📝 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Writing Routine

Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer, best-known for his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day which was adapted into a film of the same name in 1993.

Following the success of his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, Japanese-born, British author Kazuo Ishiguro had a big problem on his hands — there were too many distractions going on in his life now and he didn’t have time to write his follow-up work.

In between the novel being shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize and winning the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, it seemed like everyone in the literary world wanted a piece of Ishiguro’s time and attention.

“Potentially career-enhancing proposals, dinner and party invitations, alluring foreign trips and mountains of mail had all but put an end to my ‘proper’ work,” he wrote in The Guardian. “I’d written an opening chapter to a new novel the previous summer, but now, almost a year later, I was no further forward.”

So Ishiguro and his wife, Lorna, devised a plan. Over the next four weeks, the author would clear his diary and do nothing but write six days a week, Monday through Saturday, from 9am to 10.30pm. Ishiguro would get a few hours to himself for lunch and dinner, but there was no answering any mail or using the phone.

“No one would come to the house,” he said. “Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitatively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.”

Ishiguro named this period of his life “The Crash” and he credits writing the majority of his 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day, to those four weeks — “At the end of it I had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash.”

Winning the prestigious Booker Prize that same year, The Remains of the Day would go on to become one of the most celebrated British literary works. The novel was also adapted into a 1993 film of the same name, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, and was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay.

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