Winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature, Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, and moved with his family to Britain in 1960 where he became a writer, screenwriter, and musician/composer. He's been called the perfect blend of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka with a dash of Marcel Proust.
He is best known for "The Remains of the Day" and "Never Let Me Go." Ishiguro was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the touching 2022 film "Living."
Ishiguro is one of 6 Nobel Prize winners to earn an Academy Award nomination as well. (Thus far, only George Bernard Shaw and Bob Dylan have won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.)
Have donuts ready to sell
At age 32 after the publication of Ishiguro’s second novel, he found himself flailing professionally. The trouble, in a word, was productivity -- he had no new works to sell. So he and his wife hatched an experiment, as he told The Atlantic.
For 4 weeks they cleared his schedule so he could "go on a Crash," 9 a.m. - 10:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, 1 hour off for lunch, 2 for dinner. No mail, no phone. No visitors. No cooking, housework or anything else. The goal was to immerse himself completely into his fictional world.
“Throughout the Crash,” Ishiguro recalled, “I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere — I let them remain and ploughed on.”
The experiment worked. Ishiguro had a solid draft in 4 weeks.
He said that during his year of "unproductivity" he accomplished a lot more than he realized by finishing the background work for the writing: reading relevant books, including histories, and knowing what he wanted to write. Then he was ready to sit down and tackle the details.
Ishiguro told the BBC that growing up Japanese in the UK has been crucial to his writing, allowing him to view things from a different perspective.
From the Attic:
I've only known one person (to my knowledge) who has served on The Swedish Academy, the committee that gives out the Nobel Prize. They did so for many years.
With a huge permanent fake smile plastered on like a mask, they needlessly ruined the careers of at least two talented solid people I know of. One was a hard-working, urbane young man. Before the end of the first semester, The Swedish Academy member had labeled him mentally ill (back in the 1990s when mental illness) and forced him to quit although the young man had done nothing but an excellent job. The Swedish Academy member did the same thing to a more experienced worker who refused to quit after an illustrious career at the university. So they hatched a plan to secretly use soft money to create a new position for her in a different department that would secretly expire in one year, firing her by pretending to hire her.
This week in the news a Nobel laureate in medicine was convicted in the courts for practicing reckless medicine and falsifying preliminary animal studies (never conducted). Nearly every person who received his Nobel Prize winning windpipe transplant died! (Just 1 patient did not die, but nearly suffocates to death 4 times per day.)
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Learned so much again - thanks, Laura!
It's interesting to learn that that prolonged immersion in writing anything that came to mind worked so well. I think it's quite a gamble myself!