Breaking The Code With Neal Stephenson, Page 7

ATN: What made you decide to write?

Stephenson: One day in fourth or fifth grade, my best friend came to school wearing leather shoes. Until then, we had all worn tennis shoes. And I still wore tennis shoes. I was horrified that my peers, people close to me, were already showing signs of domestication. I had never worn leather shoes that didn't hurt my feet. At that point, I began thinking about occupations I might be able to find for myself that would enable me to wear tennis shoes, or not wear anything on my feet at all. That was my litmus test for careers all the way through my teens and 20s.

ATN: What did your mom and dad do?

Stephenson: My father is a professor of electrical engineering at Iowa State University. My mother worked as a lab technician in various biochemistry research labs for most of my young life and has also done a lot of work for the Methodist Church at their regional and national levels.

ATN: So you were always around science.

Stephenson: Oh yeah. My father's father was a physics professor at Washington State, and my mother's father was a biochemistry professor at Mankato State University in Minnesota.

AND THAT WAS THAT

ATN: What actually made you start writing?

Stephenson: I came up with an idea for a novel when I was in college and I sat down and wrote it.

ATN: What made you think you could do it?

Stephenson: I don't know. I had been discouraged up to that point because I had tried to write short fiction and found that I couldn't. I had always been told by teachers that the way you become a writer is first you have a journal, then you work up to writing short stories, and then you write novels. I had really indifferent results trying to keep a journal, and I was a complete failure at writing short stories. But when I sat down and tried to write a novel, I found it was much easier for some reason, and it's always been that way for me.

ATN: Were there points where you got discouraged along the way? You wrote and said, I can't do this, I'm not going to do this, or, It's too hard?

Stephenson: I was frequently anxious about my prospects for selling books. But once I started doing it, I was always pretty confident that I had good ideas and I could put them down on paper.

ATN: What gave you that confidence?

Stephenson: I don't know. I don't know where ideas come from. I find the whole concept of the muse pretty persuasive. It always seems to come from outside and shows up unpredictably not because of any personal merit or effort that I'm putting out. Ideas drop into my head pretty much fully formed out of nowhere and I say, Hmmm, that's a good idea. That I think it's a good idea isn't a reflection of arrogance on my part, because I don't even feel as though it's my idea. It's my job to write it down and mail it off. I guess I'm a little cautious about trying to come up with straightforward mechanistic explanations of why people write stuff. Because the more I do it, the more mystified I am. That's an analysis question which I think is a fine pursuit for people who analyze things for a living. But I just don't happen to be one of those people. I try to analyze my own writing as little as possible.

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