Okay, so my first question would probably be when did you first decide
you wanted to be a writer?
When I was sixteen.
So a little bit younger
than you are now. And that was in what we call high school which is what basically
you are in and what made me decide to do that because I wasn't thinking about
it and the the year before when they went back to do a documentary on me they
interviewed my year before a teacher and usually your teachers going to say
"Oh yes, I know she was brilliant etc" but this one told the truth and said
"She showed no particular ability in my class"
which was true but then I had a
different teacher the next year and apparently I don't think it was she who
put the idea into my head because in 1956 in Canada nobody was going to be a
writer so there were no creative writing classes we didn't learn it when we wrote
things in school it was essays. But I think I just I just started doing it and
it was more fun than anything so I changed career paths I switched from
science to writing and everybody thought I was mad.
Well...you're laughing at them now!
Well, I don't know. Most of them are dead.
What book of yours are you most proud of and why?
Wwhat am I most proud of that I've written?
Oh. I never answer that question. And the reason I don't is that if I
choose one of my books the others will know about it and they'll be very
annoyed. "We spent all this time with you and you're just dismissing us?"
I don't choose amongst them. I put in the time on them I must have been interested
in them at the time.
How do you create such in-depth storylines and plots?
Like how does it come to your head?
Well you can get the idea for a novel in
quite a short period of time but then you have to sit down and work at it.
so what they say is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration so the rest of it is
working it out and while you're working it out you often get more and different
and new ideas because the idea that you may have originally started with isn't
working out quite the way you thought it might so your biggest friend as a
novelist is your waste paper basket. You throw the things that aren't working
unless you think there's something you might use later in which case you save
it and that could be a long process it can take you know a year two years to
work out an idea that you might have had in five minutes so we don't know where
ideas come from they - can come from anywhere really
but it's the working out of it that makes it involved and when you're
working you know you're looking at you're looking at structure and you're
looking at pacing.
So here is a tip if you're writing a murder mystery put one
dead body quite close to the front.
Worth remembering otherwise people are gonna
be going like : "where's the murder??"
Many of your books contain emotionally draining scenes. How
do you deal with this as a writer?
Emotionally draining scenes? Let me tell
you a story. When my kids were about 5 they said we're putting on a play and
they sold tickets to the play - $0.25
so we bought a ticket to the
plyn we went to the play there were two of them and the play started they were
having breakfast it's the breakfast motif and they were saying things like
"Could I have some more orange juice?" "Yes here it is."
"I would like some milk please."
Here's the milk . "Could I please have some cereal?" There's the cereal.
This went on for a while and I said, "is anything else going to happen?"
And they said no, and I said "well in that case we're leaving!
"And when you think of something else that's going to happen we'll come back to see the rest of it."
a story isn't just this and that and this and that and this and that
something has to happen and the something that has to happen should be a
surprise to the person reading the book and often to you the person writing the
book and of course some of those things are going to be emotionally draining
scenes because if it was just one happy event after another people are going to
be going "is anything else going to happen?" so I think we we have emotionally
draining things in books because it allows us in a way to wonder how we the
reader would deal with that. So how is the character in the book dealing with it? Do
you think they're dealing with it well, or do you think they're not dealing with
it well? And if it were you how might you deal with it so you're when you're
reading the book they're right there with the character. So..."Don't open that
door!" ...they open the door
"Don't go in!" ...they go in. so you are wandering all the time
what would I do if I were that person you know if I were Harry Potter how
would I deal with the dragon that is about to be executed?
Like that.
So, while I'm unsure of what the equivalent is in Canada many of my
friends in sixth form that are taking English literature are currently
studying The Handmaid's Tale in their A-level studies. How do you feel that
some of the current maybe future writers of tomorrow are studying your work?
Well, they've been doing it for a while and I think we've seen some books and things
coming along that you might call relatives of The Handmaid's Tale because
remember it was published first in 1985 which is quite a long time ago and at
the time quite a few people said "this will never happen! This will
never happen in the United States."
Jump cut to 32 years later. What can I tell you?
It's happening. Not quite the same way and not with the outfits but there's
been a rollback of women's rights and a push back and we're seeing that
happening before our very eyes which is why people apart from the fact that it's
a very good TV series that's why people got so involved in it. It didn't seem
like a fantasy anymore. So how do I feel about it?
if there are no young writers there will be no future readers so every group of
young writers that's coming along is continuing the tradition of reading and
writing so they're part of a very long history but if all of a sudden there
weren't any young writers that tradition would would stop. So that's why it's a
good idea to encourage young writers if you were keen on the idea of books and
and reading. More young readers and writers need to come along or else it
will all come to an end. And wouldn't that be sad?
lots of your novels are based in a dystopian society. We as humans take
comfort in believing that the future will be brighter than the present or the past.
Post-Trump do you believe this?
Having seen the pushback I actually am
quite hopeful because although there is this desire to roll time back you also
see a lot of people saying "no, that is not going to happen."
but it is a struggle you know right now there are two opposing forces
and of course you're optimistic because the mere act of writing is an act of optimism.
Tthink of all the ways in which it is hopeful: First of all you have set
out to write a book; you believe you're going to finish it.
That's pretty hopeful. Then you believe that once you finish it it's going to be
good - that's hopeful too. Then you believe someone will want to publish it: even
more hopefulness. And then you believe if it's published somebody will want to
read it which is very hopeful indeed so just writing something down presumes a
future reader. You don't write things down if you think nobody will ever read
them. It might be you at a future time, it might be you reading your own diary that
you wrote five years ago but just recording it means you believe that in
the future somebody will be reading it and that's a pretty hopeful thing.
I'd like to ask what would be your top five tips for young aspiring writers.
How young?
So, 11 to 18 specifically.
I noticed that each of you have a notebook.
So tip number one: get a notebook! Write down things that come
into your head that you think you might find useful later. So that's number one.
Number two: read a lot and read critically. That is, decide 'I like this,
don't like that, why do I like this, what qualities do I like about it?' and notice
how the writer is putting the story together and how they are handling the
language of the story. So writers have all been begun by being readers and you
will be selecting out from all the writers that you come across your
patch as it were; your your special
writers that you really like and you will be learning from them because we
have all learned from other writers. Number three: pay attention to your
posture because writing is very hard... keyboarding is hard on the neck
and the back and you don't notice it so much when you're young but you
it will catch up to you and it's hard to write when you're in agonizing pain so
the back exercises, getting enough exercise, walking around.
If you come to a block
and you don't know where to take your story next there's two good things to do
one of them is go for a walk and the other one is go to sleep because during
the walk when you're thinking about something else the answer may very well
come to you and if you give your unconscious mind... you know, "I have a
problem"... go to sleep you wake up you may often find the
answer. But the other, the fifth one, is don't be afraid to throw things out and
by the way when you're writing nobody's seeing it except you so so don't worry
about what other people might think of it while you're writing it if you then
decide that this isn't where you want to go, that this isn't what you
want to put out there, there's the waste paper basket. You have complete freedom
while you are writing.
I love The Handmaid's Tale and I also watched the
Hulu series and I'm extremely eager to find out what's happening in season two
what was it like having to continue the story after finishing the book?
Well, luckily it's not me doing it. There's a writing room which has about ten people in
it and the head of it is a person called Bruce
And then there's then there's a number of other people most of whom are female.
Bruce said that he thought that he hired all these female writers and
thought they would agree with one another but that wasn't the case since
women are people. So they thrash it out they have a general story arc and
then they break it down into scenes and they each go off and they write a scene
and then they bring it back and they all discuss it. So as a group
activity I get to read the script but I don't have any control so I have no veto.
No writer ever of a novel ever does when it's a matter of a film or
television because it's classic that writers don't like the product and
imagine if they had a veto - they could say "well I don't know, I don't approve of
this and we're cancelling this multi-million dollar project." So that's
why they never do but I'm pretty close to Bruce Miller and we talked on the
phone quite a bit so I have input but I don't have final say and when you're
making a series like that there is no one person...there's no one person who has
total control because when you think of all the people involved in it for
instance Elisabeth Moss is a producer on it, so she gets a say. And the
producers get a say, the directors, the people doing the editing.
You sit in the editing room and they may have shot a scene maybe five times
and you have to look at each of those five times and decide which one you like
best and then they choose that one and then there's there's somebody who
works with color. They're enhancing the color. So, yeah, it is a multi
person enterprise and any one of those links might be weak and I think
we've been very lucky we've had an excellent team
and I'll mention here the designer, whose name is Anne Crabtree. So the
costumes that you see, the look of things, that's that's her work and very
painstaking it was for instance she looked at 50 different shades of red
before choosing that particular red. Again she looked at all of the shades of
blue and ended up with that sort of blue-greeny thing. They thought of
every detail for instance in the commander's house you'll see some
paintings. Each one of those paintings is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
So if you know that, you know that these people have stolen the paintings and put
them up in their own house. And the signatures of the artists on the
paintings are the only things you could read in that house that isn't in the
commander's study so of course I asked the obvious question. I said, "are they the
real paintings?" And they said "no no we got this nice man in China to paint them
for us." They did a very good job so they thought of every every detail like what
sort of silverware what sort of...the amazing scene in series one where
she's given this little pastel meringue cookie so they would have thought of
"okay, what are they having for tea? Would you like a cookie?"
It was a particularly poisonous looking thing so every every detail they've been very mindful of. They
didn't want there to be any discrepancies so something that wouldn't
be there and in season two they've been very
faithful to the main idea which is nothing goes in and doesn't have a
precedent in real life, somewhere, sometime, so they have a research team
justify those to me. They will say, "okay so here's where it
happened." All of those things they're careful about.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, and very good luck with your writing and everything that you're doing