mucking around with this wound

For some time, like a lot of people, I've been wondering why people like writers do what they do, because it is a rather odd thing to do, to keep locking yourself up in a room and writing; it's a bit anti-social and a bit weird. Indeed, why do painters and musicians get so obsessed? And all these people, why do they do what they do? I know people who write novel after novel that will never get published. People who are otherwise quite busy somehow still find a couple hours at the end of the day to write a little bit, even though they have to do a job and look after their children. I suppose I have to admit that I must be one of those people too, because that's what I do. 

After a while you start to wonder, what is this all about? I came to a kind of conclusion that what all these people had in common was that they were slightly unbalanced. I don't mean in any crazy way. A lot of them are very able people and they get through life in a very good way. But at some fundamental level, their lives have been build on something that got broken way back - not necessarily a trauma, but something, some equilibrium got lost - in other words, some kind of wound that will never heal was received early on. And this business of locking yourself up in a room and trying to write novels for week after week has to do with mucking about with this wound, it seemed to be. You know at some level you can never heal these things, you can never fix these things, but a lot of this activity is nevertheless about caressing this wound. What you're trying to create is an imaginary world that you have some control over, that you can reorder, and maybe that's some way of trying to go back, if only in your imagination, to try to fiddle around with some area of experience that you know is broken. The most you can hope for - because you know that you can't go back and fix these things - is some kind of consolation, some way to caress the wound.

- Kazuo Ishiguro, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel. As published in More Writers & Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio's Eleanor Wachtel.