An interesting interview with William Gibson, in the online College Crier magazine ("Free at all the colleges in Upstate New York") which discusses his writing techniques, and has a couple of insights into the writing of Spook Country [hat tip to Fashionpolice]
William Gibson: Sci-Fi Icon Becomes Prophet of the PresentBy T. Virgil Parker
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"When I was writing a novel like Count Zero I would just invent some other level of imaginary technology or invent some part of the back story of my future history that would account for me having a way to scoot past that bit of illogic in the story. I hope I didn't do that too much when I was doing that, but it's just something you can do when you're writing about an imaginary future. When you're writing about a present, whether it's imaginary or not, and there's some major imaginary elements in Spook Country , the rules are different. It's not the same. I have to come up with something that allows me to suspend my disbelief in my fantastic narrative and I hope will allow the reader to suspend their disbelief."
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"So when, in Spook Country , for instance, I was in that narrative for a long time. Months and months, with no idea what was in the box. I had no idea. I was hundreds of pages into it and had no idea what was in that container. Or rather, I had like a dozen different ideas of what was in the container. I had to let the narrative inform me of what it was. It's a very uncomfortable way of working, but it's the only way I know to write a book. In the beginning all I had was that scene that became the second chapter with Tito and the old man and I didn't really know anything about them and I just kind of stuck with that for months. Then I got some early version of the Hollis stuff and somehow it built a bridge between the two things and this narrative started to emerge. That sense of "this is how things are" that I think you're talking about is secondary. It may be there, but it's secondary to the process of pulling that narrative out and finding where it's going. Like if I know where it's going, it's dead for me. I can't do it."
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"Whatever part of me can write a novel, I don't have conscious access to. And I ideally don't have any control over it. The stress of doing it for me is trying to force myself to get out of the way of the novel writing guy who refuses to talk me, and who I can't count on to turn up, and who I can't count on to pay the rent, although God bless him, he has now for a long time, but like, I'm never sure that he's going to turn up and I never trust what he's doing. One of the things that I found really quite satisfying about Spook Country is that I have less faith in what the novel-writing guy was doing than I ever had and somehow, because of that, I'm more satisfied with the result. I wouldn't just get on with it, even though it scared me to death, because I didn't understand where it was going."
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"In Spook Country it's more about music business and the culture of the music business than the music that us guys were listening to or the music, you know the people they mention. I have no idea what Hollis' band would have sounded like but at some point I had it worked out in my head what labels they would have been on, and that was what mattered to me rather than what they sounded like. I haven't got a clue about that part of it. It just never gelled for me and I think that's something that's different. If I'd been trying to do something like that twenty years ago, I would have had some idea about what they sounded like. This time I had some idea of what the packaging would have been like on their recordings but not what the music was."
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