Neal Stephenson: For every book I have worked on, not only is the book different (obviously), with different characters, different story, but the system by which I write it is different, too. I always seem to have to invent a new system for writing each book. In this case I ran through a bunch of them, because I knew I had this big data-management problem. So, I started with a bunch of notebooks, just composition books, in which I would write notes down in chronological order as I read a particular book, or what have you.