>> charlie: welcome to the program and merry christmas. it is the end of the year and we are looking back at some of the best conversations from 2014. tonight, a look back at some of theñi authorsçó books that we enjoyed. >> i called them tales because i didn't want people to think we were in the land of total social realism. >> charlie: yes. although we kind of are in a way because i don't cheat. i don't think there are any real zombies or anything in the stories, but there are certainly people who are interested in cut-off hands that crawl around by themselves and otherñiñi+ the form. >> virginia wolf decided she wanted to write a novel without a plot to forgo that device, that convention, and she did a couple of times. the oneçó i liked best isñr

mrs. daleoway.ñrç @&c @&cz'3k feeling that formula fiction finally is unsatisfactory, and the way this book has turned out, i think i do break a few rules, and that pleases me. >> what i was really trying to do is in that setting where people are a little more open than usual, trying to make the case that kindness is not this kind of amorphous, gauzy, optional thing that we add on but is actually anñilk essential humanxdzv:lañ characteristic. in effect,çó it should be part n an intellectual life. it's a valid intellectual concept that anybody who's a writer or artist or citizen should take time to think about. >> i tell you what it's like, charlie. it's like watching someone walking towards you out of a mist. you have the faintest outlines, and you serve those outlines with a few sentences. those few sentences bring that person a little closer. you see the outline of their

shoulders, their face and something of their personality begins to emerge. so you write them into existence. one sentence generates another, one thought generates another. and suddenly, when you're lucky, if you're lucky, she has a life of her own, she tells you what to say, as it were. >> charlie: conversations with authors when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> rose: additional funding provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose.

>> charlie: margaret atwood is here. she has written more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. her new book turns to short fiction for the first time in nearly a decade. it is called stone mattress, nine tales. i am pleased to have her back at this table. welcome. >> hello. >> charlie: why did you return to short stories? >> i think its just kind of happened, but the first one, i really was on a boat in the arctic and i really did startñi< writing a story about how you had murdered somebody on a boat in the arctic and get away with it, and there really were five people called bob on board. >> charlie: five people called bob? >> yeah, you want a number of bobs on board so you can change them around. >> charlie: you call them tales, though, not short stories.>> yeah, i called them s because i didn't want pem to think we were in the land of total social realism, although we kind of are in a way because i don't cheat, i don't think there are any real zombies or

anything in the stories, but there are certainly people who are interested in cut off hands that crawl around by themselves and other means of the form. >> charlie: you would think, dear reader and writer,ñiq short stories would be easier, but it is not necessarily so. >> it is not necessarily so. but, on the other hand, some of the problems are similar in that, if you can't get the person reading past the first page, you're doomed, whether it's a novel or short story or a book of history, wouldn't you say? >> charlie: if you don't get them past the first page, you're in trouble. >> i think probably you should start with stoneñr mattress. >> charlie: iñiçniñrñi know. but that's true inñi everything. attention ançó send them roc)d forward. >> sometimes it's theñki sometimes it's the first paragraph or the second paragraph. but, for instance,gñ withçó?; , we start withñiq

who is telling us a tale of being on añi train ando#ó everyl this isçóv we know something he doesn't know andñi what weñ tktle of the bookçóñi isxd "drac coming along that he doesn't know about. >> charlie: so anger, death, feminism, in the farm world you explore, and all these stories. >> richard ii iii,çó cut-ofpi stories, where if you lose your vision or just feeling quite isolated, you see little people. >> charlie: this is an actual disease. >> an actual syndrome strangely costumed often in green and usually in multiple. so dancing in groups or marching in groups. but they don't interact with you. you can talk to them, but they

don't talk back, an it's called charles benet syndrome because he's the first person who identified it. >> charlie: how did you find out about this? >> i found out about it through the author who wrote the man who mistook his wife for a hat. he has a book about hallucinations of various kinds, which is fascinating, and i wish i could remember the title but it's probably something like "hallucinations." >> charlie: but revenge is the theme, isn't it? >> unfortunately it is. fortunately, it is, because we like reading about it, even though we might never do those things ourselves. i was an early reader of edgar allan poe and a couple of his famous stores are about revenge, so i got that idea quite early. and a freend of men, alberto mangel, a writer and collector of stories, was doing a collection called dark waters and black arrows, and said

canadians haven't written any revenge stories. so i thought, we'll have to change that. (laughter) so i wrote a revenge story backd interesting toñrxd write. >> charlie: due like betterçó characters? >4á=]/> writexd about? >> charlie: uh-huh. equally well, but i'm veryñrí, fond of gavinçóq @4- >> charlie: yes. inçnsr a very articulate, veí4@ó his students, one affep the other, and thex to now isçóñri quite a lotñixdir than he is,r interestingúsituation,ñi bu)l personñi in the firstñi is a fantasy writer. i'm fond of her asñr

(technical difficulty) then they turn on the radio and they hear this has become a fairly widespread phenomenon and in some cases the mob has burned down the retirement homes, and they are younger people who are very annoyed that this generation has sucked up all the money and is spending it on

themselves and not creating any jobs for them. so they have a movement going of burning down the nursing homes, and one of my -- excuse me -- retirement homes. they do have a wing attached called advanced living. you don't want to end up in that one. so one of my favorite parts, which you would like, is when they have a panel discussion about it on radio, and they have this wonderful panel discussion in which they talk about why it's happening and the social phenomenon and this and that and the other thing and the economic factors, but nobody does anything about it. sound familiar? >> charlie: yes. what's the future library project? >> that's so interesting. to me, i got a letter about it. and it is connected with the library in oslo, norway, and they teamed up with a conceptual artist called katy patterson and she put it together for them.

so the future library is a forest is growing in norway, and it will grow for 100 years, and each one of those 100 years, a different author will be asked to submit a manuscript to the future library, and you will put it in a box, you will seal the box. it can contain no images. there shall be only one copy and you can't tell anybody that's in it. all that will be known will be the title and the name. when the 100 years is up just like sleeping beauty, they will open all the boxes and then they will cut down enough trees from the forest to make the pape tore print the 100 books. so it's like a time capsule. >> charlie: yes. and my book will therefore be the oldest one, 100 years old, and the newest one only one year old. during that 100 years, all the people today who are alive unless something radical happens, will no longer be so.

the committee will have to renew it'sself a couple of times and the youngest authors haven't been born yet and their parents haven't been and they have no idea who they will be. >> charlie: isn't darren oske doing some of you work to make it into a television production? >> he is. >> charlie: you're selling him the rights? >> about to, yeah. he's doing the madd adam trilogy, the oryx and crake and the madd adam. they've cheese cheesen a write- they've chosen a writer and soon we'll see the script. >> charlie: do you have any role in offering an opinion? >> we'll find out, it's all a process. >> charlie: whenever i have

you, it reminds me of how delightful you are. but you have this reputation of being tough. >> i know. >> charlie: when you tell people that margaret atwood is coming, they say, watch out! she doesn't suffer fools! you've got to be good. >> well, you're not a fool. >> charlie: they do say that. i mean, what is it that makes you -- >> why do i have that reputation? >> charlie: that's a better question. >> once upon a time, a long, long time ago, before you were born, charlie, it was that you would have a journalist or something and they would say women can't write, or why should i read your book, or i haven't read your bach and i'm not going to, tell me in 25 words what it's about. like that. >> charlie: yes. so, in those cases, i would push back a bit. >> charlie: how? well, i would be mean. >> charlie: that's right! that's your reputation. but didn't you worry about not

being invited back? >> no. >> charlie: you didn't care whether you promoted your book or not? >> yeah, i did. >> charlie: you had the luxury to choose wherever you wanted to go. >> that's not always true. that's true now but, once upon a time, you did whatever. i did give my first book signing in the men's underwear department of the hudson bay company in edmondton, alberta. >> charlie: my feeling is when you write a book, you spent five years of your life, you want to sell the hell out of it, don't you? >> i think you and the publisher are united in the view. >> charlie: it's not about the money, you just spent so much time on this. >> well, you want it to be read, of course, which is why people say, well, in the future library, no one will read this book for a hundred years, why would you do that? books are time capsules anyway,

this is just a much longer wan. there have been many phases of book promotions. there is one called mofortfication of publishers and writers and their shame, talking about what happened to them while presented their work in public. it makes you feel better because some of the things are so awful they'll never happen to you, you hope. >> charlie: what do you think of amazon? >> what a loaded question. i think we're into very complicated conversation here because there is no doubt that publishers quite depend on amazon in many ways to be an efficient distributor of books, so that is the good side. the bad side is that monopolies are bad. i think competition is productive within limits, but i think once it gets to the stage of the monopoly, that does away

with the competition and people get lazy and exploitive. >> charlie: there are so many interesting things you said about writing including this, the older you get, the more you know about the plot before you begin to write because you've lived longer, you've seen more, you know more, and, so, therefore, it's readily available for you to pour into the vessel of the soon to be book. >> yeah, possibly not the plot. probably a bit more the characters. >> charlie: you've seen people you want to model your characters after? >> i have more data at my disposal. >> charlie: very good way to express it. yes, you have data. >> by my age, you've known more people and read more books. >> charlie: suppose the nobel commission because you up -- is it a panel, a commission, a board, whoever it is -- >> a secret person.

>> charlie: oh, it's one person? >> i don't know who it is. (laughter) i have no idea. >> charlie: but there's one person? >> no, i made that up. >> charlie: maybe it is. could be. >> could be. >> charlie: i don't know. the phone rings and somebody says something. >> charlie: says to you, margaret, can you hear me? i'm calling from oslo, or stockholm, or wherever it is. >> the phone rang in 197 and there's a little voice on the end, i'm a film producer and my name is oscar -- i said, who is this really? so i would probably say, who is this really? >> charlie: but is there somebody you think should get the noble prize in literature next year? >> there are a bunch of them, there are a lot of excellent writers around the world. >> charlie: who haven't been recognized with the highest accolade? >> well, there's only one a year, of course. there are more good writers than

nobel prizes. so -- >> charlie: you know you're observe the list. everybody thinks you're on their list. >> it's rumored but no one's ever actually seen the list. it's a phantom list. >> charlie: it's like the great mentioner. >> let me put it to you this way, charlie -- >> charlie: please. -- the devil comes to you and says, charlie, you can either keep on doing your show or you can win this big prize -- >> charlie: i'd keep on doing my show. >> exactly. thank you. >> charlie: i've won enough prizes and you've won enough prizes. the book is called" stone mattress ." you must love it because you do it so well. >> i do. >> charlie: thank you. thank you. >> charlie: e.l. doctorow is here. his newest novel called andrew

brain. this is what the book of the new york times says. i've always responded. he has no choice, though, responding to the history of one's times is the sworn duty of a character in a novel by e.l. doctorow, who has in his half-century of writing fiction, placed a remarkable number of people, both real and imagined, in their history, just to watch them respond. >> that's interesting. >> charlie: do you agree with that? >> not entirely. >> charlie: what do you disagree with? >> i don't want to be ungracious. the label of historical novelist is not only welcome. >> charlie: what's wrong wit other than its accuracy? >> all novels are set in the past, if you think about it. >> charlie: yes. even h.g. wells science

fiction is very victorian. some novels have a wider focus and include public figures and major historical events. some have a narrower focus about family, about personal relationships and so on, but they're all about the past. there's no entological difference in the two. my novels are set in different parts to have the countries -- the dakotas, georgia, north carolina, the adirondacks, new york city -- so you might as well call me a geographical novelist as well as historical novelist. i like the word "novelist" without modifications. >> charlie: responding to the history of one's times is sworn duty of a character by e.l. doctorow. i'm looking for the word "historical novelist" but i don't see it. >> maybe i overanticipated. >> charlie: maybe later.

(laughter) so what you do say in the book, that the book judges the reader somehow. >> yeah, i think this is not formulated fiction. after you do this kind of work for a while -- >> charlie: "this kind of work" is writing novels? >> well, yeah. what you want to do is find new ways to do it. and that's equivalent to -- i mean, writers have been doing that for a long time. jane joyce is a beautiful writer, a realistic sense of fiction, and then he went off and did ulysses and ended up with finnigan's wake. >> charlie: did all right, didn't he? >> virginia wolf decided she wanted to write a novel without a plot, to forgo that device, that convention, and she did a couple of times. the one i like best is

mrs. daleoway. so writers have always had this feeling that formulating fiction finally is unsatisfactory. and the way this book has turned out, i think i do break a few rules, and that pleases me. >> charlie: who is andrew? andrew came to me as a figure standing in the snow and holding an infant, swaddled infant in his arms in front of a door with the snow coming down on his yankee ball cap, and that's the image that came to me, and it was some urgency to it as he was waiting for this door to open. i found myself writing that, and then i had to figure out what was going on, and that's how the book developed. >> charlie: he is a neuroscientist? >> he's a cognitive scientist.

in his own opinion, no great distinction. he also suffers from the fact that all his life he's been what i call an inadvertent agent of disaster, an earlier infant he, it turns out that he administered medicine to and it was the wrong medicine and the infant died. he was responsible for a car crash that killed a driver and so on and so forth. so all his life, he's had this trail of awful things that have happened. so he imagines that he is now unable to feel anything, which, of course, is a self-delusion, because he's very feeling. >> charlie: but you make no distinction between real and imagined. >> that's correct. that's oneo the rules i've

happily broken. you don't know when he's imagining what he's seeing or whether he's reporting on what actually happened. there's the convention of the unreliable narrator, of course, but this really takes it to extremes. so in that way, the book does test the reader, does judge the reader. i just think that fiction can be too comfortable. you know, it is the most conservative of the arts. i think what's happened historically in music, like in 1900, stra stravinski's rights f spring, in art, the picassos and abstract expressionism and conceptual art, there were always these enormous changes. >> charlie: revolutionary and

evolutionary. >> right, fiction hasn't moved that much. of course, we've gone through a period of post-modern writing, but that's rather timid in terms of finding a new way to -- >> charlie: but aren't you partly responsible for that? >> well, not -- i came along a little later than the first post-moderns. >> charlie: but you are a novelist and, as i said, one of our great living novelists. >> i appreciate that, yes. >> charlie: so, therefore, aren't you responsible for the quality of novels in our life? >> certainly for the ones i've written. >> charlie: but have you been experimental enough, revolutionary enough? have you tried to bring some molds? >> it's a matter of personal dissatisfaction. you always want to top what you've done in the past, and that's the prime motivation. once something's done you can't do anything about it anymore,

you've got to move forward. >> charlie: were you in search to have a conversation about neuroscience and philosophers of the mind and show their conflict? >> well, i come at this from the point of view of philosophy. it's a fascinating subject, an area of philosophical concern. it's the subject is mysterious. what has happened historically is the materialist' conception of thinking has taken over from the old cartesian dua dualism. so modern science, there is no soul, the soul is just fiction, there is just a brain. but the problem that creates is to figure out how the brain creates feeling, thought, wishing, longing, falling in love and all of the subjective

states of mind that we think of as consciousness, how does that happen? nobody knows. and there's all sorts of immense amount of activity going on to map brains and figure out these -- >> charlie: exactly. there's a huge story about it in the "new york times." >> yeah, so i have a separate thought about that. it's wonderful work, and if it can do things about figure out what to do about parkinson's or alzheimer's, that's terrific -- >> charlie: that's primary what the motivation is. >> i understand, and it's noble and necessary, but i've just projected in this book to the point where an do you suggests, supposing we do figure out how the brain works, if that happens, then we can build a computer that has consciousness. now, this sounds like movie stuff, but there are actually

some serious people in this field who believe that, theoretically, that's possible. well, if that ever happened, and it won't for a long, long time, if that ever happened, all the stories we have been living by are finished. the bible, all those bronze-age, mythological senses we have of ourselves as human beings are gone, finished. that could be as disastrous as an astroid hitting the planet. >> charlie: you know, i've dealt with this scientifically at this table with brain scientists and neuroscientists talking about consciousness and artificial intelligence and all of that. >> well, now i'm giving you andrew's read on this. >> charlie: oh, i know, that he worries about what happens. >> yeah, he's a bit of an his

hysteric. >> charlie: you also have politics in here, don't you? >> i don't see it that way. it's a very interesting book. things lock into other things. for instance, andrew's first wife, whom he's bringing the baby -- >> charlie: that's the opening scene, right? >> he's bringing -- >> charlie: the door of his ex-wife -- >> the door of his ex-wife, the baby he's made with his late lit deceased young second wife -- >> charlie: right. -- and his ex-wife's husband is an opera singer who has performed in boris gutenof. >> charlie: right. at one point he calls andrew a protender because in the history of boris, boris was terrified of someone come along pretending to be the rightful czar, and since he has killed children in order to take the crown, he has some sort of

posttraumatic stress disorder. so andrew is the prince, and andrew becomes the other character in the great russian opera, the holy fool, the holy fool. in that open remarks boris -- in that opera, boris begs the holy fool and the holy fool stands for russia russia and walks awa. when the holy fool gets to the white house -- >> charlie: is george bush that character there? >> oh, i'm sorry you said that. but the point is, if someone reads this book 25 or 50 years from now, it won't matter who the model for this character is, it will just be a pore trait of

moral inadequacy attached to power. >> charlie: see, that's remarkable you do that, i mean, thinking about something that is on the cutting edge of the frontier of the future. >> well, what happened is, for some reason, i assigned him this profession right at the beginning of the book, so i had to deliver on that. >> charlie: do you know -- go ahead. deliver on that and? >> he has grave misgivings in the sense of feeling that the brain is his enemy or his jailor, and he says at one point, how can i think about my brain if it's my brain doing the thinking? you see, there is the immediate self-alienation in a remark like that. and that's because he cannot accept the romance and the comfort of the idea of the soul. >> charlie: i mean, can you pinpoint a moment when this bach

began? -- when this book began? not the moment of it, the idea. even though you might not have recognized it at the time? >> you have these ideas. sometimes you carry them around for years and every once in a while ever one of them comes toe fore and it's the only thing you can do. what happened is i remembered a man i knew who had this kind of terrible history i give to andrew that he, in fact, inadvertently murdered his infant child by feeding it the wrong medicine, and he's a good, kind, decent man, but turned out he had this whole trail of disaster. so i wondered about that, how someone who's not evil and not violent and not nasty and not mean and generally negative, but disposed kindly toward the world and amiable in nature, and how

could he achieve this awful record in his life? and that's the thought that got me started on this book. >> charlie: how long ago was that? >> just before i wrote the first line. >> charlie: thank you. thank you for coming. pleasure to have you here. >> my pleasure. >> charlie: as always. thank you. >> charlie: george saunders is here. last year he gave the convocation address at syracuse university. his message was both simple and powerful. try to be kind to others. three months later the "new york times" placed a transcript of the speech online. within days it had been shared more than 1 million times. that speech is now the book. congratulations, by the way. some thoughts on kindness. i am pleased to have george saunders back at this table. welcome. >> thank you, charlie. >> charlie: so just -- what am i having in here that's different than reading the speech or hearing the speech? >> originally, i had written a

20-minute speech, thinking that's the length. about two days before i was to give it, i called and they said, no, it's eight. eight minutes. >> charlie: on behalf of the students, it's eight. >> exactly right. so as a short story writer, i'm pretty good at cutting it back, so i put in some of the cuts, basically very similar to the speech itself. because the speech was kind of surprising. i didn't expect it to go beyond that day. so when it did, i felt like maybe i did something right without knowing what it was. >> charlie: what do you think that was? >> i think it was partly the eight-minute length minute that you had to be urgent and there wasn't a lot of time for supporting data. so i think and also the fact i was giving it at syracuse where i teach, it kind of loosened me up and made me think i'm just going to speak from the heart, don't worry about being incredly literary or rhetorically sophisticated, but at the end of the day what do i really think. i had give an version of the speech in 2004 to our daughter's middle school graduation, and

more there was our daughter and friends. i thought simple, one urgent thing i really believe, whether i can support it or not, i'm going to say it. >> charlie: can you sum it up by saying it's about kindness? >> i think so. in that setting where people are a little more open than usual, it's a big day, trying to make the case that kindness is not this kind of amorphous, gauzy, optional thing that we add on, but it's an essential human characteristic. in fact, it should be part of an intellectual life, it's a valid intellectual concept, anybody who's a writer or artist or citizen should take time to think about it. so i was trying to, in the setting, validate for those kids. i often think that courage and efficiency are proper virtues and other once, sympathy, compassion, kindness, patience,

are nice but optional. i was trying to say, no, these are all part of being a powerful human being. >> charlie: some of the people i've interviewed who have acted courageously, which is different than human kindness, which is always like i had no choice. what else would i have done. >> right. >> charlie: i didn't do it. it was the thing the do. >> one of the scary things is maybe it depends on the day. >> charlie: yeah. so i was thinking, you know, in a sense of say you had somebody say i'm going to run a marathon today, i just have to, and they had never run before, it's not going to be successful, i'm thinking since this kindness comes and goes, it makes sense to start early. you know, start to try to train a little bit. >> charlie: you need to work on kindness. >> and in the speech i lightly alluded to that. obviously, that's what religion is, an authentic religion. so that was kind of one of the

messages was, you know, if you will take my advice, maybe turn your mind to those things. >> charlie: is there some danger in the digital culture we have that we don't think about interpersonal relationships the way we should? >> i think in terms of the idea of anonymity, seems to me, license to kill. people bailiff badly when their name isn't attached to it. i think that's a problem. i think at syracuse, i have never met kinder more mindful kids. i think more so than -- i don't know but when i was a kid in the '70s, i don't remember us being nearly as kind. >> charlie: how is it expressed. >> now? >> charlie: yeah, the kindness. >> we teach these really high-level writers in a workshop format and they're wonderful at being specific in their comments but not ever harsh. not sort of trying to put somebody down. it's a real kind of sympotical feeling. i remember our generation as

being a little bit cynical, so afraid of sentimentality that you'd rather say something harsh. these guys are comfortable with positive emotion and expressing it. >> charlie: was there a pivotal moment where absurdism was actually realism? >> oh, yeah, so many. i think, you know, i went through a period in my 20s or 30s after we had our kids where i just somehow, working these corporate jobs, you know, and just sort of not having a lot of success, you know. in that sense, it was really -- you could see that absurdism is really just realism seen from close to the bottom. you know, your efforts don't amount to anything and you sort of -- people mistake you for someone less capable than you are, you know. >> charlie: when people talk about your work as being post-modern or dark, does that ring true to you? you think of what you write as

dark? >> yeah, i mean, i think it's dark. but my feeling is art is a purposeful exaggeration. it's not really supposed to be a perfect mirror to life. it's kind of a puppet show we do to touch on certain essences of life. for example, if you've ever been in a situation where you were struggling to properly represent that, you might have to take things off into the dark side. for example, if you wanted to talk in a story about kindness, i don't imagine i could do it with a bunch of well-fed happy people at a beautiful restaurant. you have to put an earthquake in there to get it going. i think the darkness is a way of luring out the light. you know, an untested virtue isn't virtue. >> charlie: an untested virtue is not a virtue? >> yes. so in the stricter realm, if you want to talk about lovely, in an engineering test, you've got to

put it under heat and stress it and see what humans do in those conditions. >> charlie: you think arthouse a moral function? >> yes, but my sense is that the moral elements of a story will come out but you can't lube directly at them. you have to concentrate on the aesthetics and like wild animals they will come out quietly if you let them, but to be didactic is not a good thing. but it's about people and you want to see people in their full glory which is by definition moral. you look at a human being and say, at your essence, what are you made of? and that, by definition, is moral. >> charlie: many people when they look at writing and say you can get at truth through fikdz better than through reality, i mean, i've never been quite convinced of that, that real stories can't be as powerful as the mind --

>> you know, i'm not sure. i think maybe the mistake is what the intention is. i don't think really think fiction is necessarily trying to "show you life." i think it's trying to put you through a very beautiful, exaggerated experience that's not life at all. i imagine it's like a black box. you go in, something happens, not random, and you come out of it sort of alive. you're sort of shaken and you're almost like after a rollercoaster. after a roller coster you're not inclined to discuss it, you're just thrilled. for a creative artist, i think just thrill somebody and the rest follows. >> charlie: when will you give another commencement speech? >> i don't think i will, actually. that one went pretty well. >> charlie: pretty well, yeah. i had an experience about ten years ago, i was on a plane coming from chicago, and one of the engines went out and it was panic, black smoke coming out, people screaming, and that was an amazingly clarifying experience. >> charlie: what did it

clarify? >> first of all, i was incapable of thinking. all i could think of was the word "no" repetteddively. but when things calmed down and we landed, it was amazing. i didn't think, oh, i'll never write another book. it was absolute denial. then a space of about two or three days where it was clear hat the goal here is to open yourself up and don't be afraid and try to be in proper relation to other people, you know, to love other people. then, of course, as those things do, it kind of closed down again and i thought, sure, i'll get to that. but i think that's really it. you know, as you -- i'm noticing as i get older i become quietly more sure of that and a little frustrated that i didn't realize it earlier. these things, you can get better at it but it's hard going to work against your ego is a really big job and a work of a lifetime. >> charlie: thank you for coming. >> my pleasure.

>> charlie: always glad to have you. >> great to be here. >> charlie: ian mccueen is here. tells of a high court judge presiding over the case of a 17-year-old jehovah's witness who refuses a blood strains fusion called the children's act, i'm pleased of ian back at the table. thank you. >> thank you. >> charlie: sir alan ward is a friend of yours. >> yes. >> charlie: you have a conversation. he tells you a story. >> he gave me dinner once and there were several judges at the dinner table. they were all -- seemed to know each other's judgments well. >> charlie: was the purpose of the dinner to inform you about judicial proceedings? >> no, nobody thought i was a novelist -- an on-the-job novelist. but sooner than later i had his judgments in hand, a bound volume, and i started thinking this is a form of fiction. this is a subgenre that needs

examination, especially the family division. it's in the heart of fiction, the novel's concerns. i wasn't thinking of a novel. i put it in the back of my mind. three years later, he did tell me the story of a jehovah's witness case. he was halfway through the story and i knew i was going to write a novel. >> charlie: you'd found home. yeah. >> charlie: what did you say a few minutes ago? >> i think the family division has pitched its tent in fiction's terrain. it's love and the end of love, especially the end of love, the contested destinies of children, medical and legal ethics, all kinds of issues that don't involve crimes with guns and knives and rapes and so on, but ordinary dilemmas that people face certainly once or twice in their lifetime. >> charlie: obviously, depression -- >> all those things. >> charlie: you set out to write it. what did you do then?

>> i read more judgments. the great thing about internet, you can pull them down. i became impressed by the best of them. there were some terrible judgments, by the way. but the best of them, great prose, huge historical, philosophical sweep. love of irony. touch of wit. great compassion and fairness, but the other thing that struck me, these are all secular judgments. they do not refer their moral systems to any intervening supernatural entity yet they are constantly dealing with religious matters. so kind of a rift opens up here, and i thought this is what i would like to explore. >> charlie: where was religion in your life? >> oh, church of england, which is a kind of atheism in my background, it was polite and conventional. i used to carry the flag in the garrison church because my dad

was an army officer. i sometimes even read a lesson from corinthians once. but i lost all religion in my early teens. >> charlie: you said at once about writing a new novel it begins with a set of feelings that are so vague that you can't even write them down because you might ruin them. >> yes, sometimes wrapping words around a thought is a way to suffocate it. so -- >> charlie: you just let it swim. >> yeah. hesitation, i think, is a very important creative element. don't rush into things. have a good idea, but sit on it a while. because if it's a good idea two months later, you know it's a good idea. >> charlie: just let it -- mold like a cheese. >> charlie: how do you know you're ready? >> when you can no longer stop yourself writing paragraphs, perhaps at the middle, perhaps at the beginning, testing it,

tasting it seems to be important. >> charlie: this case has the stark confrontation between the law courts. >> yeah. it happens a lot, and the more i looked into this -- in fact, in the signing line of it, the 92nd y last night, three judges, all at one point or another, had forced against his wishes a young jehovah's witness or parents to have a blood transfusion. >> charlie: what if parents don't give a blood transfusion and the child dies? do they say it must be god's will? >> there's a certain degree of fatalism. i've had them say this to me, we don't see death as something as final as you do. it's a beginning. the courts, i think, generally take a very robust approach to this. if you wish to make yourself a

martyr to your religion, that's fine if you are an adult, but you cannot inflict such martyr martyrdom on a child. so generally the courts will give the hospital permission to transfuse beyond the parents' wishes. but the closer the child gets to 18, to his or her majority, thee more of what the law calls the anxious question it becomes, and the more the courts wants to hear from the young teenager himself. so it's not just a rubber stamping moment. the courts take this seriously because it's a matter of criminal assault to treat someone against their wishes in a hospital. >> charlie: so when you create fiona may, how did you create her? >> what was the first thing i did? >> charlie: she's a judge, 59 years old. >> she's a judge, 59 years old, childless. well, it's, again, this vague process of -- i tell you what

it's like, charlie. it's like watching someone walking towards you out of a mist. you have the faintest outlines and you serve those outlines with a few sentences. those few sentences by that person a little closer. you see the outline of their shoulders, their face and something of their personality begins to emerge. so you write them into existups. one sentence generates another, one thought generates another, and suddenly, when you're lucky, if you're lucky, she has a life of her own, she tells you what to say, as it were. >> charlie: does that happen? you get enough into the character so they tell you what they think and say and how they say it? >> what they do is exclude all the impossibility. no, she wouldn't say that, do that, this is how she is. and this lady was somewhat against the grain. rather self-contained, highly

rational, but emotionally rather inarticulate. rather against the grain of women who are known to be so much more articulate in their emotions that be men. i thought, no, let's not go the standard route. let's have her wonderful in her work, takes her private life for granted, it's always been fairly smooth and efficient, now it's facing a crisis. she's not so good at dealing with her own problems. she's much better on the treeless heap of other people's. >> charlie: i love the name fiona. >> do you? >> charlie: if i had three daughters, one would be fiona. another would be margaret. my mother was margaret. pick and choose after that. but i just love it because it's always, to me, meant, you know, somebody who had their own -- they knew their own mind and they were strong. >> now that you say this, i did know -- something just occurred to me, a justice of the peace

called fiona, who sat in a magistrate's course who was incredibly striking. >> charlie: they're all tall. she was tall, freckled and highly competent, a very warm person, too. >> charlie: and quick of wit and mind, for me, fiona is. >> i'm sure we could find some facts on fionas. >> charlie: she meets adam. so the case is before her, sitting in an emergency basis in the high court in london, in the courts of justice, and she does a slightly irregular thing, though it's not impossible. she suspends the court proceedings, crosses london in a cab and goes and sits at this boy's bedside. he's 17 years old, highly intelligent, determined to die. she sees right through him in many ways, but, at the same

time, he stirs her. this is a child perhaps that she might have had. >> charlie: and then yates down by the sally gardens. >> paradoxically, for a boy thinking about death, he's teaching himself the violin, he's won a few tunes and he wants to play her an irish lament. she recognizes it immediately "down by the sally gardens" and she sings it as he plays it and tells him it's by the poet yates. and yates is one of the elements of this new life that comes flooding into him with fiona, the life of poetry and music. so she's sort of a messenger from another world outside his sect. suddenly, she is the reason why he wants to go on living. >> charlie: exactly. what criticisms of your writing do you find the most off target? what is it that makes you recoil

in anger or frustration. >> there are some things i think all writers have this, i'm not special in this, but there are certain kinds of things people always say about you. >> charlie: no matter what you write. >> you never get away from it. so i always have unbelievably extraordinary thrilling or or exploitive events that change everyone's life. i think there was one on a beach, one in atonement -- doesn't make any difference, they're only thinking of the opening chapter of enduring love where there's a ballooning exit. but someone says this is what i do and i can never push people's attention away frhm this. the opening of the first 100 pages or 200 pages of atonement is one, slow note of expanding

circumstances. there's nothing particularly dramatic. so that does -- usually when it's in public on stage, in an earnest interview, this page has just come off the internet, not based on his or her experience, and i'm too weary of rejecting the question. sometimes i want the next question. >> charlie: just get on with it. >> yeah. >> charlie: after you write a book, are you anxious the get to the next one or just a period in which you need to -- >> i'm quite good at in the writing. i like hesitation. there's a lovely phrase, i often quote it, when pritchet was criticizing ford who was a partygoer and pritchet said he lacked what great writers had, the capacity for determined stupor. i thought, well, i disagree with the remark.

i thought ford was a remarkable writer. but i love the phrase "determined stupor," and that's what i like to enter into, a relaxed mode of receptivity, relaxing, reading, seeing friends and thinking. >> charlie: where do you write? >> i'm lucky. i have a big old converted stone barn out in the country attached to a main house by a set of double doors so i can't hear anything going on in there. all my books are around the walls. >> charlie: do you start in the morning? >> start in the morning. >> charlie: early? no. sort of 9-ish, 10-ish. >> charlie: after breakfast? i don't eat breakfast. one slice of toast, and i carry the second cup of coffee in there and think, this is delicious, i now have three or four hours -- >> charlie: of just me and my work. >> yeah. it's midnight. everyone is in bed and you plunge through the night into the dawn.

>> charlie: "the children act," you know he is the much-praised english novelist. thank you. >> thank you, charlie. >> charlie: thank you for joining us. see you next time. for more about this program and earlier episodes visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

this is "nightly business report" with tyler mathisen and susie gharib. funded in part by -- thestreet.com and action alerts plus where jim cramer an portfolio manager stephanie li share their investment strategies, stock pi market insights. you can learn more at thestreet.com/nbr. welcome to this special holiday of "nightly business report." this is tyler mathisen, susie gharib has the night off. major closing highs for the indexes and lows like plummeting crude oil prices. that wasn't all that happened this year in the world of business. the economy and the job market hit a number of milestones as well. the health care sector dominated deal making, recalls