John Irving Interview (page: 3 / 4) National Book Award	Print Interview

For someone who doesn't understand what a writer does, or how it happens, how would you explain what you do and how you do it?

John Irving: Well, I've always been patient.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey. Or is it a melancholic story? Is there something uplifting or not about it? Is it soulful? Is it mournful? Is it exuberant? What is the language that describes the end of the story? And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you. Do I begin at the beginning chronologically? Sometimes. Or is it the kind of story that's better to jump into in the middle and go backwards and forwards at the same time? I am a person who just can't make those judgments -- I can't come to those decisions -- unless I know what's waiting for me at the end. What makes this story worth the five years it's going to take me to write it? What is emotionally compelling enough at the end of this novel? What's waiting for you that's going to move you at the end of this story? That makes a reader tolerate how long and complicated and at times difficult it's going to be? And so I always go there. I write those end notes as if they were two pieces of music, so I know what I'm going to hear at the end of the story. I know what the sentences themselves, what they're going to sound like, and I put them in a log. You know? And they're waiting for me, and I know I'm not going to get to that part of the story for four, five -- in the case of this most recent novel, seven years, but it's important to me that I hear it.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

In The World According to Garp, "We are all terminal cases," was the first sentence I wrote, the last sentence of the book. "Oh God, please give him back, I shall keep asking you," in a A Prayer for Owen Meany, was the first sentence I wrote. The whole novel is a prayer, but what's the prayer at the end? What is the narrative? Why he wants him back. I have to know those things.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think working my way through that process, begin with the end and then work your way back to where you began. Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is. Now people always ask me, "Well surely something changes. Surely somewhere along the way you get a better idea." In the sequence of events in the middle of the story, that's often true. Sometimes a character I had never thought of -- a minor character or a major/minor one-- will make an appearance in the middle of the story and move the story in a slightly different way. But the ending never changes. It never has. Eleven novels, it never has changed. I might fool around with that first sentence over time, but I won't fool around with the last. It's as clear as a note of music. It is where I'm going.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

I could no more imagine writing a novel without knowing those things then I could imagine coming home from the airport and saying to my wife, "An amazing thing just happened when I landed," if I didn't know what it was. I'm not that good a pathological liar to pull that one off.

What does it take to be a writer? What is the writer's life like?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Irving: You've got to be disciplined. I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write. There's a kind of repetition that's required. In any of the martial arts, and in some other sports as well, but especially in the martial arts sports, you repeat and repeat over and over again the dumbest things, the simplest moves, the simplest defenses, until they become like second nature. But they don't start out that way. They don't start out that way. And I think what I've always recognized about writing is that I don't put much value in so-called inspiration. The value is in how many times you can redo something. The value is in the importance of the refrain. The third time you repeat something, it has more resonance than the second time you repeat something, if it's good enough to begin with. Right?

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So much of a sport like wrestling is drilling, is just repeating and repeating and repeating, so that you've done this thing so many times that if somebody just touches your arm on that side, you know where to go. You could do it with your eyes closed. If you're off your feet and you're up in the air, if you've been there enough, you know where the mat is. You know it's here, it's not there. You just know where it is. You don't have to see it, but you've been through that position enough so that you're not looking for the mat. You're not thinking, "Is it up here? Is it down there? Am I going to land on my head? Am I going to land on my tail?" You know? I think sentences are like that. If you're comfortable enough with all kinds of sentences, with verbs and their gerundive, with active verbs, with short sentences, with long sentences, you know how to put them together. You know how to slow the reader down when the reader is at a place where you want the reader to move slowly, and you know how to speed the reader up when you're at a place in the story where you want the reader to go fast. And it's drilling, it's repetition. Most people would find it boring, like sit-ups, you know? Like skipping rope. But I always had -- I could put my mind somewhere else while I skipped rope for 45 minutes. You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else. You have to imagine that your next opponent stopped skipping rope 15 minutes ago. Then you keep going.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

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