The famous Ishiguro number is a duration rather than a word count. Four weeks, thirteen and a half hours a day, six days a week, and at the end of it a Booker Prize winner in rough form.
What He Actually Documented
Ishiguro described the episode himself in a 2014 Guardian piece. He was 32, living in Sydenham in south London, and had spent too long making no progress. He and his wife Lorna made a plan and gave it a name.
During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I'd get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian, 2014
He saw no mail and went nowhere near the telephone, and nobody came to the house. Lorna took over the cooking and the housework for the month. At the end of the four weeks, in his words, he had more or less the entire novel down, though a good deal more time would be needed to write it up properly.
The Arithmetic Nobody Gives You
Ishiguro has never attached a words-per-day or pages-per-day figure to the Crash, so any number you see is derived rather than reported. Here is the derivation, with its caveats attached.
Four weeks of six-day weeks is 24 working days. The Remains of the Day ran 258 pages in hardback. If the Crash produced the bulk of it, that lands near ten manuscript pages a day, somewhere in the region of 2,000 to 2,500 words. He had ten and a half hours of actual desk time to get there, which works out at roughly four words a minute.
Four words a minute is not fast. It is the rate of a writer thinking hard inside a first-person voice that has to hold an entire unreliable narration together without ever tipping its hand. The Crash bought him concentration rather than speed, and the distinction is the whole point of the method.
The Rest of the Time He Barely Drafts
The Crash only makes sense against Ishiguro's normal pace, which is slow by any measure. Nine novels between 1982 and the ninth, due in 2027. That is one novel every five years across a 45-year career, and the pattern is lumpy: three in the 1980s, one in the whole of the 2010s.
His ordinary working day, as he described it to the Paris Review in 2008, runs from about ten in the morning until six, with no email or telephone before four. Most of that time goes on planning and thinking rather than producing prose. The drafting compresses into bursts because the thinking has already been done, which is why a month of it can carry a novel.
For the full Crash method, the planning that makes it possible, and what it costs him, see the full Kazuo Ishiguro writing routine page.
Reading how Kazuo Ishiguro worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.
Get the Book on Amazon →365 mornings, in paperback and Kindle.
What You Can Steal
- Clear the diary before you clear the page. The Crash worked because nothing else was permitted in for four weeks. Half-clearing it produces a half-result.
- Name the period. Calling it the Crash made it a discrete thing with a start and an end, which is far easier to survive than an open-ended push.
- Somebody has to cover the rest of your life. Lorna took the cooking and the housework. That is part of the method, and it should be negotiated rather than assumed.
- Plan first, then sprint. His bursts can be short because the structural work is finished before the drafting starts.