According to Karlin Lillington, writing for the Irish Times, William Gibson will stop blogging when he starts writing his next novel. It sounds as though he needs privacy in order to write:

or, as he writes himself in his blog:

One thing that was immediately clear to me, from the first blog, is that this is not an activity, for me, that can coexist with the writing of a novel. In some way I only dimly apprehend, it requires too much of the same bandwidth (yet never engages anything like the total *available* bandwidth).

But, definitely, the ecology of novelization and the ecology of blogging couldn’t coexist, for me. It would be like trying to boil water without a lid. Or, more like it, trying to run a steam engine without a lid. (I wonder if that would be the case for a native of the blogosphere — for whom, as Lou Reed once said of heroin addicts, “the needle is a toothbrush”? Maybe not.)

This is pretty much the opposite view to Steven Johnson’s statement that he’s been twice as productive in his other writing since he started blogging. But as I understand what Gibson says, for him the incompatibility of book-writing and blogging isn’t that blogging takes time but that it’s too public. Or too open, perhaps. He sounds rather like the individualist romantic genius who needs isolation to create great art, while the blogging ethos demands openness and social sharing of the process. I wonder if these opposed strategies are clichÈs, beliefs or just a sign of different personality types? I think I’m a native of the blogsphere – though I’m not sure about the toothbrush thing.