The Buried Giant took ten years to write, longer than Ishiguro had anticipated. Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2014, he recalled that his wife, Lorna MacDougall, had rejected an early draft of the book, saying: "This won't do ... there's no way you can carry on with this, you'll have to start again from the beginning."[6] Ishiguro added that, at the time, he had been surprised by her comments because he had been pleased with his progress so far.[6] He shelved the novel and wrote a short-story collection, Nocturnes (2009).[4] It was six years before Ishiguro returned to The Buried Giant, and, following his wife's advice, he proceeded to "start from scratch and rebuild it from the beginning".[4][6]
Ishiguro's inspiration for The Buried Giant came from the Dark Ages in Britain. He told The New York Times that he had wanted to write about collective memory and the way warrior societies cope with traumatic events by forgetting. He ruled out modern historic settings because they would be too realistic and interpreted too literally. The Dark Ages setting solved Ishiguro's problem: "this kind of barren, weird England, with no civilization ... could be quite interesting".[4] He proceeded to research life in England around that time, and discovered, "[t]o my delight ... nobody knows what the hell was going on. It's a blank period of British history".[4] Ishiguro filled in the blanks himself, creating the novel's fantasy setting. For the book's title, he sought his wife's help. After many discarded ideas, they found it near the end of the novel's text. Ishiguro explained, "The giant well buried is now beginning to stir. And when it wakes up, there's going to be mayhem."[4]
