I could not believe I was sitting three feet from a Nobel Prize Winner as he described the nitty gritty details of his writing “process”.  I had seen him the night before in a sold-out lecture hall, but this was a Master Class for Prose Fiction writers.

Mr. Ishiguro received his Masters in Creative Writing at UEA in 1980. There were only 6 people in his class. His friends here at UEA call him “Ish”. He will be 63 next month. He is extremely humble and down-to-earth.

There is no way that I can do justice to his words. But I promised my writer friends that I would try to pass on the most salient gems of his writerly advice. So I will try. I did not record either of his talks, so his words are not verbatim. They are a combination of my notes and my memory. If I have somehow misinterpreted his meaning, it has been inadvertent, and I apologise.

Please also forgive the scattered nature of the ideas. I decided it was better to go ahead and post something than nothing! I’ve got to get back to my own writing!

Genre

“We should have a think about genre.” He told a story from Neil Gaiman: A bookshop suddenly decided to get rid of the shelves of “horror” or was it “SciFi”? Anyway, somebody had to reshelve all those books into other genres. His point was that the boundaries of genre are very fluid and they are simply an invented category for the sake of marketing, for publishers and booksellers. Writers should not succumb to those artificial borderlines when they are writing.

Character

He used to think of characters as individuals. Late in his writing career, he decided he should not worry about characters in isolation. Now he tries to answer the character questions through the character’s relationship to others. Does the relationship have a beginning, middle, end? What drives stories are human relationships. Never Let Me Go is centered around a triangular relationship.

He quoted somebody who said: “A 3D character is someone who surprises you convincingly.”

Revision Process

He said every person in the room was a better prose writer than he was. He says his genius is in “between the drafts”, during the the revision of drafts.

He has still not settled on one method. In Remains of the Day, he wrote 30-40 pages and revised them furiously until they were finished. Then he would move on. In Never Let Me Go, he wrote the whole first draft from beginning to end. He said he thought he did this out of fear—that he would not be able to sustain the story if he stopped to revise.

“My superpower is between drafts. I am not afraid to deconstruct and start from scratch.”

Nobody sees his first draft. Not even his wife. That is a private place where he is absolutely free to do whatever he wants and make whatever mistakes he makes. He handwrites it because he feels safer in handwriting. Nobody can read it. It is an extremely private document.

In writing his second novel, he had a bad experience. He went very far into a draft with the wrong narrator, a child. So he had to start all over. Audition your narrators. Write several pages using different narrators and see which one offers the most possibility.

Readers

Only his wife and his agent are his readers. Be careful who you give your work to. You must trust their taste. Don’t listen to a bunch of disparate opinions. It could dilute your vision.

His wife is his best and most trusted reader. She is not afraid to tell him the truth. At one point after The Remains of the Day, when he was writing something else, she said to him: “You are still in the mind of a butler.”

Writerly Instinct (comparisons to Jazz)

Why is one take of music better than another? They are the exact same piece of music played by the same person. But one just sounds a lot better, there is no intellectual reason for it. There is no justification. You just feel it. You have to hone this instinct, to know which draft or passage is better than another.

Why is one performance of jazz music better than another? Intentionality. This applies to all art. Intentionality. That’s what makes the difference between a jazz performance that is just a show of technique versus one that really moves the audience. When a performer has intentionality, he is there to say something with his riffs, using his skills to say something new. The artist needs to convey something personally important, something that really matters to him to say. And you can feel that.

His themes and books

Usually he picks the theme/idea and then he tries to figure out which characters and what setting would be the best place to explore that idea. He only picked setting first once (A Pale View of Hills) because he wanted to explore his memories of Japan.

He feels that this first book, set in Japan, is too mysterious.  A lot of people accepted it, thinking it “must be a Japanese thing.” Today, he wouldn’t make it as mysterious. Ambiguity is a powerful tool, but bafflement is not what you’re after.

Melancholy: He likes to write about humans looking back at their lives and coming to terms with the good things, the bad things, the unfulfilled things. He likes to write about characters who can’t quite articulate how their lives have been thwarted.

Memory: He likes the freedom of using memory as an organising principle—you can juxtapose a memory from 30 years ago with something that happened two days ago.

The Buried Giant: Nations (like individuals) have a memory. What do nations (individuals) choose to forget in order to move on and what do they choose to remember and keep as part of their history? How do people (nations) lie to themselves?

Never Let Me Go: It’s remarkable how humans love each other in the worst of scenarios.

Remains of the Day: the tension comes from suppression of emotion. You know the bomb is going to go off, you just don’t know when and how. It wasn’t until a very late draft in which he wrote the scene where the butler breaks down.

The ending

How much of your story do you know before you start story?

Planning has advantages: you can control reader manipulation. But serendipitous discoveries come from improvised moments, this is when dark things come stumbling out. So try to have both.

David Mitchell doesn’t like to know the ending. Ishiguro needs to know where the story is going to lead.

When he was young

He used to worry about “voice”, about somebody being able to pick up a book and know that it was him, that it was recognisably his voice. Don’t waste too much time on that. Your voice is naturally unique. It’s dangerous if it becomes a conscious choice.

Who do you like to read?

“I don’t read that much fiction.” (He’s obsessed with graphic novels at the moment. He also writes song lyrics for Stacey Kent.)

“I like writers who teach me something about writing: Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, García Márquez.”

“We used to have Dictatorship Envy, because those writers under dictators had something to write about. We were relatively comfortable in a stable, liberal democracy. It was harder to figure out what to write about. That’s when I discovered García Márquez and Magical Realism.”

Reading tastes are equivalent to racism. If you say you don’t read horror, or SciFi, you are being ‘racist’ toward a genre. Don’t do that.

Gossip

Neil Gaiman (SciFi in China): The Chinese used to ban SciFi because it was used a Trojan Horse to bring in anti-government, anti-Communist ideas. But today, the Chinese leaders have realised that they are not as successful in video gaming because they have limited the imaginations of their children with no SciFi. So they invited Gaiman and other Sci Fi writers to a conference in China to talk about Science Fiction.

James Ivory said, “Anthony Hopkins doesn’t cry very well. I don’t want the final emotional scene in the movie.” (It’s in the DVD extras.)

Advice

You should limit production of your work. Don’t be free and easy giving out your energy. Only do it when it really matters. You’ll lose yourself.

What are the emotions you want to express?

What is the fictional world of your story in relation to the world? What are its behavioural laws, its laws of physics? What is the literary world that the character inhabits?

What do you select to include in a scene/conversation? Think about the graphic novel: a story told through static images. There can be no motion like there is in film. The images reflect the exact moment something is happening. Don’t pick the obvious key turning points. Let the reader guess.

Limitations of vision are useful.

Take drafting seriously.

Hone your instinct.

Be courageous. Don’t just write what you know.

First, every cell in your body is on high alert. Nothing is the same. In the grocery store, I cannot find anything I want because not only is everything organized differently, the packaging is unfamiliar, too. For example, I want raisins. I look for a red box, because that is what my brain believes raisins come in. I go to three different grocery stores and scan each aisle and each shelf neurotically. It does not occur to me until the fourth, when I finally get myself to ask, that raisins could come in a clear white plastic bag. Brain! Why do you deceive me?

There are thousands of things which my American mind is used to that I do not have here. No car. I must grocery shop the European way. Every two or three days, rather than once every couple of weeks, when I could load my car with everything I needed. I must buy an old lady cart so that I can wheel the groceries home. Grocery shopping is to my mind an ordeal. It requires a list, a long walk or bus ride, and a couple of hours minimum. How can I make it feel like an adventure?

What am I doing here? Challenging everything I thought I knew about life? Deciphering entirely new systems and forms of transportation and methods of devouring time? I never quite know why I do things. I do them with certainty, and then I flail. I am flailing now.

I try to find comfort in old structures: embroidery, series tv, the gym. I am still Sylvia and I still carry many of Sylvia’s ideas and prejudices and assumptions of what it means to be a responsible adult in this world. But with every trip to the grocery store, I find I know nothing. Nothing is as it seems. Nothing is as I expect it to be.

If you have any desire to shake up your worldview, move to another country for six months. Scramble your brain. It’s a terrifying exercise of self discovery. And yet somehow, strangely exhilarating.

 

 

Agency: my entire life has been predicated on achieving this.

I have sought it more than love, more than enlightenment, more than self-awareness. I did not think I could have those things until I achieved Agency.

From where does this most basic human desire arise? The need to be in complete and total control of one’s own life, one’s body, one’s choices? To have no one, not a parent, not a spouse, not a friend, be able to control what you do with your life?

And why does it make men like Trump crazy when women achieve it?

In my little child mind, I intuited that the acquisition of money was the one and only true path to agency.

If you could pay for yourself, then you owed no one.

This became my singular goal, one I pursued with zeal.

Funny thing, I pursued it in a counterintuitive manner. I obeyed all the rules. I became the quiet, behind-the-scenes little worker bee that everybody could rely on.

I got squashed along the way, but I never took money from anyone that I did not immediately pay back. I worked for every cent. For every apartment. For every car. For every insurance premium. For every vacation. For every notebook, every pen, every computer.

Virginia Woolf taught me that I must have A Room Of My Own if I wanted to be creative. I took her to heart.

It would require millions of words to recount all the obstacles along the way. The men who took credit for my work. The men who got the bonuses for my sweat. The men who insisted they owned me because I worked for them. The men who tried to insult me for my feminism, my fashion-ignorant attire, my weight. The women who agreed with them, who saw me as an aberration of nature.

But that’s not what I want to remember. What I want to remember is this:

I am the sole agent of my destiny.

Girls. Seek the route to your agency. But only if that’s what you truly want.

 

I am lying naked, emaciated, on a concrete floor.

I am thinking. It is all I have left.

I am thinking about Michelle Obama’s speech, the one she gave 27 days before she and her husband were executed.

The beauty of that speech. The dignity. The hope it gave me as a woman. As a human.

They managed to repeal the 19th Amendment, and he won.

He immediately set upon imprisoning everyone who didn’t back him.

He started with women, then Mexicans, then gays.

I am all three. I was top of the list.

I memorized her speech. The last tears from my eyes came from those words.

My body is no longer writhing, only waiting for the sweet release of death.

I can still see her eyes, the tremor in her voice, the passion oozing from her heart.

Now I hear a sweet song. Star, my cockatiel, is singing good morning to me.

“Wake up,” he says.

I do. I look at my iPhone. It’s November 8.

The now infamous “Grab her by the p***y” tape triggered a long forgotten memory in me.

I was 21, fresh out of Yale. I had returned to the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. As an English major, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. Home seemed like a safe way station.

I got a job as a “paralegal” in an established law firm run by a father and his sons. At the Christmas party, the patriarch, now retired but still ruling with a firm hand, drew me into his ostentatious office. Before I knew it, the door was closed and his withered aged face was slobbering on mine. I exited quickly, but did not make a fuss.

I was furious. But not at him. I was furious with my female colleagues who had not warned me to avoid him. When I asked one of the women I trusted why she had not said anything, she implied that it was a rite of passage that every woman in the office had to endure. They felt that it was in my best interest to experience what each one of them had.

It never once occurred to me to report the incident. I knew it was a battle I would not win, and I did not want to be fired from my first job after college.

Soon thereafter I quit and moved to Boston. I donned 20 pounds and fatigues as my daily wear.

I never made the connection between that incident and the anti-beauty campaign that I embarked on in the Boston years. I never wore makeup, I was faithful to the fatigues and the sensible shoes, and added men’s ties and vests if the occasion warranted.

Somewhere in my female-trained mind, I associated beauty with danger. Beauty invited unwanted advances, unwanted pregnancies, even rape. When I arrived at Yale in 1975, a freshwoman was raped twice by the same man. We were forced to take a self-defense class  in which we learned to yell NO and kick a man in the crotch. Although I was extremely grateful for the class, I regretted having to give up three hours a week which I sorely needed for my studies.

In those Boston years, I wanted nothing to do with beauty. Makeup and clothes cost money which I did not have. The ritual of daily beauty devoured time that I’d rather use in advancement of my career.

Early on in life I bought into the false dichotomy: you were either on Team Beauty or Team Smart.

Donald Trump and Billy Bush, in a moment of unguarded Sexual Assault Banter, reminded me why.

Watching my 86-year-old mother has led me to the conclusion that habits do, indeed, die hard. I observe, to see if there are any hints of my own geriatric future.

What remains with her after all these years?

(1) Her morning beauty routine, which involves an intensive makeup applying session. I imagine that in her youth, this routine did not take the two full hours it takes now. I don’t have to worry about carrying this routine to my old age because I have never worn makeup a day in my life. Score!

It does amaze me, however, how insistent she is about getting fully decked out every day. To the quadruple nines, this woman! Spectacular outfits, shoes, earrings, jewelry, and aforementioned makeup. It exhausts me just watching her. I would be willing to spend that much time on a beauty routine only on days that I have been invited to a wedding, or the red carpet.

(2) Her need to be useful, to participate in the activities of the people around her. She wants to cook, and drive, and generally dictate the decisions of the day. But she is unable to do those things anymore. She will not give up trying, though, which leaves us in a literal Mexican standoff at least three times a day.

I can imagine being stubborn about continuing to be independent and useful until the day I die. I have been financially and physically and emotionally independent since I was 16. I cannot imagine giving up my daily decisions to anyone. Since I don’t have children, I guess I won’t have to. But what will become of me and my hardheadedness? Belgium, California, Kevorkian?

I’m not going to worry about that today. Today I have to make all the daily decisions and find a way to let her believe that she made them. It’s the only way I can think of to avoid a Mexican standoff.

Do you believe in omens? Today I heard a huge thud somewhere outside the house. I jumped up and went out the front door to discover a dead bird, claws straight up in the air. I swear it looked like a cartoon drawing. It was perfectly beautiful except it was dead. It had smacked straight into the house.

My brain went crazy. Would I have to dispose of it? How would I do that without touching it and contracting some strange avian disease? I would have to get rid of it before Mom got home. It would  certainly upset her, death so much on her mind, and her recent love affair with Star, the cutest bird on the planet.

But I couldn’t find the strength to deal with it. I was preparing for a singles tennis match, only a couple of hours away. Why God why me why now? A dead bird, really, Universe? That’s what you serve up to me today?

A few months before Gail passed, a bat entered our house and terrorized us for two consecutive nights. In 15 years of living in that old Victorian house, we had never had one bat occurrence. It felt like an ominous omen. Forgive the linguistic stutter.

The CDC had recently changed its rules, we came to find out. Now, if you are asleep in a room where a bat is found, you must take the series of rabies shots whether you have physical signs of a bite or not.

Gail had heard the bat on the floor by her side of the bed, and we had immediately evacuated. We were pretty sure we hadn’t been bitten, but the CDC didn’t care. With my high freelance deductible, I ended up paying over $2K for the shots. Gail’s bills were covered 80% by Medicare.

We had to call The Bat Guys (this is literally the name of their company). They could not locate the bat, even though it returned the next night. The Newport emergency room informed us that there had been a severe infestation that year of bats in Newport’s old houses. They nonchalantly reported that they had had to inoculate entire families that month. We slept with the lights on for the rest of the summer, because bats notoriously hate the light.

It wasn’t until Gail died five months later that I started seriously thinking of that bat as an omen. At the time, there was definitely an eerie sensation accompanying  the entire event, but my superstitious mind refused to consider it an omen, because then it might become one.

Back to today’s inert cartoon-like bird. I had this thought: wouldn’t it be great if one of those stray cats would come and take it away?

I went upstairs to put on my tennis gear. I looked out the window and, sure enough, I saw a cat. It looked up at me and acknowledged my presence. But it seemed to have no interest in the dead bird, even though it was less than a foot away.

Damn cat, I thought. Why doesn’t it follow its instincts and help a girl out?

When I went out, only a few minutes later, both the cat and the bird were gone. There was not one stray feather, not one sign that a dead bird had just minutes before, been lying there.

Did the cat telepathically get my message? Was my thought so powerful that it created the reality I wanted? Was the entire scene an omen of the potent presence of death, and then suddenly, its absence?

Or is a dead bird sometimes just a dead bird? And a cat just a cat following its hunger instincts?

Why does my mind want to create a portentous story about a bat and a bird and the death that always surrounds us?

I was grateful. I didn’t have to dispose of the bird. And I won my tennis match.

Last night on the tennis court, I saw a side of myself that I don’t particularly like. In both the second set and the third-set tiebreaker, I saw myself acting like a coward.

In the first set, I was aggressive, going for my shots without fear or hesitation. But once we won the first set, easily, I might add, at 6-1, I began to worry about losing. And once the doubts set in, I stopped playing on all cylinders.

I started going for the easy, safe shots. I started playing to “not miss”. And you cannot win that way. Both tennis and fortune favor the bold.

In tennis, this behavior is called “protecting your lead”. Everyone knows that this method does not produce victories. And yet, it’s hard not to behave that way when you’re under pressure. The commentators say only champions hit harder on the pressure points. They also say it is something you cannot teach.

It made me start thinking about playing it safe in life. Do I exhibit the same cowardly characteristics on the playing field of life?

I have taken many risks.  I went to Yale at 16 when I had never been on a plane, or to the East Coast, or seen snow. I moved to Boston at 21 with $500 and no job and no place to live. I applied for a job in publishing that the human resources department told me I would never get. I submitted a textbook proposal knowing full well that publishers only wanted authors who were also professors. I walked 440 miles across northern Spain because it felt important to prove to myself that I could do it. When my partner of 30 years passed, I pulled myself out of my grief long enough to pack up the house and sell it. At 57, I moved back to Texas to take care of my mother. (This last one is probably the bravest thing I’ve ever done!)

I don’t think I’m a coward in life. I don’t think I “protect my lead” when a challenge presents itself. And yet, I did that on the tennis court last night and we lost. Is it a product of age? What the heck happened?

When my tennis teammates who watched the match told me afterwards that I was not acting like myself, that I looked uncomfortable and unwilling to go for broke, my heart sank. I wanted to be grateful for their observations, but truth be told, they stung. Because what they were saying was true.

I’ll see what happens next time I’m on the court in the same situation. I have no trouble hitting all out when I’m losing. The underdog position suits me. It’s when I’m winning that the fear sets in.

All just to say: what do you say we go for broke? In life and on the court. What have we got to lose?

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am surrounded by the prospect of death. We all are, of course, but for some reason, I am particularly aware of it. For 20 years, my partner suffered a chronic lung disease that made Death a constant companion in our home. We did our best to ignore him, but finally, he made his presence unavoidable.

Now I live with my 85 year old mother, and again, I feel his presence, vividly. I don’t want to have the same regrets that I had after Gail passed: Did I tell her I loved her enough? Did she know she meant the whole world to me? Why was I so grumpy on that last day?

It is hard not to be grumpy around an 85 year old. Everything takes so long. No matter how much I plan to allow her time—to get into the car, to get to the table for a warm meal—inevitably, I have not allowed enough. Do I wait to eat with her and eat it cold? Or do I eat it hot, and then just sit and watch her eat alone? Sometimes I choose her. Sometimes I choose me.

I understand why people choose to stay so busy. Every waking moment is busy, busy, busy: making coffee, getting on the metro, into the car, into the office, never-ending to-do lists. In this way, you never have to notice Death there standing in the corner. I envy that now. I used to think it was silly to stay so busy. I see the beauty of the survival technique in it.

Death is not a fun companion. Creation is the only thing I can find to quell the pain. Words, embroidery, drawing, and of course reading, which is a cocreation of sorts.

On some days, nothing helps. Bursting into tears is the body’s only response.

This is Star.

Star saved my life when my partner was near death in the ICU. All the spiritual gurus tell you to list at least three things you are grateful for the second you wake up. Star is always on my list. Even when he bites my ear or disagrees with me about his destination when I take him out of the cage.

I try to see Star as energy, as a vibrational frequency of the Universe, but I never manage to. I usually see him as a bossy bird who loves stoned wheat crackers and insists it’s your fault when a feather is irritating him as it comes out. He also demands head-scratchies, especially when a mobile device or a remote is using up the hand that should be scratching him. This is when he gets the most adamant about that hand’s reason for existing.

Yes, I am grateful for Star. I didn’t even want him when he came to us. A friend whose sister had died of breast cancer was Star’s original owner. Her children were very young and the sight of Star made them very sad, so he needed a new home. I said no, but my partner Gail, in all her wisdom, said yes, we must. (That was the spiritual conundrum: do a good thing or limit the number of birds in the house?)

Her decision to take him in saved my life that January day in 2013 when I thought I had lost her. I felt unmoored like a balloon accidentally let go by a child. I was floating in the black nether space of fear and self-pity when Star caught me and brought me down. “Scratch my head!” he demanded. “Give me some cracker!”

And suddenly I was back on earth, with tears generously flowing. But the tears now had some laughter in them. Yes, I am grateful for the bossy bird with the itchy head.

P.S. The beautiful gray hair behind Star that matches him so perfectly belongs to Gail.