Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, and More

Tim Ferriss interviews legendary author Margaret Atwood about how she writes without outlining, the different mental origins of poetry versus prose, and how a single character can travel across decades through poem, TV play, and novel. She discusses growing up in the northern Canadian woods with no electricity, her early career when writers in Canada couldn't expect to make a living, and the coffee-house subculture that birthed today's literary festivals. Atwood explains her resistance to labels and closed boxes, her interest in dystopian and utopian fiction, and the design of her Practical Utopias course about building green, scalable, affordable ways to live. She also covers the writing of Aunt Lydia in The Testaments, research from the 'junk shop' of her brain, and a wide-ranging riff on astrology, Hermes, and curiosity.

• Atwood writes poetry in cursive on the fly, while novels are '10% inspiration and 90% perspiration', disciplined work she sits down to do like a job.
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• The story of Grace Marks started as a poem, became a black-and-white TV play, then the novel Alias Grace, then a Netflix miniseries by Sarah Polley who first wrote to Atwood at age 17.
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• Atwood traces her start as a writer to crossing a high-school football field in a pink princess-line dress when a poem 'occurred' to her, described as a 'large invisible thumb' descending from the sky.
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• She wrote for 16 years before making a living at it; in 1950s Canada there were essentially no literary agents and publishers thought there was no market for Canadian books.
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• Practical Utopias is an 8-week online live learning experience on the Disco platform where participants 'world-build' green, scalable, affordable ways to live.
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• Aunt Lydia evolved rather than being planned as a double agent, she was a secondary character in The Handmaid's Tale who became a primary, more complex voice in The Testaments 15-16 years later in the story's timeline.
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• For Practical Utopias they chose Tezos NFTs because they consume about as much energy as a tweet, far less than typical NFTs, to illustrate the participants' utopias.
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• Atwood invented LongPen, a biometric remote signing technology, holding patents because she started so early; it has since pivoted into a business tool called Syngrafii.
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• Velcro was invented before anyone knew what it was for, Atwood cites it as an example of technologies finding unexpected purposes.
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• A Dutch neighbor, Yeta Sisman, taught Atwood astrology and palmistry during long cold Edmonton winters in 1969 while writing a thesis arguing Hieronymus Bosch's figures were astrological symbols.
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• Atwood's parents were so rural in Nova Scotia they didn't get electricity until the late 1950s, and she saw a 19th-century farm operating largely as it would have a century earlier.
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• Her father was a forest entomologist; the family went into the woods around April and returned in November because insects do little in winter, with transportation by boat since there were no roads.
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• Atwood wrote her first novel at age seven, about an ant, and notes its structural flaw: ants don't do anything until the final adult stage of their life cycle.
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• A 1952 guidance textbook listed only five careers for girls: nurse, secretary, schoolteacher, airline stewardess, and home economist; home economists made the most money.
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• Teaching the same course to 19-year-olds and returning adults, Atwood found that students who disliked Middlemarch (because the characters make wrong choices) were the ones the adults loved ('it's just like life').
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• E.O. Wilson, whose The Future of Life Atwood recommends, was an ant expert and her father a bee expert, both Hymenoptera, and she reviewed Wilson's only novel for the New York Review of Books.
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• Atwood cites futuristic ideas including mushroom coffins, 3D-printed compressed-earth houses built in two days, prefab homes that produce more energy than they consume, and fabric made from algae.
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• Late-career Henry James dictated his work to stenographers; Atwood discusses dictation software (Dragon) with Tim, recommended by Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman.
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