he did nothing but write from 9am
to 10.30pm – all day, every day, six
days a week. He allowed himself
one hour off for lunch and two
for dinner, but otherwise he wrote
continuously, without distractions:
no letters, phone calls or emails and
no visitors, with his (very supportive)
wife Lorna looking after cooking
and household chores. He hoped
that in this way he would not only
significantly increase his daily output
but, more importantly, would also
reach a mental state in which his
fictional world was more real to
him than the actual one. He wrote
freehand, not caring about style or
contradictions, intent only on getting
ideas down on paper, and ploughing
on and on. And it worked. After
those four weeks of uninterrupted,
concentrated writing, he had a draft
of what was to become The Remains
of the Day.BEAT THE BESTSELLERS
http://www.writers-online.co.uk MARCH 2020protagonists in Never Let Me Go,
put their faith in a future which they
know is at odds with the predestined
fate that awaits them. In The Buried
Giant Axl and Beatrice set off across a
troubled land in the hope of finding
a son they have not seen for years.
Their hazardous journey reveals dark,
forgotten corners of their love for one
another. It’s a story of mists, monsters
and mythology – an atmospheric
examination of memory and guilt,
described by one critic as ‘Game of
Thrones with a conscience... about
the duty to remember and the urge
to forget.’
How he writes
Ishiguro has two desks, one with a
(rather old) computer not connected
to the internet, the other with a
writing slope. He produces a first
draft in pen by hand on his writing
slope, paying no attention at all to
coherence or to style. He just tries to
get everything down on paper; if he
is struck by a new idea that doesn’t
fit with what has gone before, he still
puts it in, making a note to go back
and sort it out later.
Once he has a completed first draft,
he begins the real work of planning
and sorting sections and moving them
around. He writes the second draft
on his computer with a clearer idea
of where the novel is heading, and
he writes much more carefully. Some
individual passages may be rewritten
many, many times, but his third draft
is, more often than not, the final one.
His novels usually have a first-
person narrator (The Buried Giant
is the exception). He believes that
the choice of narrator and setting
are critically important. ‘You do
have to choose a setting with great
care, because with a setting come
all kinds of emotional and historical
reverberations,’ he said in an interview
for Paris Review. But having decided
upon his narrator and his setting, he
leaves a lot of room for improvisation.
He used to focus on developing
characters’ eccentricities and quirks, but
has come to believe that it’s better to
focus on their relationships, allowing
the characters to develop naturally from
that. He believes that relationships, like
people, can be three-dimensional. ‘I’m
not a naturalistic writer,’ Ishiguro said
on Desert Island Discs. ‘I don’t go round
observing people and putting them into
my books.’ He strongly disagrees with
the ‘write what you know’ school of
thought, which he believes encourages
dull autobiography and is the reverse
of firing a writer’s imagination and
potential. In his own writing he
attaches great importance to feelings
and emotions, trying to highlight some
aspect of being human while avoiding
any kind of moral message. He dislikes
literary allusions, which he feels are ‘a
bit snobbish or elitist’ and can take the
reader away from the fictional world
they’re in. When working on a novel he
avoids reading or watching anything in
the same area lest it should influence
the world he has created and the way
he visualises the scenes.
In the summer of 1987 Ishiguro,
who had until then gone along with
the view that four hours or so of
concentrated continuous writing
was about the most anyone could
reasonably manage, agreed with his
wife on a drastic, radically different
approach. For a period of four weeks,27LISTEN
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To hear an
extract from
Never Let
Me GoLISTEN
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To hear an
extract from
The Remains of
the Day