Kazuo Ishiguro on how a radio discussion helped fill in the missing pieces of Never Let Me Go in The Guardian:
The setting for the first section of Never Let Me Go is a boarding school, but let me say I never went to boarding school myself. Of course, I drew on my own memories of what it felt like to be a child and an adolescent. And I suppose it’s inevitable the experience of being a parent would inform the way I think about children. But I can’t think of any one scene in that school section based, even partly, on an actual event that ever happened to me or anyone I know. When I write about children, I do much the same as when I write about elderly people, or any other character who’s different from me in culture or experience. I try my best to think and feel as they would, then see where that takes me. I’ve never found that children present any special demands for me as a novelist. In fact, I find it alarmingly easy to think like an adolescent.
More here.
