Talking about Neal Stephenson's works always brings up several topics: endings and editing. He's responded to criticisms of his endings in various book talks, for instance his Author's at Google talk about Anathem [1] (prepositioned to the relevant bit @10:54). One of his editor's at Wired magazine also made a comment about editing his work in his book talk about Fall or Dodge in Hell at the Interval [2].<p>This is a transcript of a part of the Authors at Google talk for Anathem (first link prepositioned to 10:54):
<i>[10:54]
Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it.
[11:11]
A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently.
[11:21]
But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. I've seen people complain, for example, that Snow Crash doesn't have a good ending. But I can remember that at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby Dick. There's a helicopter that gets brought down, and there's a private jet that blows up, some people die, there's confrontations, and the girl goes home with her mom, it seems like a good ending to me. So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is.
[12:59]
For The Baroque Cycle, I created a kind of NORAD bunker in which to write the ending. It was this complete, you know, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, they were completely covered with timelines, charts, and all kinds of technology that I was using to bring all the plot lines together into an end.
[13:27]
I think Anathem does ok on that score. I'm sure I'll be hearing from some of the Stephenson can't write endings people, but I think it's got a decent enough ending on this one.</i><p>This is a transcript of an unknown (to me) Wired editor talking about Stephenson's copy: <i>I will tell you I was working under Kevin at Wired when Neil did a story of following the fiberoptic cable around the world, and it was a forty five thousand word piece, and I will say when you brought the copy in I could not improve it as an editor. It was the cleanest copy I'd ever worked with ever with any other writer and I actually worked with a lot of writers so I will say you have something going on there about your first drafts that are uneditable.</i> [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxuzwCps70&t=3253s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxuzwCps70&t=3253s</a>