John Irving on Novel Writing

The YouTube clip below features John Irivng, best-selling author of The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany. In this clip, Mr Irving talks about the novelist as a craftsman. He says:

The craft of a novel is simply to make the story better, more compelling, more unstoppable on page four-hundred than it was on page forty. You have to make the reader interested in the characters before the reader cares what happens to the characters. And there has to be some emotional pay-off at the end.

The end of the novel is so important to John Irving that he has the ending designed and set as a kind of focal-point in his mind before he begins to write his novels.




To get published as a novelist, you don't have to believe the same things about novel-writing that John Irving does, and you certainly don't have to write the same way. (Many brilliantly successful novelists start their novels with not even a clue about how it will end). If you want to get a novel published however, it is wise to to watch interview clips like this, and to ask yourself some questions about the creative novel-writing process.

So, after watching the clip above, what are the similarilies and differences between your creative writing processes and John Irving's? Is there something you feel you should change, or at least try differently? Use the comments below to answer and discuss.