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