Kazuo Ishiguro's Daily Routine

Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989. His writing routine for that book was a 4-week sprint, not a way of life. He and his wife Lorna called it the Crash, and he wrote most of the first draft in it in the summer of 1987.

It followed a year lost to distractions, and in his own account for The Guardian, he wrote from 9:00 AM to 10:30 PM, Monday to Saturday, with 1 hour off for lunch and 2 for dinner. He didn't open mail or go near the phone, no one came to the house, and Lorna took on his share of the cooking and housework. Sundays were off, and Mason Currey points out that the research was already done before the Crash began.

It's for anyone with a draft, a thesis or a launch where the thinking is done and the words aren't, and who can clear a month with help from the people around them. It works as a one-off push, not as a permanent schedule.

You get 10.5 hours of writing a day, Sundays off and a head that lives inside the work. Ask for the clearing first: tell the people around you that the month is spoken for, and hand over what you can. The wake time, bedtime, meal times and the shape of Sunday are our estimates.