RB: What do you do when you think about your story?
KI: I sit in a stuffy room and fill notebooks with possible relationships and situations. In nonfiction, authors have to do a lot of research before they right. I do the equivalent, but my research is not in libraries, or by interviews. I research the world in my head, the people, relationships, and settings. Is it the real world, or is it a few stages removed; in what way?
RB: What’s your process of writing a draft?
KI: I write first in pen, deliberately illegibly. I pay no attention to style; my only objective is to let the ideas come out, to get past my own defenses. I write quickly and intensely. Ideas change; if I decide a character would be better this way, I make the change and carry on. I write 30-40 pages and stop. The first draft is a total mess.
Then I go through a process which my daughter calls “bottling up.” I look at the total mess, and divide it not into paragraphs but “ideas.” This is similar to a technique actors do when they rehearse plays; they break the play into “moments.”
I number all the ideas, say 1-23, and then write down a 1-sentence summary of what happens in each of them, try to produce a flow diagram.
I’m not a good writer of sentences. I think my strength is between drafts. I “pull out” of the story to see its overall shape, stare at the numbered points, shape the ideas, see what’s original and what’s not, consider the forks in the road in the story going forward. Then I write the draft again, and repeat the whole process 3-4 times, until I write 30 pages I’m happy with.
Then I move on to the next 30 pages. I write one section at a time, because the 2nd section has foundations in the first, if I roughed it all to the end I’m afraid there would be structural weaknesses. (But some projects seemed to require it, like Never Let Me Go.)

I wonder if any writers here have tried any such techniques. I've read about others approaching writing similarly. First, unleash the ideas, let them roam the page un-mitigated, then rein them in by reducing, and imposing your order. Ishiguro says this.second step "makes you feel godlike."

I'm guessing each has their own method that works for them, and the more you practice, the more it becomes yours, and then your writing wears your method like a signature.