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.