Slashdot Mirror
William Gibson on Blogging
The Ape With No Name writes "With Pattern Recognition now out, Gibson talks to the Guardian about blogging, which ones he's looking at and why he may have to quit blogging himself. He's quoted as saying '...if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist.'"
Could going back to the stream of consciousness style actually screw you up when trying to write a novel??
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
is too much Amateur Philosophy.
There was an early review of Pattern Recognition in one of the UK broadsheets where the (female, as it happens) reviewer was complaining that she didn't like it, didn't understand it, and it was unfair to expect anyone to understand what 'steganography' was. She couldn't go and find a dictionary?
:)
I'm really looking forward to reading it, when I can find someone to borrow it off
...but the internet in general. His fav sites, his thoughts on the blogging phenomenon, even googling, while we're at it.
In fact, the gist of the article is about sites he likes and visits often...
Err, and it's not even an article per se... shouldn't this be categorized under Interviews instead?
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
William Gibson's blog is located here: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
At first I considered a blog as somekind of diary people would keep online. The main reason people would read blogs was inspired by some kind of voyeurism. Nowadays most blogs are just a view on todays (or yesterdays) news. People nowadays read blogs to read the headlines and possibly different opinions .
;-)
I've once started a blog myself. Didn't last too long. The process of starting on including installing etc. was more fun to me than writing in it every day
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
It's not Gibson's fault, but that article was useless. Strafor, cnn, bbc, google ... wow, you've opened my mind to some new sites, Guardian! And as for Gibson's 'insights'into blogging ... . I imagine that a much more interesting interview was left on tape.
Actually, one thing I like about Gibson's style is how he uses invented terms - some you can guess from their morphology what they mean, others you can't.
So you form an idea of what each word seems to mean out of the context - like you do when you hear a novel word.
Finally most if not all of the new terms are explained a little while after they are first used, giving an interesting experience of how your deduced meaning matches the intended one.
...is simply being able to remember your goal.
Blogging is the antithesis of goal driven composition, and it's about time this was understood.
I take it you don't like a lot of original speculative literature then.
Things like A Clockwork Orange, some of Kurt Vonnegut's stuff (Cat's Cradle comes to mind), a good chunk of Tolkein, all with invented words must be just horrid for you.
Ah well, somebody has to buy the mainstream stuff, right?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I can get a google search with porn turned off; why can't I get blogs turned off too?
I think this is too broad of a generalization. Sure some blogs are the typical, "what I did today" or "pictures of my cat" but some blogs are informative and can reveal things deep in a person's soul that you would never realize. Sometimes there is something therapeutic about letting your thoughts and emotions flow even if it's just strangers reading them.
rk
Rangers Lead the Way!
Does blogging aversely affect the professional writer's writing? The Guardian interview touches on an important question, but only briefly - this is one that should probably be tackled by a team of researchers. When I started up a simple blog-on-a-Wiki last December, I was a bit plagued by a similar question:
Why would writers write in their free time?
For me, as long as I can get away with taking one or even two week breaks from the blog, it is not a problem. "Write when you need to, blog when you can," is about where I find myself at the moment.
I am supposed to writing a ten page history paper right now, but no, what am I doing, posting on Slashdot instead. Blogging, posting to forums, watching Bill O'Reilly just to get angry, they are all more interesting distractions than writing a book or a paper because they are easier and don't require as much energy. If you get all your emotion out on the little stuff, you have nothing left for the book.
*yawn*
The kind of article/interview that would put anyone off Gibson forever. I'm so glad i just finished reading the brilliant Virtual Light trilogy, before finding out that he visits bbc, cnn and google. If those were the most interesting sites he could think of, it probably means he sticks to surfing pr0n only.
if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist
Personally I found this pretentious bollox. Smacks more of an author trying to cash in on the current albeit dying fad of blogging to help promote his new book.
Newsflash William. Writing juvenile gibberish on a web page is not a form of higher art. Stick to the novels.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
--TRR
He mentioned this before at least at the book signing in Birmingham if not before then too.
He said it's difficult because the 'blog provides an outlet for your thoughts and material, it doesn't have chance to accumulate.
So he doesn't 'blog when he is writing, that gives him chance to fill a store of thought enough to fill a book.
Don't blame me - this
One can blog just to get stuff out to the public, and get a bit of a response. Gibson said during a reading that he felt that blogging was too fun; it didn't feel like work. Even interracting to two or three dozen people in a blog struck him as a time sink.
Neil Gaiman is writing very conversationally, responding to questions. (In verifying the address, I noticed he has written about this topic already.)
Elsewhere, Warren Ellis & Bruce Sterling are just commenting on stuff that comes up as they research their upcoming work. Cory Doctorow (and co.) & Charlie Stross just have more varied interests than Gibson, I guess. And hell, the way they're working on a new story is in a blog.
Um. I feel weird that I'm pointing out so many examples. I read all these regularly, though.
The article's small and content free because it's designed to be not much more than a sidebar: the Guardian (Britain's major left-liberal daily) publishes one of these micro-interviews every week, with the same sort of blah questions ("Most useful site?" "Google", invariably). It makes more sense in the print version of its tech supplement, where it acts as normal space-filling journalism, and usually a plug for book, album, site, whatever.
Also, The Guardian is absolutely obsessed with blogs. Every week, the supplement will feature one of the following articles: "Are Blogs the new Journalism?", "Wi-Fi Blogging - Is this the Future for Reporting?", "Blogging - Journalism for Everyone?", etc., ad nauseam.
The last decent one I remember is Dave Green being cynical.
In your search string, add the term -blog
There is another aspect to blogging that I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion. Blogs can be a good way to see what it is like to pursue something you are considering. That is why I keep my blog. When I figured out what I want ed to study for graduate school, I went out and tried to find some first person accounts of what it is like to become a Nurse Anesthetist. I bet most of you have not even heard of one. Anyway, it was difficult at best, to hook up with one, let alone find out how school was for them. So When I started school, I started a blog to let people know what anesthesia school was like.
Anyway, I guess I am trying to say that not all blogs are just random thoughts about how someones school lunch smelled like a nursing home.
I don't see that anyone's mentioned Jerry Pournelle yet.
Somehow he finds time to write novels while running a very insightful blog, writing a column for Byte, keeping active in the amatuer aerospace community, and generally having a life. I don't know how he does it, epecially at his age.
He proves that blogs and more, the internet, can coexist with real life(tm)
(for authors at least).
Does that mean the process of being a novelist involves eating your way up the food-chain until you either die or are excreted back to the bottom? :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Although I keep what you might call a blog on my own computer, it's more a private diary or journal than a blog. I kept a diary on paper for 10 years and have moved over to this system for numerous reasons. I think that blogs take away the integrity of a diary. A good diarist doesn't write for an audience, only for himself. Samuel Pepys' diaries have worth because he writes without the bias you would expect in a blog, where the writer may have an agenda or an axe to grind. I wouldn't look to blogs for facts and nor would I trawl through one looking for a stranger's opinion when I'm more likely to find the quality and breadth of opinion in a forum. Blogs seem to me to be there for egotists who feel they have an audience when they post to a webpage - often enough the quality of the writing isn't of a good standard. Things my girlfriend and I have argued about is an exception however. Well written and very funny.
Come to think of it, the main difference between blogs and other sources of information are editors. I think we all need one.
The most important thing about blogging IMO is that it allows the average person to easily be a producer on the net instead of just a passive consumer (ala TV). Weblogs also allow for the publication of very obscure and specific content that would not exist otherwise (such as a weblog about various things to wget and curl).
Sure, there is a lot of crap in blogs, but everyone has something worthwhile to say once in a while. There are a lot of very smart people who write weblogs.
Those who think blogging is pretentious should read the following entry on Dave Winer's Scripting News.
Those in power always resist something new that empowers the masses in what was formerly their exclusive domain (such as news organizations suppressing the weblogs of reporters, and elitist intellectuals who think expressing opinion should be their privilege only).
James Joyce = overrated. Overrated is James Joyce. It was a dark and overrated night. A shot rang out. James Joyce screamed. "Is there an overrated author in the house?" [J. Joyce steps forward].
At least he did give us the term quark:
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."