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It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin.
(Relevant, from the interview)
Yea, I know what you mean. I guess the important thing is that what gets put in is worth reading. Narrators usually have special privileges and secrets and information and I guess its worth asking yourself, what those secrets are and why does your narrator have them.
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i haven't thought about it as narrator's secrets -- but what is worth reading is precisely my problem. I have a poetic bent that gets carried away, and so what ends up happening is that I leave in a bunch of flowery passages that I just can't bear to cut, but i take a cleaver to most of the rest of the mechanics in the story. ends up feeling disjointed, I think.
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cranking up the resolution is a good way to put it. Gibson definitely did that.
It's hard, when writing fiction: sometimes if I don't have a strong feeling for why a certain thing should be described the way it is, I cut and cut and cut and what comes out is too spare. But when I ask myself why there should be more words there, why I do have to describe what that spoon looked like or her expression when I wasn't looking, I don't have an answer and I just say she breathed on it and stuck it on her nose. Which reads okay.