotions and the physical circumstances, the physical circumstances of their world. And for me, that's a powerful technique. That works for me. In more conventional-- you know, it's sort of a more conventional genre fiction that the character is about to shoot the villain, does not find himself thinking inexplicably of his mother. In one of my books, this could happen, and I need that. I need that to maintain my own interest, I think because it's a reflection, not of how I think other people's being works, but how I know my own being works. There's something that keeps me from creating characters I find implausible. I'll do it sometimes for sort of experimental or poetic reasons, but by and large, I'm held in check by a need for some weird kind of plausibility.