Posts tagged Pattern Recognition

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson

Wonderful interview with William Gibson (Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition), not least of which is this tidbit on how he approaches the craft of writing:

INTERVIEWER

How do you begin a novel?

GIBSON

I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

INTERVIEWER

You won’t have planned beyond that one sentence?

GIBSON

No. I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me—that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework.

There’s no three act structure, or noticeboards with post-it notes mapping out the course of the story. Merely the first sentence.

They don’t teach that in creative writing classes. If they did, the course wouldn’t last much longer than an hour.

Op-Ed Contributor - Google's Earth - NYTimes.com

William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, draws an eerie parallel:

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

Cross-reference the above with a skit from The Onion: Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village.

Rummaging through the shoebox of shattered dreams

Many years ago, I wanted to be a journalist. The glitz and glamour of a wordsmith, that was the life I aspired to. I didn’t make it - boo hoo, sob sob - but at least I have a fat folder of press clippings to show for it.

Reading through them now, the agonies of composition and editing are mercifully forgotten. Now I can regard them from a distance with an objective eye. There’s even a hint of surprise (and yes, satisfaction) that I wrote stuff good enough to publish.

Looky here, a preview of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition for The Observer (January 2003):

A new book by William Gibson is always an exciting event. After all, this is the self-confessed technophobe who wrote Neuromancer, and introduced the world to cyberspace and cyberpunks. Pattern Recognition, his seventh novel, is notable for being set in London one year after 11 September, and the business of imagining the future takes a back seat to the complexities of the modern world.

In a tip of the hat to Naomi Klein, the heroine, Cayce Pollard, makes her living through an unusual sensitivity to corporate branding. When a toothsome ad executive asks her to investigate the source of a mysterious phenomenon on the internet, which could be the most important viral marketing campaign ever devised, Cayce soon becomes entangled in a world of paranoid surveillance and commodity fetishism. Pattern Recognition is a stylish and ambitious novel. Equal parts detective story, travelogue and cultural satire, it is also (dare I say it) about one woman’s quest for emotional fulfilment, and proof of Gibson’s growing maturity as a writer.

Not too bad. Some of the sentences in the second paragraph are a little clunky. I’ve a strong urge to rewrite and clean it up, but that’d be an act of pointless revisionism/complete waste of time/rampant egomania* (delete as appropriate).

But this article was the cause of a particularly surreal episode; the week following its publication, I went to see Gibson do a promotional reading at the Congress Centre in London. Whereupon his PA introduced him to the stage with a reading of this exact same article. 

I was thunderstruck. I broke out into a sweat and squirmed in my seat, and peeked around the room to see people’s reactions. And of course, they couldn’t care less. They were about to see their hero, this was just a fluffy preamble to get them even more stoked up.

Afterwards, I stuck around to get my book signed. I couldn’t pluck up the courage to tell him that I was the “journalist” whose news item they’d read out. It seemed like a grotesque act of vanity. And besides, why would he believe me? So I went home, signed book under my arm, walking on air.

I told my editor the next day. She had difficulty hiding the fact that she didn’t give a shit. But I very much gave a shit. In retrospect, my attempt at becoming a big-shot newspaperman was gloriously muddled and fabulously misguided. But this was an achievement to be proud of. Those were my words, and William Gibson had listened to them.