{"id":2703,"date":"2006-12-12T09:44:03","date_gmt":"2006-12-12T09:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2703"},"modified":"2006-12-12T09:44:03","modified_gmt":"2006-12-12T09:44:03","slug":"gibson_on_writi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2703","title":{"rendered":"Gibson on Writing a Book"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.williamgibsonbooks.com\/blog\/2006_12_01_archive.asp#116520956176984363\">William Gibson<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>I think it may actually get worse, each time! But I also suspect that that may be a paradoxical indicator of relative emotional health. If you&#8217;ve ever met anyone who&#8217;s writing a book that he or she is convinced is *very* good indeed, you&#8217;ll know what I mean. (Swift reading to his servants may be the perfect case in point.)<\/p>\n<p>By the time I&#8217;m three-quarters through the writing of a novel, I&#8217;ve necessarily lost anything like perspective, and must rely on feedback from trusted daily readers to know whether or not I&#8217;ve completely driven the thing off the road. 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, though no matter how thoroughly I&#8217;ve managed to stun it, it still manages to send messages to the effect that the work is really deeply pathetic, hideously flawed, and should be abandoned immediately. I tend to imagine that this is what writer&#8217;s block is really about, though in my case it&#8217;s remained only partionally symptomatic. I manage to ignore those messages, as painful as I still find them.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>William Gibson: I think it may actually get worse, each time! But I also suspect that that may be a paradoxical indicator of relative emotional health. If you&#8217;ve ever met anyone who&#8217;s writing a book that he or she is convinced is *very* good indeed, you&#8217;ll know what I mean. (Swift reading to his servants [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,21,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}