John Irving has spent decades crafting novels filled with orphans, wrestlers, trans characters, bears, abortions, and unexplained miracles. His books are long, intricately plotted, politically opinionated, and often devastating. He writes them by hand. He begins with the last sentence. He lets the rest of the book catch up.
Irving is one of the last great maximalists of American fiction, and he knows it. “I’m not a twentieth-century novelist,” he once told The Paris Review. “I’m not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel… I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller.”
Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, Irving grew up with a stepfather who taught at Phillips Exeter Academy and a mother who kept the mystery of his biological father a well-guarded secret. That absence—and the searching it triggered—would become a defining feature of his fiction. “In many of my family saga novels, there is a familiar premise,” he told NPR in 2022. “There’s this elusive, evasive, somewhat mysterious mother. There is an absent or missing biological father. There’s a child who’s an outsider within his own family who’s looking for answers.”
Irving became a household name with The World According to Garp in 1978, which introduced one of literature’s first fully fleshed-out trans characters, Roberta Muldoon. It won the National Book Award and was adapted into a film starring Robin Williams and John Lithgow. In the decades since, Irving has published fifteen novels—including A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules, A Son of the Circus, Avenue of Mysteries, and most recently, The Last Chairlift. His work has won an Oscar, a Lambda Literary Award, and countless fan letters detailing personal tragedies. Irving replies to all of them. Usually by postcard.
As a writer, Irving is unapologetically plotted. He’s suspicious of memoir, loathes Hemingway, reveres Dickens, and believes the passage of time is a novelist’s greatest asset. “A novel must be more compelling, more urgent, to the reader on page 400 than it was on page 40,” he told Bostonia. “Momentum lies ahead of where the reader is in the book.”
John Irving’s daily writing routine
Irving’s writing process is less a routine than a system of ritual and compulsion. He begins with the last sentence, then the final paragraph, then slowly works his way back to the beginning. He doesn’t start writing until he knows the full arc of the story, and once he begins, he writes everything by hand. “Writing by hand is more like drawing,” he told Lesley University. “It seems to be the right pace for me.”
I have nothing against my laptop, but it’s too fast, too easy. Writing by hand is more like drawing. It seems to be the right pace for me. Given the fact that I know everything in the story before I write it, all I want to be thinking about is the language, the tone of voice, the pace of the language.
Irving writes slowly and rewrites even slower. He’s obsessive about momentum, about planting clues and symbols that echo forward, and about foreshadowing endings from the very first page. “When I first read Moby-Dick, that was the novel that showed me how you foreshadow an ending,” he told NPR. “If you really know exactly what is going to happen, you can do it this way.”
In his younger years, he juggled coaching wrestling with writing early drafts in the margins of his life. Now, with the freedom to write full-time, he immerses himself more deeply.
When I’m beginning a book, I can’t work more than two or three hours a day. I don’t know more than two or three hours a day about a new novel. Then there’s the middle of a book. I can work eight, nine, twelve hours then, seven days a week—if my children let me; they usually don’t.
He rarely reads while writing, because the work consumes so much of his day. “Given the choice between writing and reading, I write,” he told Bostonia. “It’s fortunate I was a good reader as a young man; I read very little now.”
Irving knows how each character’s story ends before the first page is written. His obsession with endings isn’t about control—it’s about clarity. “The authority of the storyteller’s voice—of mine, anyway—comes from knowing how it all comes out before you begin,” he told The Paris Review. “You might say I back into a novel.”
Even at 80, he still aims to write every day. He uses a slanted posture board to accommodate his back and scribbles out long passages by hand. “I still like the idea of dying when I’m writing and leaving an unfinished sentence for somebody to finish for me,” he told NPR. “That makes me feel good.”
No Comments