WEBVTT NOTE Episode 124: Sixty Years at the Desk: Margaret Atwood on Nesting a Story 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:17.000 Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis, and today I am joined by Margaret Atwood: poet, novelist, twice a Booker Prize winner, the author of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments and the novel we are discussing, The Blind Assassin. Margaret, welcome. 2 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:24.000 Thank you. I am told I am here to talk about writing rather than prophecy, which is a relief. 3 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:30.000 For anyone who has not read it, what is The Blind Assassin? 4 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:51.000 Three books wearing one coat. An old woman remembering her sister, a novel inside the novel, and a pulp science fiction story being told in a rented room. Put together they are about who gets to tell the story of a family, and what a woman had to trade in nineteen thirties Canada to survive it. 5 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:54.000 You still write longhand. 6 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:11.000 First drafts, yes, in whatever notebook is nearest. The hand is slower than the brain, which is exactly the point. And I stopped waiting for a good mood sometime in the nineteen seventies. Waiting for the mood is how people produce nothing for thirty years and call it perfectionism. 7 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:15.000 People call you a prophet. You resist that. 8 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:31.000 It is not prophecy, it is filing. Everything in my speculative books has already been done by somebody, somewhere, usually to women. I keep clippings. The invention is in the arrangement, not the horror. 9 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:34.000 What did you want this particular book to do? 10 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:54.000 I wanted the reader to be complicit. You spend six hundred pages believing one version, and then the floor moves. That is not a trick for its own sake. It is a way of showing how families and countries agree on a comfortable story and repeat it until it hardens. 11 00:01:54.000 --> 00:01:59.000 And the reach? Do you think about the size of the audience? 12 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:16.000 I think about the reader, singular, and then I am delighted when there are a great many of them. Television took Gilead to people who would never have picked up the book, and I have no snobbery about that whatsoever. If a young reader arrives through a screen, they still arrive. 13 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:18.000 One piece of advice. 14 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:24.000 Write the next sentence. That is the whole method. Everything else is furniture. 15 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:46.000 Margaret Atwood, thank you for this. Listeners, we do not stop at the interview: every guest gets a month of promotion from us, so The Blind Assassin is featured on our promoted books page and going out to the whole mailing list. Follow the show, leave us a rating, and pass it to a friend who is stuck on chapter two. I'm Nora Ellis, and this was Behind the Book.