I submitted this 2014 essay from Ishiguro, but no point in having 2 separate threads for the same Nobel Prize news/discussion.<p>Thought some folks here would be interested in how a famous novelist does "crunch" weeks". In this 2014 op-ed for the Guardian, he describes how it took 4 weeks for him to create his most famous novel, "The Remains of the Day":<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro-the-remains-of-the-day-guardian-book-club" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro...</a><p>tl;dr<p>- Had the first chapter written the previous summer, but made no progress on it for about a year.<p>- Even though he couldn't write that year, he did a "substantial amount of 'research'" about British life/politics/servitude of that time period. This is what led to his 4-week "Crash" session being productive:<p>> <i>he decision when to start the actual writing of a novel – to begin composing the story itself – always seems to me a crucial one. How much should one know before starting on the prose? It’s damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough.</i><p>During the 4-week "crash", he had a dedicated study in a house he recently moved in; his previous 2 novels were written at his dining table.<p>His process during the 4-weeks was not at all structured (in the traditional sense):<p>> <i>Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.</i><p>Note that he didn't <i>finish</i> the novel in 4 weeks. But he did reach the critical mass to make it a complete idea and story:<p>> <i>I kept it up for the four weeks, and 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.</i>