Une interview de China Mieville

[jerome]

China Mieville (Le roi des Rats, Perdido Street Station et Les Scarifiés) revient dans une interview sur sa ville New Crobuzon que l'on retrouve dans Perdido Street Station et dans Le Concile de fer (à paraître).

Voici l'extrait. Toute l'interview est ici

"
PWT - What about New Crobuzon? How did it come up and what did you want to say with the setting?

CHINA - I just wanted a setting that I could use as a ragbag, into which I could throw anything and everything I thought up, but still trying to conceive of it rigorously, legitimately, 'realistically' in its own terms. So New Crobuzon is the result of many years of accreted ideas, images, monsters, architecture. It wasn't planned, it coagulated out of a mess in my head. That was always its telos.

PWT - And what can you tell us about your writing process? How do you come up with ideas? Do you outline your novels? Do you research much?

CHINA - I outline very carefully, in a lot of detail, print out the outlines and refer to them throughout the writing process. I get very stressed indeed by the idea of writing without knowing what's going to happen. Of course things change in the writing, but with a plan in place, they change within parameters and the change cascades all the way down and you can follow through what'll happen. I research a reasonable amount, but I'm painfully aware that excess research can be i) a stalling mechanism to put off the actual writing, and ii) a way of making for a clunky book. So I tend to research but only at the level of, say, a children's encyclopedia, because it's a very rare book that needs more detail than that for whatever it's talking about. I have no idea where I get ideas from. I think ideas are easy, and I think most people have way more ideas than they think they do. "