The Salon Interview: Neal Stephenson

I think my plan was to drive to the West Coast. I had this old pickup truck that I was going to do it in and I got as far as Iowa before I got it into my head that I should overhaul the engine of this pickup truck. It was burning oil. I was having to stop every 150 miles and put in a quart of oil. Now that's not so bad. It would have made a lot more sense to buy a couple of cases of oil, but I have always had this fatal weakness for getting involved in the physical nitty-gritty of stuff. It seemed like a cool idea that I'd take apart this engine and fix it up with my own two hands. I launched into that and I was doing it in an unheated garage in Iowa in January. I was 21. It was bitterly cold and the engine was all dirty. If you know what you're doing, you steam-clean the engine first, and I didn't do that. I did a bunch of things wrong. It turned into a lengthy, grinding, unpleasant process. But I got it done, got the engine to work right, but I'd lost my momentum to go out West and do something there. My sole assets at that point were the value of the gasoline in the tank of this vehicle, in my parents' garage.

So I decided to write my second novel. I'd written one in Boston, kind of a starter novel. Kind of a fantasy novel, I guess you could say. "The Big U" is No. 3. The second novel was an epic fantasy.

Were you inspired by Tolkien?

I was very consciously trying to do something that was not like Tolkien. This is a novel with a lot of geography in it. It was set on a planet that had a peculiar geography. It was geography-driven, geographical fiction.

Was that the point that you started to get serious about writing?

I felt like I was starting to get a little bit of traction as a writer. I wasn't publishing anything, but I was starting to get the hang of it, and I knew what to do better next time. I got a day job in an office and started working on this third book, which became "The Big U." The bottom line is that eventually it sold. It needed a lot of work because of the way I'd written it. There's a theory or a paradigm of how to write that I'd imbibed without knowing that I'd imbibed it. Somewhere out there is the platonic ideal of the thing you're trying to write and your rough draft is just a shadow of it. You toil through one draft after another trying to make it better. I sort of did that with "The Big U" and then I very consciously tried to do it with the thing I wrote after that, which never got published.

What happened to that book?

I had been reading all these accounts by other writers about how they produced their magnum opus and they all followed something I'll call the distillation narrative. Which was: "I sat down and wrote a manuscript that was a foot thick and it had some good stuff in it, but it was too long. So I rolled up my sleeves and went to work and edited. Toiled. I cut and scraped. I hacked. I shortened and rearranged and got it down to six inches, but it still wasn't good enough. So I went back and yada yada yada. And eventually I wound up with this trim little manuscript that had all the good parts in it."

That was a reassuring theory of how to write because it didn't require you to sit down every day and turn out good material. Instead it required you to sit down for eight hours a day and produce a huge volume of material and hope that there was something good in it. Then you'd go back later and cut out all the crap. Whatever works, but it failed for me, and it failed kind of expensively in the sense that I spent two or three years on that and produced a miserable, incoherent pile and sort of ruined a decent enough idea. I ended up feeling very anxious when I got to the end of the process and came to terms with the fact that this was not a publishable book. Then I panicked and wrote another book very quickly that got almost immediately accepted for publication and that was "Zodiac."

How did you change your writing process after that?

I did figure out that I tended to write good stuff first thing in the morning. So I had all this free time in the rest of the day that I had to occupy with something other than writing. Because if I sat and wrote, I'd just bury the good stuff I'd written in crap and have to excavate it later. I did some construction work with a friend of mine. Basically the work habit I developed out of all that was of setting things up so I could write in the morning and then stop and exercise my penchant for getting into the nitty-gritty details of physical things. Not because that was productive in any way but because it kept me from screwing up whatever I happened to be writing. I tried to pattern things that way ever since. That's worked fairly well.

One of things you like to do on the side is dabble in programming. Do you see similarities between writing code and writing fiction?

I think there are common threads between writing and programming. That's a really easy statement for people to misunderstand and twist around so I'm a little leery of making it. All I'm saying is that the thing you're making -- the novel or the computer program -- has got a very complicated and finely wrought hierarchical structure to it. The structure has to work right or the whole thing fails. But the only way you can work on it is by hitting one character at a time. You're building this thing one character at a time while having to maintain the whole structure in your head. That description applies equally well to programming and novel writing even though they're very different activities.

I agree that comparing the two could raise hackles in some quarters. People like to believe that one activity is entirely aesthetic and emotional and the other is entirely rational.

That's a misconception. I justify say that by referring to the work of Antonio Damasio, who's a friend of mine. He's written a few books about the brain, and the one that's most relevant to this discussion is "Descartes' Error." The error he's complaining about is the idea that reason and emotion are different things. He tells a story about a patient who suffered a very specific localized kind of brain damage that was blocking a certain kind of interaction between how he thought and how he felt. In certain situations, this guy was better than other people at certain things. When driving on ice he didn't panic and he knew all the rules, how to turn the steering wheel and keep his car under control, and he was able to drive when other people were skidding off the road. But if you asked him to schedule an appointment and gave him two dates to choose between, this guy could sit there for an hour, dithering over this simple choice. Every possible contingency or scenario that could play out would flash up in his head, and he didn't know how to choose between them.

Damasio is arguing that one of the innate faculties of our brain is that we can envision a wide range of possible scenarios and then sort through them very quickly not by logic but through a kind of process of the emotions. Emotions associated with a particular scenario cause us to prune off whole sets of options. He claims that chess masters work that way. Part of the time it's this very logical, rational thing, but part of the time it's "This gives me the willies. I'm not going there." Damasio quotes in this book scientists like Einstein who quite explicitly say that their process of shifting through ideas and deciding where to go with their research has a very strong emotional component to it. I don't buy the idea of a split between a rational and an emotional mind. I suspect that idea is a lot more common among nonscientists. I think there's a whole complex of factors behind scientists being pegged as emotionally remote or out of touch with their feelings.

I was amazed to discover that you wrote these three 1,000-page books by hand, but some writers do say that writing by hand puts them in better touch with that kind of intuition.

I do it all on paper. I started that with the "Baroque Cycle." "Cryptonomicon" is the last book I wrote typing it into a computer. I use a fountain pen. The entire thing is in longhand.

Is that your method from now on?

I think so. It's hard to say, because I tend to invent a whole different system for writing each book. This may turn out to be something just for these books.

Considering the period you're writing about, maybe you should have tried writing it with a quill.

I thought about it. But that seemed a little over the top. What I figured out a long time ago is that, while I don't get blocked that much, when I got really blocked and couldn't get going on something, what always worked was to get away from the computer and sit down somewhere with a piece of paper and a pen and just start writing. So I thought, if this works so well to get the juices flowing, is there any reason why I shouldn't try to write more that way? This was around the same time I was discarding the whole notion that one had to produce tons of material every day. The fact that it's slower is not a problem because I wasn't worried anymore about producing a lot fast. I like the fact that it never crashes, you can't lose your work. Occasionally after I've typed it and I'm editing it onscreen, I may add a paragraph at the keyboard but that's probably not more than a few pages out of the entire "Cycle." Basically, every word was written with a fountain pen.

It's incredible how much you've produced in the past few years while only writing in the morning. What do you do with the rest of the day?

Ever since about '85 or '86 I've indulged my penchant for getting into physical stuff. A lot of the time I'd do projects, whatever interested me. I'd build a model rocket or work on an electronic circuit or write a little computer program or work on the house or the car. There was a long series of things like that I would do.

Then I started skewing towards things that were really impractical, because if I got into practical things, I'd get into trouble. I'd work on a computer program and then I'd think, "Hey, there's a business opportunity here." And then I'd get distracted. Or I'd start a house remodeling project, wiring some outlets or something like that, and something would happen and I'd run afoul of the inspector and get into some kind of situation-comedy tangle that would make it hard for me to work in the morning. I ended up doing a lot of rocket building, large model rockets. That turned into me being on the advisory board of this space company in Seattle, Blue Origin.

Is it a research outfit, or do they actually make things?

It's intended to be very much a making-things kind of operation, but right now it's in a hiring and getting-ready stage.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't building rockets cost a fortune?

It does cost a fortune, but that's not my department. I'm a member of the advisory board with machine shop privileges. I go in there and try to make myself useful in an advisory capacity inasmuch as a science fiction writer can. Time will tell. Here I have to get really vague because it's not my company and I don't have an ownership stake in it, and so we're no longer talking about my intellectual property, as it were. I tend to rapidly become bored with the more abstract parts of it. I want to go off and lift heavy objects and operate a plate grinder.

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