What I Learned from John Irving-IV (Irving's emotional distance brings readers closer; so does his comic voice)

With social distancing being the hallmark of life in the Age of Covid-19, my thesis is that John Irving turned himself into a super-successful novelist by practicing emotional distancing.

When a writer as good as John Irving keeps his emotional distance from his characters, we care about them more, not less. Readers are attracted to a story where the author uses unadorned, brutal language to describe the story's supposedly most poignant moments.

In John Irving's Prayer for Owen Meany, we have eleven-year-old Owen Meany, who is best friend and schoolmate of Johnny Wheelwright, hitting a foul ball during a little-league game that kills Johnny's mother who's seated in the spectator stands. The story's narrator Johnny loses his mother and becomes an orphan in the same instant. Is it tragic? Absolutely. But I contend that the way Irving writes it largely skips over the tragedy and instead concerns itself with cold, clinical details. Yet readers adore his writing. But why?

My belief is that in John Irving's capable hands, emotional distance not only creates reader involvement; it goes beyond, and gives rise to comic effects that can be extremely attractive.

What's the Difference between comic writing and comedy writing?

Irving doesn't play his characters and their difficulties for laughs. If he did, we might think of him as a comedian or a stand-up comic.

Instead, we think of Irving as a serious novelist because, instead of playing his material for laughs, he plays it for pathos, which can variously be thought of as poignancy, tragedy or sadness, or all three at once.

Read how Johnny mother's death is described as she dies in front of her son as we look on: "The ball struck her left temple, spinning her so quickly, one of her high heels broke, and she fell forward, her knees splayed apart, her face hitting the ground first…" That language might appear to be right out of a true crime thriller, except for that detail about the mother wearing high heels. What mother of a young boy would wear high heels to a little league game? This is John Irving at work adding a comic touch.

That's the only description of Johnny's mother's death we have, that single sentence. Then:

"No, Johnny! No, Johnny!" Mr. Chickering said, "You don't want to see her, Johnny," he said.

At that point we're treated to a short treatice on memory:

"Your memory is a monster; you forget, it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you. You think you have the memory; but it has you!"

We glimpse a young boy's mother killed in front of her son. Is it funny? No, it's anything but funny. But is it comic? Yes, it is, because it's so poignant and tragically sad.

In the immediate aftermath, there's a conversation between the police chief and the team manager: "Where's the ball?" (It turns out it's missing.) "Well, it's the murder weapon." Indeed, it is. Seconds later in a terse interchange, it's called "the instrument of death." The tension crackles, but then dissolves when the team manager says to the police chief, " Don't be an asshole, Ben." To me that conversation comes off extremely plausible; also funny and entertaining.

And this: "All the players had been made to stand behind the bleachers while the police took photographs of my mother." They were taking photos of a deceased woman, a chance victim in a tragic accident, but by Irving using the phrase, "photos of my mother," we're brought up short. Once again, that's Irving's comic touch.

In Irving's The Cider House Rules, we likewise see the life of an orphan, Homer Wells, play out as he grows up at "the boy's division at St. Cloud's in Maine. There's enough tragedy in Homer's life for five orphans. Each time he tries out a new set of adoptive parents a new horror ensues. One set of parents can't stand the fact that Homer doesn't cry, so they torture him until he wails. That's Irving's comic writing, for you. It's cold and calculating, I'd say.

Irving's description of The Winkles, an adventure-loving couple looking looking to adopt a young boy with whom they can share their adventures, is quite funny (in a comic way). The Winkles string a rope across a raging river so they can go bouncy-bouncy in and out of the river's white water rapids. They're having a grand time until the paper company that's upstream launches a load of logs down the same river:

"Suddenly the Winkles looked upstream... So did Homer, in time to see the log drive when it was about twenty-five yards away… The mass of logs, each as big as telephone poles, moved swiftly downstream with a wall of water in front of it…"

"Homer Wells was still running when he reached the road… He turned in time to see the logs surge by. A line from the tent had been attached to the Winkles' survival rope, and the entire tent and everything in it were swept downstream in the pounding flow and charge of the logs. The Ramses Paper Company wouldn't recover Billy and Grant's [the Wikles's first names] bodies for three days; they found them nearly four miles away.

When Homer Wells returned to St. Cloud's, Dr. Larch the head of the boy's division, comments, "You didn't give the Winkles much of a chance." Only after Homer explained what happened does Dr. Larch say, "You mean the Winkles are gone?"

A fun-loving couple, the Winkles, are gone, but do I cry for them? No. Do I mourn them? No. The scene strikes me as being both comic and entertaining, the exact opposite of compassionate and caring. All in all, it's rather cruel, wouldn't you agree?

John Irving is always going for comic effects, and that's the brutal, cold, hard truth. What's amazing to me is that John knew at a very early age that the less emotion he invested in his characters, the more passionate his readers would feel about them. In my view, at a very early age, John Irving had that extremely brilliant insight, He realized he could leverage off the good will of his readers to turn them into his readers' champions. That's something Charles Dickens understood; but it's somethjing many writers today can't begin to understand, no less master. 

Next month: Still more of what I learned from John Irving.

What I learned from John Irving - III (Cruelty to Children & the Magic of Missing Body Parts)

If anyone were to pose the question to me, "How did John Irving write so many best-selling novels?" (No one ever has.) I would answer that, at least in the case of two of his books, Prayer for Owen Meany and Cider House Rules, he did it by portraying innocent, orphan children being subjected to abuse while he writes about it in a matter-of-fact way. By using this recipe, John Irving strongly motivates his readers to want to protect the innocents (while they may have secretly been entertained by the description of the abuse) which, in turn, creates an extremely strong and nuanced emotional bond between the reader and character.

As an example, I would point to Owen Meany being lifted aloft by his Sunday school class and being passed from student to student while he protests mildly. This short scene, which appears early on in Prayer for Owen Meany should be considered the key visual for the entire novel. A screenplay or movie of the book would almost have to open with this scene. By the end of the scene, I would wager most readers are ready to nominate Owen for a "Christ Figure Oscar," if such an award existed, while at the same time we're not only allowed but encouraged to be entertained by this scene of child abuse.

I believe most readers, if they were truthful with themselves, would probably admit that if they were a child attending a Sunday school class where this "passing around scene" actually took place, they might have taken part in the abuse and even enjoyed doing so.

(Please don't tell me you would have run from the class and told the teacher who was reportedly on a smoke-break that something bad was happening back at the class. Please, don't. Would you really have done that?)

My opinion: By writing the scene in as an enticing manner as he does, John has placed you in a morally compromised position.

(When we were friends, I always called him John, and I mean no disrespect by calling him that here.)

John forces you to take sides. You have little choice. If you have a pulse, you are involved. And the instant you admit to yourself you would be having fun cruelly abusing Owen Meany by passing him around, your parent-side kicks in, and you say to yourself, "Kids can treat each other so horribly. Sunday school was so horrible. I hated the whole experience." And once again, John's got you involved and morally compromised. Now you're ready to ban Sunday Schools all together. No, better yet, ban religion! Why do we do these horrible things to our own children who we supposedly love?

(And I'll have you know, this is being written by someone who taught religious school for seven years, and, cruelly abused his own children by bribing them with doughnuts with sprinkles on top to attend.)

When I was an innocent student of John's at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, John gave each of us fair warning. I can even hear John now saying, "You really want to be a novelist? Prepare to spend your life in a room alone abusing, mutilating and murdering the ones you love, i.e., your characters. Prepare to cut off penises and fingers in furtherance of getting readers to sign on to reading your 500+ page novels.

For God's sakes, give up being nice to your characters. If you want to be a novelist, prepare to perform unspeakable acts to your characters. Isn't being a novelist fun? Don't you love it? Of course you do. You can't get enough. That's why you're here."

(Just think about this for a moment: Isn't it uncanny how a novelist, as soon as he or she detaches a body part from a character, causes the reader to feel more attached to that character? Crazy, huh?)

When John said all that to us, he should have been costumed in a black suit playing the part of a somber, sober New Hampshire undertaker at the wheel of a very long, black Cadillac limousine.

I wouldn't listen to him. Not me. I was in the "I think I'll go easy on my characters and just pretend I'm going hard on them" school of novel writing. Well, that's a recipe for failure. It only took me some forty years to come around to John's persuasion. Let's hear it for the New Hampshire Undertaker. (The New Hampshire Undertaker. What a great title for a John Irving novel, agreed?)

Next month: Still more on what I learned from John Irving.

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.

Editing and the Life-changing magic of tidying up.

That little book by Marie Kondo entitled The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up? Have you heard of it? It has sold three million copies worldwide and was a NY Times Best-Seller.

I came across it the morning of January 1, 2020, while I was looking at discarded belongings in the recycling room in my apartment building. I might have passed the book by had I not watched Marie Kondo being interviewed on my favorite Sunday morning show some weeks before.

As I was sifting through the pile of stuff, I was engrossed in thoughts about finishing my novel; mainly I was thinking that the considerable task that lay before me in the year 2020 was the editing of the novel to arrive at a final draft.

Perhaps it was no more than a case of propinquity, a number of random thoughts coming together: Tidying up is sort of like editing, isn’t it? And it being New Year’s Day and finding that book being one of the very first things I did in the year 2020 (besides sleeping) and my New Year’s resolution being, Finish that novel already! Get done with it! Get it out into the world where it belongs!

So as I plucked that book out of the junk pile, The Life-changing Habit… , all those thoughts did come together and out popped the notion that perhaps it might contain some wisdom for me.

If there were a way I could finish my novel before midnight of December 31 2020, it would certainly change my life. I was open to my life being changed, very open to it. Something good was already happening: The thought percolated in my brain: Hell, if it’s only a matter of tidying up my novel, I can certainly do that and finish before New Year’s Eve, couldn’t I? Of course I could! Perhaps her magic was already working? That was my state of mind as I began reading Kondo’s little book.

Of course as a novelist I couldn’t help but believe there was an untold story here: Had the previous book’s owner thrown Kondo’s out in a fit of rage on New Year’s Eve? Was he or she enraged at how unhelpful the book had been? Or did that person learn how to tidy up her life to the point there was no longer a need for this book on her bookshelf? I hoped she had read the book, gotten out of it all she could, and then discarded it because it had become clutter. And so the untold story might be that what was the end for her was a new start for me.

Within the first few minutes of cracking open this little tome, a world of parallels between tidying up and editing my novel opened up to me. Kondo’s advice is to “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go.”

Likewise with editing: Look at all the chapters in your novel, setting aside all the chapters that don’t directly support the story you set out to tell. There is no “nice to know” information about your characters that should wind up in the novel. Only those events described that put across the story belong.

Once you’ve paired down your chapters, you can look at pacing and overall story structure within the remaining chapters: Does your chapter support a rapid escalation of tension and character development, so that as the story continues, we see the main protagonist in conflict and/or in danger or in a state of development. By the end do we see a new person emerging, functioning as people function in real life?

Then you can look at individual chapters; make sure each of them contribute to a chapter story arc. You can discard anything unnecessary and fill in gaps.

The other key thought that Kondo advocates and that I can attest applies one hundred percent to editing a novel is this: gradualism doesn’t work. You can’t organize a kitchen one day and the living room the next, and hope to ever escape the grind of continuously organizing; nor can you edit the first chapter one day and a middle chapter the next day and hope to wind up with a comprehensible, cohesive, and a single engrossing work.

That means you must edit the whole thing, the entire thing all at once, in the blink of an eye. Like Michelangelo, you must look at a large hunk of marble you’re about to start carving and see your finished sculpture within it. That happens in an instant. The concerns expressed on page one must be the same as on the last page, although obviously what the principal character learned from living the story must also be present.  The basic style of writing should be the same or very similar. The manner you use to tell the story must be consistent. The tone (the attitude behind the writing) should be different but must be reminiscent of the tone that you use on the first page. It certainly should serve to acknowledge how far the character’s consciousness has been transformed by living the story.

Some might say, “My character has changed by the end of my story. Is it any wonder that the style of writing has changed by the end?” While that argument might seem plausible, I’ve found that pulling it off in a novel is extremely difficult without inadvertently giving the impression that the end was written by a different author.

In order for your story to have emotional impact and credibility it has to work as a single, unified artistic whole. It truly must give the impression of being told by a single voice.

Kondo equates tidying up with putting one’s house in order and that it shouldn’t take that much time. It should happen all at once. She advises, “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go. If you adopt this approach… you’ll never again revert to clutter again.

Next month, more about what I learned from reading John Irving.

“When you have no further use for characters, kill them. Knock ‘em off.”

One of the high points of my time at The University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop (where I was a fiction writing student between 1970 and 1972) was having John Irving as my instructor.

Like the powerful narrative voice one finds in his novels, John was a powerful presence in the classroom. He was always empathetic to the plight of a novice, unpublished writer; always ready to share advice, tips, thoughts about writing fiction and living the writer’s life.

One of the tips he said more than once: “When you have no further use for characters, kill them. Knock ‘em off.”

This apparently useful if not ruthless advice for plotting a novel was of no use to me at the time. Sometimes, as in this case, his words were so boiled down, I wasn’t able to apply them in my writing, except as a “handy plotting tool.” That was the case until yesterday morning at 6:30 a.m. when I learned that in the hands of a great novelist, a beloved character’s death can elicit genuine emotion within a reader, which as Donald Maass says in his seminal work, The Emotional Craft of Fiction is why we read fiction.

I’m reading John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and at about 6:30 a.m. this morning. I was on page 128 when I came across a paragraph that broke my heart and gave me insight into how fiction works that I did not have when I was in my 20s. The paragraph describes Johnny Wheelright’s feelings (Johnny is the narrator-character of the novel) at his mother’s funeral after she was struck and immediately killed by a foul ball hit by Johnny’s best friend, Owen Meany:

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time, the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone, forever. There comes another day and another specifically missing part.”

In the details mentioned, and the senses tapped into we grasp the totality of the emotion gripping John at the age of nine; a boy who loses his mother and who missed her on the day she died and on every day since. Not only did Johnnie miss her, and continue missing her in new ways, but I’m left with the impression that John, the grown-up version of Johnny who is narrating the novel, now a man in late middle-age, is still missing her in new ways as each day passes.

As a friend of mine says, those who lose a parent at an early age become members of a club to which no one wants to belong; nevertheless, this is an exclusive club of sorrow and mutual understanding to which these children have no choice but to become and remain members even as they grow old. It’s a club that sets them apart from everyone else, both those of us whose parents are still alive and those whose parents died after a long life.

My point with all of this: If you’ve been reading my ExcitingWriting Advisories (EWAs) of recent months, this passage points back to craft-points Donald Maass makes in his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story behind the Surface.

In A Prayer for Owen Meany, when Johnny’s mother dies, she had only been married to a man named Dan Needham for a year-and-a-half. Dan has already adopted Johnny, and after his mother dies there’s no question in Johnny’s mind that he loves Dan and wishes him to remain his stepfather, and for them to live together.

It’s been said, and I believe it’s true, in one way or another, every story can be understood to be either about the formation or the dissolution of a family. Many story lines depict a family coming apart only to somehow be reconstituted in a new form by the end. This is so for action movies where families are often depicted as elite teams or sometimes as teams of criminals; in romantic comedies where singles come together despite fate always pulling them apart; in horror movies where families of friends or loving couples are torn apart. My point: This family formation/dissolution theme is the most frequently used method authors use to encourage their readers to make a connection with a story.

In A Prayer for Owen Meany, we know at the end of the first chapter that Johnnie loses his mother to an errant foul ball hit by Owen Meany. In chapter two Dan is introduced; we see Dan and Johnnie’s mother, Tabatha, having a long courtship and finally getting married. Indeed, we cut directly from Tabithia’s wedding to her funeral a year-and-a-half later. Then we have the heart-wrenching paragraph I quoted above that begins, “When someone you love dies…”

The paragraph that follows directly after that one is telling because although clearly we already have a new family forming between Johnnie and his stepfather, the author resists doing the obvious of letting Johnny go home with Dan. Instead he lets the stepfather return to where Dan, Tabitha and Johnnie were living when Johnnie's mother was alive, and he lets Johnnie go in new direction that hints at Johnny seeking love and intimacy with a girl who is approximately his age. So there you have the hint of a new family forming. I find it to be extremely emotional and telling.

This is the paragraph that follows directly after the one I quoted above: “The evening after her funeral, I felt she was gone when it was time for Dan to go home to the dorm. (Dan is a teacher at a private school, and their home was literally an apartment within a dormitory.) I realized that Dan had choices… But as soon as I realized what they were, I realized that the choices available to Dan, regarding where he would sleep, would be imperfect, forever; and that, forever, there would be something unsatisfying about thinking of him alone, and something also incomplete about him being with me.”

This is the strength of John Irving’s storytelling: The truth of what he’s describing seems manifest to me: The only thing that sets us apart from animals is our ability to love. We have a choice: If we choose to love, in the end we will die, or we will be broken because the person we love will die before we do. If we choose not to love, we will inevitably be broken, beyond love; we will become asexual beings, touching no one, and untouched by anyone, truly an untouchable, hardly human at all.

Now when I remember John Irving saying in class that you must kill a character when you no longer have any further use for them in a story, he never pointed out what a powerful role the character’s death can play in the story after the death and after the funeral. Yes, there is an after-life, certainly in fiction there is.

To me, this is the stuff of a great novelist, John Irving, giving his readers strongly felt and movingly described, raw emotions. It was a moving experience that I began to understand all this at 6:30 a.m. in the morning. As though this was another layer of meaning John originally taught me forty-seven years ago at The University of Iowa.

John Irving and Me

By the time I first met John he had published two novels, The Water-Method Man and Setting Free the Bears, both of which had been well reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. While I was in Iowa City, he released a third, The One Hundred-Fifty-Eight Pound Marriage which was as I remember it was universally panned, and forthwith quickly removed to “the remainder tables.”

John was unfazed by this career setback. The faith he had in his writing talent was unshakable. I don’t think he ever expected all his novels to be successful. If they sold well, he was grateful. I got the impression he thought if some of his novels were not roundly criticized, even booed, he could not be doing his job, which included continually expanding the boundaries of storytelling in interesting ways and not relying on prefabricated formulas.

All this is to say: He gave himself permission to be a great writer.

The model he presented to his students—we were all in our mid-twenties while he was in his late-thirties—was that of an emerging novelist just a few years older than we who was doing a yeoman’s job of managing his career. To me he always appeared calm; he was and remains incredibly intelligent. Even now I don’t know how he did it all. Like his character Owen Meany he had tremendous strength of character and faith, only in the case of John Irving his “way” (like the Buddha “way”) was fueled by faith in himself to do his best, knowing his best was always improving. It was an honor to be in his student.

I was visiting him once in his home in Iowa City where he was spoon-feeding baby food to his youngest boy while talking to me about the writing life. His older boys entered the kitchen from outside saying the family cat had gotten out. I went outside with the older one (Later John coached them to be All American Wrestlers) and retrieved the meowing cat from under dense shrubbery in front of their house. Then we trooped back inside and, as I remember it, he and I went back to discussing fiction as he finished putting his baby down for a nap. As I said, I don’t know how he did it all.

Yes, he was a powerful presence in the classroom, but he never believed in class participation. He would talk non-stop for one-and-a-half hours. He had prodigious powers of concentration. He’d tell stories about writers, himself included. Some of his stories were fascinating. Some lulled me into a late afternoon nap.

He was mindful as a writer; he always knew, or seemed to know what he was about; he was committed to following his writing chops wherever they might lead him, even as it turned out to be on the stage of the 1999 Academy Award presentations where he accepted an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (based on his own novel, The Cider House Rules.

He was a sometimes tennis partner of mine. After beating me in a match, he would run home with the racket in one hand. I would drive home. Now I understand why he ran. For the same reason I ran home after exercising this morning, for the pure joy of doing it.

The Emotional Craft of Fiction and Why It's Important.

Donald Maass, who has in the past authored a number of widely praised how-to-write-fiction books, in his newest work says that writing novels isn't about showing or telling per se; also that it's about much more than simply describing what your characters are going through.

Rather, he writes in his book The Emotional Craft of Fiction that it's about asking, "How can I encourage my readers to go on emotional journeys of their own?" That's Maass's thesis, that if as an author you encourage readers to go on these emotional journeys of their own, you will connect with them at a deeper emotional level; the novels you write will be more readable, memorable, accessible and important to them.

In this blog issue I review The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass, Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2016.

Donald Maass states, and I believe he's correct, most readers believe that when they read an engrossing novel, they are living out the story at the same time as the characters in the novel are. But, observes Maass, what is actually going on is this: As readers become engrossed in a novel, they may be weaving their own personal experience into a story that, as they read on farther, becomes more and more personally meaningful to them. Although what they experience is extremely involving to them, he writes that what they get out of it may have little to do with the novel they're reading.

If you accept Maass's view of how great novels work, you might come around to his belief that writing a best-selling novel may not be about writing stories readers want to read, per se; instead, it may be about writing the stories in such a way that they open a floodgate of emotions for readers which, in turn, makes it exceedingly easy for them to embark on their own personal journeys as they're reading. And again, it's important to note Maass's belief that the personal journey the reader goes on may not have that much to do with the book that prompted them to go on that emotional journey.

As Maass expresses it: "The purpose of this book is to delve into the ways and means of creating a powerful emotional experience for readers as they read."

Maass mentions the enduring power of classic novels to involve readers and cause them to gain potentially life-changing experiences and wisdom: "When a plot [of a classic novel] resolves, readers are satisfied, but what they remember is what they felt while reading it. Hooks may hook, twists may intrigue, tension may turn pages, and prose may dazzle, but all of those effects fade as quickly as fireworks in a night sky. Ask readers what they [most vividly] remember about novels; most will say the characters, but is that accurate? It's true that characters become real to us but that is [only] because of what they cause us to feel. Characters aren't actually real; only our feelings are.

According to Maass, "Emotional impact is not an extra. It's as fundamental to a novel's purpose and structure as its plot. The emotional craft of fiction underlies the creation of character arcs, plot turns, beginnings, midpoints, endings, and strong scenes. It is the basis of voice." It's everything, in other words.

He continues, "Mastering the emotional craft of fiction starts with understanding how emotional impact is produced and then applying that in practice. It isn't magic, but the results will feel magical."

Maass realized that there was a need for his book when he "realized that in reading many manuscripts and also published novels, I was feeling little. The high action of best-selling thrillers often left me cold. Romance and women's fiction wallowed in feelings but frequently left me feeling indifferent. Literary fiction can be the driest reading experience of all. Beautiful writing may sparkle like a diamond necklace, but sparkling isn't a feeling. The greatest wish of editors today is a strong voice, and that's fine but even strong voices can fail to reach my heart. Strong writing doesn't automatically produce strong feelings. Paradoxically, poorly written novels can sometimes unsettle me, stir me to anger or send me reaching for a tissue. I want to feel more as I read. Don't you? That's why this book and the methods [described] herein matter."

In addition to this introductory essay, I'll be writing individual essays about each aspect Maass focuses on in this landmark work:

How to stir more meaningful emotions and elevate the moral stakes of any story;

How to create story arcs that impress readers as more authentic and meaningful because they illicit stronger emotions;

How to infuse the plots of your stories with additional emotional power;

How to think about the emotional journey your reader is on to increase the overall impact of your works.

And how to think more effectively about the emotional journey that you as the author of the work are inevitably on as you write your novel.

Unpacking this single book over the next six months: That is how important I believe Maass's book is.

Together, let's explore The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface.