Monday Writing Motivation: My buddy Kazuo Ishiguro
Here’s a story about our visit to hear a world-famous writer talk about his music (and his writing), together with some of his advice – and what happened then.
Trish booked us seats at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s iconic Southbank Centre for a hybrid evening of jazz and literature. The event? An appearance by Stacey Kent, her husband the saxophonist and clarinettist Jim Tomlinson, and, on keyboards,  Art Hirahara. They were performing songs written by Tomlinson and Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel prize-winning author of such books as The Remains of the Day,  Never Let Me Go, and The Unconsoled.
I have to confess at once that I am something of a troglodyte when it comes to jazz – but I was happy to listen to the songs that Stacey Kent sang because of the identity of the lyricist. (In fact I almost always pay more attention to the lyrics than I do to the melody of any song.)
And the lyrics were everything you might have expected from, well, let’s call him Ish, for reasons that will become clear a little later in my tale. Take this couplet from the song of the evening, The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain*:
Let’s be young again, if only for the weekend
Let’s be fools again, let’s fall in at the deep end
But the high point of the evening was the second half of a programme, in which Ish discussed among other things, his writing.
What did he touch on that you might find useful? Well, he said a couple of things that I found insightful.
Take this observation, for instance. He said that writing courses spend a lot of time teaching writers to grab the attention of their readers. “But they ignore the equally important necessity of getting their books to linger in the memory of readers.”
Cast your mind back over your favourite books. Think about the long-lasting effect they’ve had on you. That’s precisely the sort of lingering impression you’d like to leave with your readers, isn’t it? The Remains of the Day left me with a profound sense of loss, of sadness, of melancholic resignation. Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, was deeply disturbing…
How do you achieve this effect? Well, I’m not sure, although I suspect that a great deal has to do with surprise, and the contrast between what you expect, and what the writer delivers. But I think Ish’s right. You couldn’t call any of his novels sensational – and yet all of those I’ve read remain in my memory: sometimes strange, always understated, whose implications seep into my consciousness over time.
Ishiguro also raised the perennial disagreement between pantsers and planners. Pantsers are those who write without a plan or even a destination in mind for their story. Planners know where they’re going. He recalled an argument he had with David Mitchell, the man who wrote The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Cloud Atlas. Mitchell, Ishiguro reported, lies firmly in the camp of the pansters, and took issue with Ish who sits in the opposite camp.
Ishiguro went on to qualify this commitment, however. It’s not so much that he needs to know where the plot is heading, or what how the story itself will end: but he must know what the “emotional landing pad” is.
It’s an important distinction and one I hadn’t heard articulated before. But I think he’s absolutely right. It’s not essential that you know specifically that your hero is going to return from the field of battle with the head of his enemy clutched triumphantly in his fist. It is essential that you know he’s going to be riven by a complex admixture of exultation and guilt. Knowing that, you’ll know how to steer the unwieldy barque of your story towards that destination, whatever specific form it takes in terms of plot.
And what happened next?
Well, the Queen Elizabeth Hall is a large venue holding, oh, eight hundred or a thousand people. Every seat was full. We were sitting above the main cross-aisle and decided to let the crowds disperse before we made our way down to the aisle, before crossing towards the lifts.
As we got to that aisle, we realised that the party from the stage, including Ishiguru, had made their way up to the same passageway, and was heading towards us. A group of people, clearly friends of the laureate, met them halfway, and Ishiguro hugged each of them in turn.
I was within a couple of yards of the great man and impulsively said, “Do I get a hug as well?”
And with a laugh, he embraced me briefly, before moving on.
Which is why, dear readers, I think I’ve earned the right to refer to him, familiarly, as Ish.
Happy writing,
Richard
P.S. Do you think that the emotion that you leave your reader with at the end of your story is precisely the thing that makes it linger in memory? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Use the comment box below, or email me.
*Â This is the title of the CD album Stacey Kent and Jim Tomlinson have released, as well as a slim volume that Faber have published of the lyrics by Ishiguro.