William Gibson On Writing the Novel

William Gibson

I suspect that the biggest part of the labor of writing, for me, has always consisted of bludgeoning the editorial super-ego into relative passivity

One thing that I learned from my horrific train wreck of a NaNoWriMo was that very same thing. Each morning, I’d sit on the train, and for the 20-25 minutes I was there, I was to do nothing but write forward. A little like what Writer.app encourages you to do.

Write forward, don’t worry about the little typos, the slips, just chuck it and get going forward… a word takes too long to come to your head, maybe !!!MARK IT!!! and move on, get going with a more accesible one.

It’s a great way to go. Writing the shorter Sane Magazine pieces every week is a little more like Gibson’s feeling about short stories, only with less perspective… because that thing is going out, and it’s going out at a certain time, well, editing and writing happen all at once. Which works (sometimes) for these shorter shots, but would just bog down a novel (say, God Coffee, I Miss You), if you tried the same approach.

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