Kazuo Ishiguro on Writing

Kazuo Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature. The Fort Dix FCI leisure library had of his novels An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989),The Unconsoled (1995), and Never Let Me Go (2005). I preferred Never Let Me Go,. How Ishiguro strayed into speculative fiction interested as by then I was already thinking I had let thinking about genre which I think of as marketing hindered me from telling a story.

I have a theory that the reason Memphis produced the music it did  and why the London bands were so big in the Sixties was competition creating a cross-pollination through inspiration. No Yardbirds without there being The Rolling Stones. Ishiguro, I think, makes my point for me in the following how this applies to writing:

Around this time, I came down with a virus and spent a few days in bed. When I came out of the worst of it, and I didn’t feel like sleeping all the time, I discovered that the heavy object, whose presence amidst my bedclothes had been annoying me for some time, was in fact a copy of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (as the title was then translated). There it was, so I started to read it. My still fevered condition was perhaps a factor, but I became completely riveted by the Overture and Combray sections. I read them over and over. Quite aside from the sheer beauty of these passages, I became thrilled by the means by which Proust got one episode to lead into the next. The ordering of events and scenes didn’t follow the usual demands of chronology, nor those of a linear plot. Instead, tangential thought associations, or the vagaries of memory seemed to move the writing from one episode to the next. Sometimes I found myself wondering: why had these two seemingly unrelated moments been placed side by side in the narrator’s mind? I could suddenly see an exciting, freer way of composing my second novel; one that could produce richness on the page and offer inner movements impossible to capture on any screen. If I could go from one passage to the next according to the narrator’s thought associations and drifting memories, I could compose in something like the way an abstract painter might choose to place shapes and colours around a canvas. I could place a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. In such a way, I began to think, I might suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self and of their past.

These passages have enlightened me on what I am doing with "No Clean Slates" and what I have still to fully work out with "Chasing Ashes." 

The thought came to me – as I continued to stare at John Barrymore – that all good stories, never mind how radical or traditional their mode of telling, had to contain relationships that are important to us; that move us, amuse us, anger us, surprise us. Perhaps in future, if I attended more to my relationships, my characters would take care of themselves.

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 I’ve been emphasising here the small and the private, because essentially that’s what my work is about. One person writing in a quiet room, trying to connect with another person, reading in another quiet – or maybe not so quiet – room. Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large glamorous industries around stories; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?