I came across an interview with Neal Stephenson this morning (via Lifehacker and Life’s Paradox ). It turns out it’s from 2008, when Stephenson’s Anathem was released. I’ll be highlighting several interesting points for writers over the next few posts.

First up, the sort of auxiliary work some authors do.

Stephenson: I actually wrote one that never got published that had an extrem ely elaborate, carefully thought-out map, as well as timelines and histories and cultures — the whole bit. I enjoy making that kind of material up, and I’ve got a mind that’s geared that way. I did it even back in the days when I had to do it all with a typewriter and 3-by-5 cards. So working today with computers and 3D graphics and all of the tools at one’s disposal, I could see myself diving into such a project, and not emerging until ten years later, when I had complete topographic maps of the entire world, and all of that.

Joyce Carol Oates does something similar: [Quote from The Writing Life ]

Her writing is not effortless…She writes by hand, starting stories countless times, making comments as she goes, often producing as many as 1,000 pages of notes for every 250 printed pages. Belle-fleur (1980), which has been chatarerized as springing from a dream, “took lots of work,” with charts and graphs and heavy engineering…Her novel American Appetites had 3,000 pages of worksheets. You Must Remember This had 3,500 pages of side notes. My Heart Laid Bare , 5,000 pages.

I find this very interesting, as I also make copious notes that will never make it into my fiction. I try to inhabit the world my characters would. For my current project I have a map of the village where the protagonists live, as well as a notebook of with quotes they would choose from books. I’ve also been using SweetHome3D to design the house the main characters live in.

In this article Edward Carey explains the way he inhabits his characters’ world, sculpting an entire city for Alva and Irva :

Building the miniature city that I was writing about was essential to me, firstly so that I could really understand what it looked like, and secondly because it is what the protagonists of the novel do, and so I felt if I were really to understand them and their obsession I’d have to do the same. I spent many weeks constructing miniature streets and buildings, rummaging through many architectural books and guidebooks, and stealing building designs from different actual cities to construct my made-up one. I was amazed at how delicate a process it was, how painfully slow, and at how much patience it required. And how vulnerable the plasticine was, how easy to dent, and how quickly it grew dusty.

It was a great adventure for me building the city. I started building it (after I’d already made many maps) when I’d completed a few drafts of the novel, but the process of making the city changed the novel. I suddenly began to consider many new things. I could see the city with much more clarity and certain new possibilities for events began to occur to me. I began to wonder how it would be to be a city planner, and what responsibility there is to the people who would have to live with, and in, the decisions you make. Building the city, playing God, was wonderful but certainly I shall never do it again. I remember having a nightmare that somehow a mouse had gotten into my miniature city and was trampling around the plasticine streets, carving destruction as it went; I woke up terrified.