WEBVTT NOTE Episode 124: Sixty Years at the Desk: Margaret Atwood on Nesting a Story 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 You've been publishing for six decades. What has stayed the same about how you work? 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:26.000 The longhand. I still start with a notebook, in the morning, badly. Bad early pages don't frighten me anymore — they're the raw material, not the verdict. What has changed is that I no longer wait for a good mood. If you wait for the muse, you'll be waiting behind a great many people. 3 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:33.000 The Blind Assassin nests one story inside another. How do you keep that from collapsing? 4 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:54.000 You keep asking who is telling this, and why now, and who they're afraid of. A frame story is only a trick if the teller has no motive. Once the teller wants something from the listener — forgiveness, usually, or an alibi — the nesting holds. Readers are far better at tracking layers than editors fear. 5 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:59.000 Your work is often read as prophecy. Do you enjoy that? 6 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:15.000 Not particularly. I put nothing in my speculative books that human beings haven't already done somewhere, so it isn't prophecy, it's filing. The unsettling part is not that I imagined it. It's that I only had to look it up. 7 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:20.000 What's the purpose of writing, at this point in your life? 8 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:39.000 Curiosity, mostly, and the fact that I'm unfit for other employment. But underneath that — a book is a message in a bottle from someone who may be dead by the time you open it. Writing is how the living keep talking to strangers. It seems worth doing. 9 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:43.000 One rule for a writer starting out? 10 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:54.000 Finish things, and keep the receipts. Read your contracts as carefully as you read your reviews — more carefully, actually.