Methodology

June 30th 2005 at 1:52 pm

Margaret Atwood writes about the necessity of SF, apparently changing tack on her previous claims that she absolutely did not write SF (marketing/literary acceptance strategy on her part? I don’t know, but it’s nice to see her giving props):

it is still the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling - heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all - out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it.

And I enjoyed reading Ian McDonald talking about his writing methodology:

I’ll spend a year or so collecting this information to build a kind of cognosphere of wherever I’m writing about –one of the first things I try to get is the music (thanks for the baile MP3 –my CD arrived today). I reckon everyone writes to an inner soundtrack, certainly it’s one of the simplest hooks to pile memories and associations onto. Moods too -when I was writing the death of Aj in RoG, it was Godpseed You! Black Emperor’s Motherfucker/Redeemer at house-shaking volumes, over and over. At this stage it’s absorb absorb absorb –I never use 90% of my research, but you have to lay the groundwork of the mundane (that word again) so I know where the freaky fits onto everyday life. Do I generally write to music? Only if it’s something you can ignore when you need to. Nothing wordy. Radio is of the devil. Why do they think we want to hear them talking?

I find putting words on a page so traumatic and difficult I do whatever it takes to make it simple, so story development goes through three stages:

Interesting stuff. He seems to be a detailed outliner, which, as I grow into novel writing more and more, I seem to be becoming as well.

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