How we work: William Gibson / Cory Doctorow, authors

Here's an old one for the Boingboing folk (hello, you join us about half way through the list; do please suggest your own habits, tricks, methods and stories):

Blogging as inhibitor (Gibson) or catalyst (Doctorow) for writing

William Gibson says he's stopping blogging so that he can write. In an interview with Karlin Lillington for the Irish Times WG said: "If I expose things that interest or obsess me as I go along, there'd be no need to write the book. The sinews of narrative would never grow." And on his own blog he warned readers he'd stop once it was time to start the next book:

"One thing that was immediately clear to me, from the first blog, is that this is not an activity, for me, that can coexist with the writing of a novel. In some way I only dimly apprehend, it requires too much of the same bandwidth (yet never engages anything like the total *available* bandwidth). But, definitely, the ecology of novelization and the ecology of blogging couldn't coexist, for me."

On the other hand, Cory Doctorow says he blogs so that he can write: "I've been using this blog to keep track of stuff that needs to work its way into my novels for years now", and notes that the same seems true for Rucker, Sterling, Warren Ellis and others too.

What is it (the author? the subject matter? the writing method?) that makes blogging a writing-inhibitor for one author and a writing-catalyst for another?

More how we work.

Comments

[Troy Worman]

I tend to agree with Gibson. I feel compelled to blog--to the detriment of higher priorities, at times. At other times, more often, I am grateful for the outlet and the opportunity to develop my voice.