What I Learned from John Irving - II

As you may already know, I knew John Irving when he was practically an unknown novelist; he was my instructor when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

As for what I learned from John, I remember him saying numerous times, "Writers spend a great deal of their time working alone. If you want to be a writer, you had better understand that."

Of course, we're probably all familiar with the notion of the novelist acting like the divine creator, God herself, in the microcosm of the story-universe she's creating. (You don't happen to believe that God is a "she?" Very well. I won't try to prove otherwise to you.)

I believe that as a novelist, John Irving was not naïve to the analogy of acting like God in reference to his specific characters and the overall stories he told. As I reported in another EWA, he often said, "Kill off characters when they stop being of use to you in your story." I never heard him say, although in light of many of his novels, he could have said, "Remove your characters' specific body parts (fingers, for example) for added reader interest."

I used to think it was strange but John often said that before he wrote the opening of a novel, he would not only know exactly how the story ended; he would have actually written the final paragraphs of the novel.

I would have never been capable of even thinking such a thought, no less knowing my characters well enough to be able to write the last page of a novel before writing the first.

Now, forty-eight years later, it doesn't strike me as strange at all that he would make a habit of doing that. John is well known to be an inveterate and in-depth outliner of his novels before writing an initial word of them. Once he completes the outline, writing the final paragraph or even the final sentence that appears on the final page of his novel is not that difficult a feat. For Irving, it's a pretty straightforward process.

I still would not be able to do such a thing; I couldn't even come close.

From the opening pages of Prayer for Owen Meaning, John suggests that the religion the story's narrator (who's first name is also coincidentally "John") and his friend Owen were exposed to as children taught God's plan for every individual was known to God and intricately planned out long before any of us human beings get to live it out. Everything is pre-ordained, including one's salvation.

This theology suggests to me that God, if she wished, would likewise be perfectly able to write the final page of the story of each of our lives as each of us is born, if she wished.

By the way, I don't believe John necessarily believed in predestination—quite the opposite. My belief is that he thought that that specific theological tenant was quaint; he found it difficult to take seriously. That explains the comic side of his novels. He loved poking fun at certain beliefs, among them, predestination.

Yet he knew full well that his outline method as a novelist gave the lie to his theological doubt because, in the micro-microcosm of John Irving's novels, he did to his characters precisely what he doubted God ever did to him or to any of us. He knew exactly what was going to happen to each one of his characters long before he finished writing the novel they appeared in. In that way I think he got to play with these ideas, i.e., poke fun at them while at the same time having fun trying them on. In this way he was able to consider the consequences of taking these beliefs seriously.

The challenge with all of this is when you turn to the "terms" of John Irving's youth—no doubt about it, he had dyslexia and he did not excel academically. With John, you don't see many obvious signs of a famous novelist in gestation. What I can report as I observed him in his mid-20s when he was my instructor at Iowa: He had a strong, steadfast, in fact, unwavering faith in his eventual success. I never thought that that opinion was based on an overblown ego—not at all; rather, I believed at a very early age he intuitively understood his material, as any comic novelist should (what was funny about it, poignant about it, rip-your-heart-out bitter-sweet about it); and from the start he had an intuitive understanding of how to go about describing his characters' struggles as they lived out their lives—never letting the tone get sappy or sentimental.

As Irving wrote in the opening chapter of his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, when he was growing up the son of a Phillips-Exeter Academy faculty instructor, attending that famed New Hampshire high school as a "townie," the essay was the reigning literary form, not the short story. It's no surprise to me that parts of A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules read like well written essays. Also apparent to me from page one of both novels: This writer has next-to-no interest in poetic language, in stringing together words that glitter like diamonds; rather Irving's words describe comic events that in Irving's telling become vividly visual and highly memorable. You laugh, but you also care; I do, at least.

By his example, John taught me great novels must always be about something. They must be ambitious and take up important issues just as The Cider House Rules takes on abortion and A Prayer for Owen Meany takes on faith in God and, as already mentioned, predestination.

Next month, more on what I learned from John Irving.

What I learned from John Irving - I

As many of you know, John Irving, an unknown novelist at the time I knew him, was my instructor when I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I've learned more from John in the last year than I did while attending his reading classes and workshops in the early 1970s.

Being an undiagnosed moderate-to-severe ADHD at the time (that disability being completely unknown), I noticed I grow bored easily; thus, as a young writer I projected the belief that my readers would rapidly grow bored with whatever I wrote if every sentence did not contain some fresh display of creativity. This was not the most nurturing soil from which one can grow warm, enduring relationships with readers. In fact, as I soon learned, readers "smell" fear in a writer, and if they detect it, readers will abandon their work faster and in greater numbers than rats off a sinking ship.

In truth, I'm perversely proud to say John Irving would bore me silly. The stories he would tell, for example, about his experiences in Germany and in Paris about meeting other writers and about art in general would go on and on far too long—long enough for my boredom to grow into a case of yawns that might lead to an in-class nap.

At the same time, many of the stories I was writing, my teachers and fellow students would point out, were far too short and, in their opinion, "undeveloped."

I remember vividly writing a short story about an "actor" who plays a "badman" in "Western reenactments" of train robberies, cattle rustling, and "prairie wars" at one of those tourist traps just off the Interstate in the 1970s.  My readers thought it was funny, entertaining, if "rather slight." I described my actor-character as dying three times a day in "shoot-outs" at 1:00 pm, 4:00 pm and 7:30 pm, but I never once considered that deep down I wanted to write this story so I could talk about death and the inevitability of it that we all face. If I were rewriting this story today, I would introduce a character actor who dies of cancer while he's also dying three times a day in these "Western skits." Now there you might have an interesting story, but the story I wrote played it for laughs and never had even a hint of actual death, in it. In retrospect that seems rather strange.

The passage of time cures many ills, and clears up others, and one sickness that I may have cured was my warped notions about how soon readers will "bail out" on writers. Given John's proclivity for writing long novels, he was absolutely right to go on and on in his stories and I was totally wrong to believe most readers would become bored as soon as I would.

There's nothing readers love more than a writer who insists on letting his writing take the space it needs in order to develop into a style, while the style, in turn, has the space it needs to give birth to unforgettable characters. I could sum it up this way: John's approach of finding a universe in a bottle was far more rewarding than mine of continually jumping from bottle to bottle. That was where my approach and my ADHD-thinking led, to me creating a rather strange universe that was difficult for readers to follow and not all that satisfying to read.

Now, if I currently had writing students and taught a writing and reading classes comparable to the ones John taught me (I don't), the stories I might tell might cause me to appear as boring to my students as John appeared to me. Hopefully, my novels will have as much appeal to modern-day readers as his novels had to readers back in the '80s and '90s.

It has been a privilege for me to begin taking ADHD medication in the late 90s, and over the ensuing years, to gradually grow to appreciate the world for what it is; to see it in a new light, and to train myself to write relatively normal stories readers can appreciate. Next month, more about what I learned from John Irving.