Kazuo Ishiguro Wrote REMAINS OF THE DAY in Four Weeks & Now I Understand How He Did It

Solitude, I have discovered, is a different kind of teacher. Here's how I finally managed to revise my own novel, and what I learned in the process about craft, life, and loneliness

Here, friends, is the post I promised I would share with you detailing my recent solo writing week on the North Shore of Lake Superior. If you are in the middle of a book project and need more traction, or if you are at all struggling to engage or re-engage with your creative writing practice in general, this post is for you.

To note, I am 55 years old and have never, until now, spent seven straight days entirely alone, despite spending much of my youth drowned in loneliness. I am combing my memory to make sure that I am right about this recent writing week spent entirely alone being a first, and I’m pretty sure I am. You see, I moved in with my first husband at age 20 and had my first child at 22, and have been in the thick of it ever since. So, I didn’t quite realize the milestone nature of this experience until I was already in it.

Years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote about the phenomenon of genuine solitude and immersive writing very beautifully for The Guardian, in an essay called “How I Wrote Remains of the Day in Four Weeks.” I read the essay back then, and have thought about it often over the years, but have never experienced what Ishiguro describes—wherein the world of the writing becomes realer than the real world—until now.

Solitude, I have discovered, is a different kind of teacher.

And I learned so much during my week alone—about my novel, its world and characters, their lives and deep desires and flaws, and about how to thread those things through the story, how to keep going back and plant what needs to ripen and bear fruit later in the course of their journey through the book.

Before I dive right into the concrete specifics of what I did during my weeklong writing intensive, what I learned, and how I made it work, I want to share a few biographical details about me, especially for new subscribers or, really, anyone who doesn’t know me in real life or know much about my day to day.

Like I said, I am 55 years old and have been writing and publishing my work since my early 20s, but, until 2015 (so, my mid-40s), I primarily published narrative journalism in regional magazines, along with some personal essays in trade magazines and lots and lots of contract writing (think educational books for the library market, collaborative and ghost writing, technical writing like grants and such, and a nearly backbreaking amount of web “content” which I am eternally grateful to no longer be tasked with). Why did I write all those things? For money. I wrote them for money because I needed it. Meanwhile, for a decade I also taught elementary and middle school in addition to all that freelance and contract writing. Why so much labor? Because we—my husband and I—have six kids between us in our blended family.

Starting in 2010, I left grade school teaching for a full-time job at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, where I am still employed as writer and lecturer. At the U, in addition to writing and editing in my department, I teach narrative health and a class called Writing for Public Health. I also teach my own Writing in the Dark workshop (which started back up last night and was amazing!), and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, where I just finished a fantastic 10-week flash class in person at Shakopee Correctional Facility, a level-four state prison for men (meaning, lots of time-consuming rigamarole around the teaching, in addition to the actual teaching).

And, with those six kids (now grown) and five grandchildren under five, including a foster grandson who is being single-parented by our youngest child, I am very, very, very (very!) busy.

So busy.

Too busy to attend to my novel in the way I have wanted and needed to. And I was lamenting that on my birthday (which was April 9, right amid the 30-Day Creativity Challenge). I was frustrated that I had not been able to continue progress on revising my novel manuscript, a task I began in February, while working remotely for six weeks on the Gulf Coast. Back then, I did a bunch of conceptual work on the novel’s timeline. And at that time, the manuscript was about 68K words, many of which were fairly polished. But on a global scale, the work was in need of major revision as well as some significant expansion. And the global stuff I did in Florida was really big work! I accomplished a lot. But once back in Minnesota, amid all the mayhem of my work and family here, I was simply not able to implement the solutions and tasks I had identified in Florida. Even though I had, during AWP, two really good conversations with two separate agents who read and liked my first pages. Even though I genuinely believe in this novel. I was stalled out.

In response to what I shared (which they already knew!), my family suggested I get myself out of the house for a week as an investment in my book, myself, and my sanity. The next day, I booked myself this super cute place on Lake Superior, which, if you’ve read The Part That Burns or any of my work, you know is a deeply spiritual and connected place for me.

Once I had booked my lodging, I made sure to clear my calendar. No book coaching calls (normally I do one or two of those a week), no other freelance meetings, and I requested PTO from the U (I work remotely but did not want to have to attend to those job responsibilities while also trying to immerse myself in the world of my novel).

The question that plagued me was whether a week would be enough time to accomplish anything. While working on The Part That Burns, I was very fortunate to be awarded two separate month-long funded residencies, one at Millay Colony for the Arts in New York, and one at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming. In both cases, I was able to immerse and get a ton of work done. And because there were other artists in residence, I made close friendships that have lasted. But I'm not in a place right now to be away for a full month. And I wasn't sure how a week would go. Would it even be worth it?

The answer is a definitive, celebratory, ecstatic yes.

And now that I have been home for a full week, I have had time to consider the reasons why, and would like to share those reasons with you in case they are helpful. Bear in mind that we’re all wired differently, and what works for me might not work for you. But even with that disclaimer, I feel there are some universally acknowledged hungers in creativity, some demands creating places upon us, and we are wise to feed and heed those hungers and demands as best we are able.

So what worked? First and foremost, and above all, the complete solitude I chose—by virtue of going all alone and choosing a very remote setting, I set myself up for success. There was nowhere to walk to, no one to talk to, nothing to distract me. I had only myself and the pressure I had placed upon myself, in response to taking a whole week away from everything and everyone else—to use my time well. In other words, I understood that I had a full week ... but only a week. As a result, I was able to accomplish almost as much in a week as I accomplished in a month in those earlier residencies.

I am thrilled.

But it was not easy. So, the second thing is, I had to make a decision about my intentions and stick to them. I was there to write, and that’s it. For example, the photo of the Adirondack chair shows you the view from the deck of the building where I stayed—where I never once sat. Because I couldn’t write comfortably outside. And all I did while on the shore was write. And drink coffee (so much coffee). No, no wine. Not even a drop. But I did eat regularly, even though food didn’t taste good (more on that later in this post). And, of course, I slept (but not that much). Luckily, despite that I never once sat on the deck, I did have an amazing view from my couch. Indeed, I took this photo of my last cup of morning coffee on departure day from the exact spot where I had hunkered down almost nonstop for the previous seven days. I worked a minimum of twelve hours a day, usually more like fifteen or sixteen. It made me loopy and lonely and stir crazy. But it also worked magic.

What I achieved in seven days in my little writing room on the North Shore could never have happened at home. Not in seven weeks, seven months, or seven years. So even as I suffered the toll of such nonstop work and a considerable amount of loneliness, I told myself the view from the couch was enough. I told myself there would be other times for hiking and wading and exploring (and there certainly will be—each summer my family and I drive the North Shore a couple of times a month on the way to and from our cabin). But this particular week was for writing, and writing only. I didn't want to squander any of that precious time.

And, beyond the bare minimum necessary breaks to stretch and recover, I didn't.

As a result, I made it once through the entire manuscript (which as I said was 68K words long when I began the revision), then I started again, and then I started again. I was not editing. I was making major revisions. For example, I cut more than 10K words from the manuscript I left home with, but ultimately added more than 10K words to the manuscript I brought back a week later. So that’s a lot of old scenes subtracted and new scenes added. I still have some significant new scenes to write at a certain turning point in the middle, and many new scenes in the last third. But I know what I am doing, whereas when I got there, it was just all so hard and so much figuring out still to do.

The first 75 pages were by far (and I mean really by far) the hardest—huge structural work to make the new timeline and revised plot I created in Florida work. Just so much rewriting, new writing, and, most of all, THINKING through how to do it, what needed to happen, scenes that needed to be dreamed up and written, etc. It was so slow. So exhausting. So demoralizing, really. I felt almost defeated. But I’ve been around this block before. Just keep going, I told myself. And I listened to myself, and kept going.

And the momentum, by the fourth day, suddenly escalated in the most breathtaking way. To note, in order to achieve and maintain that momentum, I kept a list called “Notes for the Novel” where I captured all the things that were, for various reasons, not implementable in the moment, but which I did not want to forget. This included threads I wanted to pull through or plant earlier, scenes to add, ideas for amplifying certain elements of the story, etc. I also marked some things in the margins to “FIX LATER” so that I could keep moving and not waste time. I allowed myself to look up a thing or two here or there (I did have internet—I even posted on social media!), but I kept time online to a minimum. I didn’t want to get sucked into any research black holes.

I was lonely. Very, very lonely.

I am used to being with Jon & Frannie all day every day, and most of the time there are others, too, cycling through the house—our kids coming and going, Z spending the night half the time, the rest of the grandbabies converging on Saturdays. It's a hectic, busy life, yes, but it's also just the way I like it. So my husband, to whom I spoke by phone several times but not every day, sent me pics from home—pics of the grandbabies, pics of all the yard work he'd been doing, and lots of pics Frannie, who I missed so much.

Every night as I went to bed, alone, which was already strange for me, I found myself looking for Frannie, then remembering was not there. At home, I am the one who carries her up to bed every night. So I appreciated those pics of her and of life at home. It allowed me to feel lonely without feeling anxious (or too anxious), if that makes sense. I have enough abandonment anxiety still alive deep inside of myself that it helped to keep the energy flow open versus worrying about some right or wrong way to approach the influx of info from home. To his credit, Jon chose not to tell me about a few little issues that came up. I didn’t need to worry about those things from 250 miles away, but I am a worrier, so I’d have worried if he had told me. I was grateful that he waited, because none of it really mattered.

Ultimately, by dwelling so deeply and devotedly in the world of my novel, I learned things about craft. I learned about managing time control (an obsession right now, just see this recent prompt on How to Speed Without Crashing!) in a container as vast as a novel (and all my recent practice with flash-sized pieces in Writing in the Dark really, really helped!). I learned about pacing, too, and how it can start to assert a palpable rhythm in a novel, if you’re patient and keep listening for it, feeling for it.

And I learned about myself. Like how, when left to my own devices for seven days, I end up eating just in order to live in a way that didn’t feel very nourishing. If I lived alone I’d really need a strategy for enjoying food more. Also, I learned that on my own, I wake up at sunrise and get tired earlier, too. It's like my body, not having any other external factors, just tuned to the sun and went from there. I also learned that when deprived of human contact even for just one week, I become extremely effervescent with strangers (my neighbors on the Shore had two dogs and a baby, and I loved when they'd hang out at the fire pit outside my door). I made fast friends with the owner of Lockport Deli down the road a few miles. Lockport constituted one of my two excursions up the shore for provisions.

I felt, when I went to that little market, like I was coming down from the mountain after a long winter or something, haha. I know that was partly a function of not simply the isolation, but also of being so deep in the world of the novel that the real world took on that strange, less real quality that Ishiguro described so vividly.

Ultimately, I found myself transformed by the nature of such an intense week. Not only did I discover a great deal about my work and myself, but I finished something crucially important to me, and I’m grateful for it in a way that makes the word grateful feel inadequate. I think this strategy—surrendering to the chaos but scheduling intense, lonely writing residencies—is probably the best of all worlds for me right now.

In closing, I need to acknowledge that it is a privilege to be able to go away alone for a week. A privilege I could not until fairly recently even consider. In past times, I have made do with full days in public spaces like libraries or coffee shops, and/or my own empty house, back during the very brief period when we had an “emptier” nest. These smaller scraps are not as ideal, at least for me, because they are not as immersive. That said, a stretch of seven or eight hours is absolutely beneficial, and will offer exponentially more opportunity for creative unfolding than an hour or two or three. So if your life is not one that currently allows for a week or even a weekend away, think about how you can get day- or half-day-long stretches. One of my novelist friends, who is also a mother of a young child, drives her car to public parking lots (like at Target) and writes there. I used to park by the river and do the same. If you have ideas for carving out solitary time for writing even in the face of logistical and financial hurdles, please share them in the comments.

Also, questions! I will be answering questions in a new weekly post for paid subscribers called Lit Lab, which will start in July. I can’t wait to start interacting with you all in that space.

Love,

Jeannine