Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MARGARET ATWOOD: Creativity is one of the essential things

about being human.

You don't have to apologize for it.

It's something human beings do.

Sometimes people say, express yourself.

Sometimes people say, express yourself.

I don't really think that that's necessarily the key thing.

Expressing yourself can be shouting in a field.

So rather than expressing yourself,

why don't you think in terms of evoking, conjuring up

for the reader some curiosity, some suspense, some interest

rather than this is my ego?

rather than this is my ego?

[CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING]

If you're a writer, you have a very limited repertoire

of tools.

Your repertoire is a blank page and some words

that you put on it.

So you're not making a film.

You don't have sound effects.

You don't have actors.

You don't have actors.

You only have those words that the reader is reading.

And that's what you use to build everything in your story

as words.

Words on a page are inert.

They're like black musical notes on a score.

They're inert until the music is played,

or in the case of a book, the reader is reading.

And when the reader is reading, the words

transform back into representations, sounds,

transform back into representations, sounds,

smells, colors, people.

Reading is the most participative of the arts.

There's more brain activity when you're

reading that kind of intense text

than there is, for instance, when you're

watching television, when you're watching film,

because the brain has to supply everything with the words used

because the brain has to supply everything with the words used

just as cues, clues.

So what you're providing the reader with

is a score, a score that the reader will then interpret.

And all you can do as a writer is make

your book as good as it can be.

You throw it out into the world, hope for the best.

And that's all you can do.

You can not dictate to the reader

how they should read your book or receive your book.

how they should read your book or receive your book.

Because the meaning of a book, once it's is out in the world,

is not decided by the writer anymore.

Even if the writer has thought the writer was putting

x meaning into the book, the reader

may have quite a different idea, and usually does over time.

So Thomas Hardy thought that "Tess of the D'urbervilles"

was about the irony of fate, and we

think it's a pretty kinky story about what happened to women

in the Victorian period.

in the Victorian period.

I mean, that's what I think.

What do you think?

When I wrote "The Handmaid's Tale,"

I didn't give the central character a name.

The readers decided that her name was June.

There's nothing in the book that contradicts that.

In fact, it all fits.

But it wasn't something I thought up.

The readers figured it out.

It has to be June once you come to think of it,

because each of the names that are mentioned in chapter 1,

because each of the names that are mentioned in chapter 1,

they all occur again in the book except for June.

I thought that was pretty smart of them.

I'm Margaret Atwood, and this is my MasterClass.