JI: The decision to make Ruth Cole a novelist was secondary. She was always a woman, and one who was successful in her career; for a while, in the first few months of taking notes for the novel, I was uncertain of her profession. But everything that haunts her and fills her with self-doubt is something that women think about and worry about more than men. Men don't hold themselves accountable for sexual misjudgment--or they don't hold themselves as accountable as women do. Many men have made countless bad-girlfriend choices; they tend to shrug them off.

We live in a world where it's permitted for a man to have a sexual history, a sexual past; provided he doesn't keep repeating it, a sexual past often enhances a man's image. But if a woman has a sexual past, she'd better keep quiet about it.

Ted Cole kills himself because he sees how his own sexual misconduct has influenced his daughter's sexual choices--not because he feels guilty for sleeping with his daughter's best friend. How many men kill themselves because their sons have made bad-girlfriend decisions?

And everything Ruth witnesses in Amsterdam, even what she only intends to witness, is more self-damaging (in her mind) because she is a woman. As Ruth observes of Graham Green: it's entirely permissible for a man to explore the sordid and the unseemly--it's even expected territory for male writers to explore. For women, it's forbidden. Ruth feels ashamed.

So many women today have careers that are in advance of their personal lives, or at the expense of their personal lives. Men, too--but men concern themselves about this less. If a man is successful, and has been married three times, and has not a single speaking relationship with any of his children from these fallen marriages, the foremost thing about him is still his success. But a woman, no matter how successful she is--in any career--sees herself as a failure if her personal life is unsatisfying, or if she's ashamed of it. Other people, men and women, tend to look upon such a woman as a failure, too.

And Ruth's mother, Marion, cannot recover from a tragedy that (relatively speaking) Ruth's father, Ted, allows to roll off his back. What amount to superficial wounds to men are often mortal injuries to women.

As for Ruth's being a novelist, I began with her father as a successful children's book author and illustrator. I knew I wanted Ruth to be better than her father, and to feel driven to compete with him--to have conflicted feelings for him, too. (The squash was only one area of competition between them.) Why not make Ruth a better writer than her father? I thought. Why not make her less superficial than he is, in every way?

HG: At least four of your major characters--Ruth and Ted, of course, but also Eddie and Marion--are writers of fiction, and you quote and summarize their works at length. Is this merely a plot device, or did you have something else in mind?

JI: Once I made Ruth and her father writers, I thought that everyone should be a writer--partly out of mischief, knowing what fun I would have comparing and contrasting the kinds of writers they are, but also because making the four of them writers allowed me to intertwine their lives with what they wrote about. Ted's stories for children are arguably stories for young mothers: the young mothers are Ted's principal targets--both his principal book buyers and his sexual prey. The creepiness of Ted's children's-story voice was also a way of setting up the detachment with which he tells Eddie and Ruth the story of the death of his sons.

Ruth is more autobiographical as a novelist than she is willing to admit, but her fiction goes far beyond her personal life; it is much more imagined than it is strictly autobiographical. Eddie, of course, cannot imagine anything. And Ruth's mother, Marion ...well, her writing is painful. It's storytelling as therapy. I say, if it does her good, let her do it.

I tried not to be condescending. Eddie may be a bad, even (at times) a laughably bad writer, but he is a decent guy, a compassionate man, and a good friend. (He's certainly a lot warmer than Ruth is!) And Ted, despite his creepiness--both as a writer for children and as a man--is a riveting storyteller. He gets your attention and keeps it. And, as a father, he's halfway decent; as Ruth says, at least he was there.

By making four of the principal characters fiction writers, I was able not only to connect their lives but also to connect their various interpretations of their lives. D. H. Lawrence once said that a novel was the most subtle form we had to demonstrate the interconnectedness of things. Well, that's true, but a novel needn't be subtle. A Widow for One Year (or any other novel by John Irving) isn't subtle.

HG: Apart from the facts that you moved from Sagaponack to Vermont, and that you have a son exactly Graham's age (and Ruth's age as a child), what other autobiographical elements are there in the novel?

JI: There are many autobiographical elements in the novel. Like Eddie, I went to Exeter, and my father taught there. He was one of the school's most popular teachers, however; unlike Minty O'Hare, my father never bored anyone. And, like Ruth, I found my love story somewhat later in my life. I was forty-four when I met my second wife; I'd been divorced from my first wife for five years. (Like Ruth, I'm not proud of my sexual past--I mean the years between my first marriage and my second, but not exclusively. I don't think I should elaborate.)

As for the choice to make Ruth the age she is when the novel begins--she's four--it was calculated not because I had a four-year-old at the time but because four is the age when memory begins. Most children don't remember much about being three. Four is when memory starts, but the memories from one's fourth year are not complete. I wanted Ruth's memories of the summer of '58, when her mother has the affair with Eddie and then leaves, to be present but incomplete.

Regarding Graham, it's true that my son Everett was exactly that age as I was writing the novel--hence I felt qualified to write Graham's dialogue (and Ruth's, as a child). Children of that age are impressively perceptive, but their language hasn't caught up with their perceptions.

It was vital to the novel that Ruth have a child the same age she was when her mother left her, because I wanted Marion to have to come back and face that child.

HG: You seem to take a dim, even moralistic view of promiscuous sex in the cases of Ted, Hannah, and even Ruth in her encounter with Scott. Yet, at the same time, you treat the prostitutes in Amsterdam with something close to affection. How do you reconcile these different outlooks?

JI: I would agree that I take a "dim, even moralistic view of promiscuous sex," but I also take a comic view of it. Ted's encounter with Mrs. Vaughn is funny; Hannah's perpetual escapades are also comic, but there's a sad side to Hannah, which I hope is redeeming to her character. And she's a lot more fun to be around than Ruth is. (Wouldn't most men rather date Hannah than Ruth? Maybe not marry her, but that's another story.)

I'm a New Englander. Perhaps the sexual disapproval of the Puritan fathers has seeped into my core. Promiscuous sex is invariably punished in my novels. (I'm not entirely comfortable about this.) And my two most saintly characters, Jenny Fields, Garp's mother in The World According to Garp, and Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules, are both sexually abstemious. They have sex only once in their lives; then they stop. I don't recommend this.

Personally, I am not moralistic about sex. What revolted me about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was the righteousness of the media. The thought of journalists as moral arbiters in the field of extramarital sex is repugnant. The thought of journalists as moral arbiters in any field is reprehensible to me. That's one of the reasons I made Hannah a journalist. Imagine Hannah as a moral arbiter!

As for the prostitutes in Amsterdam, I spent four years going to Amsterdam for two weeks at a time (at different times of the year each time). I spent a lot of hours with one policeman, and with a woman who was then the head of a prostitutes' rights organization--she's a former prostitute. I wanted to get the cop right, and I wanted to get the whore right. I wanted their stories to ring true with other cops and whores. Both policemen and prostitutes have assured me that Harry and Rooie are true to life.

In Amsterdam, the publication party for the Dutch translation of A Widow for One Year was held at the police station in the red-light district. It was well attended by policemen--less well attended by prostitutes. One prostitute who did attend told me that many of her colleagues were not in the habit of coming to the police station of their own free will.

The business of turning the shoes in Rooie's wardrobe closet, so that Ruth can better conceal herself there ...well, I'm especially proud of that detail. I invented it, and when I asked several prostitutes what they thought of it--did they think it would work, and so forth--they were very excited by the idea. One of them told me later that she was using the method herself. A case of fiction writing influencing another profession--most rewarding.

A sadder truth, about Rooie, is her need to make up a life for herself. Like Rooie, prostitutes need to invent their lives. They need to lie. That's just an observable fact. I don't disapprove of prostitutes or the men who go to them. It strikes me as a relatively honest sexual transaction. Compared to harmfully misleading or deliberately deceitful love affairs, the prostitute-client relationship is both forthright and unmessy. The shame commonly attached to it is a mystery to me. As opposed to declaring your love for someone when you don't feel it, or when you feel it for a different partner every few months, what's wrong with paying a prostitute for sex?

I don't find these "different outlooks," as you call them, difficult to "reconcile" at all.

If Ted Cole had lived in Amsterdam, and if he had visited a prostitute--even a different prostitute, as often as three or four times a week--think of how many lives he wouldn't have messed up.

I have never understood the objection to prostitution. To make it a criminal act, to drive it underground--that is what is criminal. That is also what makes it dangerous, both for the prostitutes and for their clients. The Dutch way isn't perfect. What sexual transactions are? But it's a better way to handle the situation than any other way I've observed.

HG: Even though Eddie is basically a comic character, you engender a great deal of reader sympathy for him. How do you turn a comic character into a sympathetic one?

JI: A part of what's comic about Eddie is also what's sympathetic about him: namely, he's vulnerable, and his haplessness survives his youth. In middle age, Eddie suffers the same awkwardness boarding a bus in Manhattan that afflicts him when we first see him as a teenager in love with Marion. And Eddie's love of older women is sincere. How many men have such enduring sexual attractions? It may require some imagination on the reader's part to believe in Eddie's steadfast attraction to older and older women, but it's not hard to imagine what older women love about Eddie.

I've had a lot of mail from older women lately. "Haven't met any Eddies," one letter said. And there was this one: "If you know a real Eddie, would you introduce me?"

Eddie is domestically heroic. His novels are transparent, his attachments strike Hannah (and probably many readers) as pathetic, but Eddie literally means what he says, and he does what he says he'll do.

Marion tells Eddie that she came back because she heard that the house was for sale. It's a good line, but she really comes back because Ruth wrote her and told her that Eddie still loved her; Marion needed to hear that someone did.

Ruth finds her Harry in the end--she gets to have her love story. But there's more emotion in Eddie's enduring infatuation with Marion, and in Marion's coming back, than there is in all of Ruth and Harry's love story. Marion is a much more moving character than Ruth, partly because of Eddie.

Of course there's a simpler explanation for Eddie's transformation from clown to compassionate hero: he grows up. Rather than see himself as a victim of what happens to him when an older woman takes up with him and then abandons him, he upholds his reverence for her as the guiding light of his life. That in itself may be absurd, but Eddie's convictions are true; he's not fickle. And there's something more about Eddie than at first meets the eye. His laughable qualities as a teenager--his innocence and oversensitivity, and how easily manipulated he is--are qualities that are admirable in him as an adult. He lets people use him (even Hannah); that's not an altogether unlikable quality. In Eddie's case, it's even brave. He lets Marion use him. It's a good thing for her that he does.

HG: Ruth has a strong punitive streak in her. In view of her childhood, that is certainly justifiable, but do you also find it admirable?

JI: Oh yes, I do! What idiot said that revenge was a dish best served cold? What matters is that you get the opportunity to serve it--who cares whether it's hot or cold? Ruth does have every reason to be punitive, to be more than a little rough (or crude) around the edges. Her revenge on Scott Saunders and on her father is, in my view, justified. So what if she goes a little too far? She didn't strike the first blow, did she? If she overreacts (a little) to what's been done to her, it doesn't bother me.

If people take a piece out of you, what's wrong with taking a piece and a half or two pieces out of them? I don't pick fights. I do fight back.

HG: Ruth does not pay attention to the reviews of her books. Do you think this is good advice for a writer, and do you follow it yourself?

JI: On this subject, above all, there is what Thomas Mann had to say. "We all bear wounds," Mann observed. "Praise is a soothing if not necessarily healing balm for them. Nevertheless, if I may judge by my own experience, our receptivity for praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than the opposite. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength."

I believe that. We live in a time when the politics of envy are flourishing. In the name of equality, the neo-Marxists want to punish individual achievement and success. In book reviewing, "private rancors," as Mann called them, abound. (There's no small amount of envy in book reviews, too.)

My writing has never been an acquired taste; I have always had, and will always have, mixed reviews. Many readers, and critics, love my novels; other readers, and many critics, despise every word I write. I don't inspire indifference; nobody is neutral to John Irving. I write long, explicit, plot-driven novels; I intend to move you to laughter and to tears. My language goes to extremes; to move the reader, emotionally, means more to me than persuading the reader intellectually. I have said the same of Charles Dickens; he had his fans and his enemies, too.

Jean Cocteau once advised young writers to pay very close attention to what the critics disliked about their work; he believed that what the critics disliked about you was the only original thing about you. I think this gives critics too much credit. I don't interrupt my writing to read my reviews, but--at the end of the day--I read them.

A book reviewer's animosity does my heart good. Praise is fuel, but so is anger. Reading something about myself that is infuriatingly stupid, or something that is seething with personal nastiness, is honestly energizing; it's a different kind of energy than I derive from praise, but I can still use it.

In terms of understanding the effect of my novels, I learn much more from the letters readers write to me than I learn from book reviews. You don't read a book the way a reader reads a book when you know you're going to write about it. I know--I've been a reviewer, too, after all.

Book reviews are more important, even tragically important, to young, unknown writers; they depend on good reviews. But the word of mouth about a book, among readers, is more important to me than reviews. Of course that's easy for me to say--I have lots of readers. When I publish a new novel, I keep a very close watch on the best-seller lists; I'm not ashamed to say that they mean a great deal more to me than reviews.

HG: You are often accused of being a sentimentalist, as if that were a bad thing. Do you regard yourself as a sentimentalist, and, if so, how would you define the word?

JI: I've already defined the word by admitting that it is my intention, as a novelist, to move you to laughter and to tears, and that I use the language to persuade you emotionally, not intellectually. In Great Expectations, Dickens wrote: "Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts." But we are ashamed of our tears. We live at a time when critical taste tells us that to be softhearted is akin to doltishness; we're so influenced by the junk on television and in the movies that even in reacting against it we overreact--we conclude that any attempt to move an audience to laughter or to tears is shameless crowd-pleasing, is akin to sitcom or soap opera or melodrama.

To the modern critic, when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty. But, for a writer, it is craven to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. To be emotionally inscrutable has become a predictable fingerprint of the "literary" author. I wouldn't want to be married to someone who was emotionally inscrutable. Who would ever want to be in a relationship like that? Well, I don't want a novelist to be emotionally inscrutable, either. In a novel, sentimental risks are essential; concealing one's emotions is a form of political correctness, which is a kind of cowardice.

HG: While you were writing A Widow for One Year, you were also working on movie scripts of two of your other books. What are the major differences in your approaches to a script and to a book, considering that almost any scene in your novels--take the ones at Mrs. Vaughn's house as examples--is filmable as written.

JI: "Filmable as written" only in the sense that I am a visual writer. I want the reader to see vividly the action in a scene--as you say, like those scenes with Mrs. Vaughn. But what makes the conclusion of the Mrs. Vaughn episode work is the lengthy buildup to that chase scene, when Ted escapes her; a lot of foreground has gone into Ted's character and Eddie's, in order to present Mrs. Vaughn in her far-flung rage. And a lot of anticipation has been built into Ted's pornographic drawings, so that to see them in tatters, in a swirl of litter surrounding Ted's car ride home with Glorie and her mother--not to mention their earlier effect on Eduardo--is the result of many layers of storytelling.

Unfortunately, those layers aren't "filmable as written." Much of my writing, although visual, is multilayered; it is also dependent on the effects of the passage of time on the major characters. That passage of time has an emotional effect on the reader, too. Hence when Marion says, "Don't cry, honey, it's just Eddie and me," not only do we hear the echo and remember the circumstances of when we first heard that line, we also recognize how much of the lengthy passage of Marion's life is captured in that sad, resigned assurance to her daughter. In a film, how do you get a line like that to work? It needs the understanding of time, and time's effects, to give it weight.

And because my novels are not only long, they're also plot-driven, in compressing the story to fit into the time restrictions of a feature-length film I am faced with losing whole characters and the story lines that accompany them. The process of making a screenplay from one of my novels begins with the decision of which two-thirds of the novel I am going to lose.

If I wrote shorter novels, I might find the process of translating a novel into a film more gratifying.

In the case of The Cider House Rules, which I have been writing and rewriting for four different directors over thirteen years, not only have I lost the major minor character of Melony, a moral and sexual force in the novel, but I have reduced a fifteen-year love affair to eighteen months. (Movies don't handle the passage of time at all well.) In the case of A Son of the Circus, which I have been writing as a screenplay for a mere eight years, I have made the main character, Dr. Daruwalla, a minor character in the film; two minor characters from the novel, the children who are sold to the circus, have become major, and another minor character, the Jesuit missionary, has become the hero of a romantic comedy--the missionary is the movie's actual star.

While the film credits will doubtless say, "based on the novel by John Irving," I think a more apt description of both my screenplays is that they are interpretations of my novels, not the novels themselves.

I'm pleased with both screenplays, but I like my day job better. I doubt that I'll write another screenplay. I enjoy writing novels more. And in the time I have given to these two screenplays, I could easily have written another novel. Relatively speaking, it is easy to write a screenplay--far easier than writing a novel--but what is difficult, especially for a semireclusive novelist, is the wasteful social intercourse that is required to get a screenplay produced.

You know how we work together as author and editor. I give you my manuscript ...you mark it up. I respond to about two-fifths of your suggestions, ignoring the others. In the case of A Widow for One Year, I might have responded to as many as half your suggestions. But that's it. Nobody is looking over our shoulders. And that's the way it should be.

With a screenplay, more people read it before it's produced than I could ever remember; people I don't even know, people who remain nameless but have nonetheless contributed this or that note about the script, people complaining about this or that scene for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality or the integrity of the overall story--lawyers, secretaries, business executives, bankers, actors' agents, assistants to assistants, and just plain jerks (in addition to the director and the producer). In short, every script, before it's produced, has suffered the comments of a veritable committee!

A novel is a single voice, made better by an editor who has the author's interests and intentions at heart--an editor who knows the author's interests and intentions as well as the author knows them. That is a creative relationship. At some level, the relationship between a director and a screenwriter is also creative, but that relationship is invaded, time and time again, by teams of people with conflicting agendas. It's like trying to build and fly a kite with the unwelcome "help" of a bunch of retired 747 pilots.

HG: You are known as a great defender of the nineteenth-century novel, particularly the works of Dickens and Thomas Hardy. What virtues do you find there that you feel are missing in contemporary fiction, and which contemporary novelists do you think fulfill--or come closest to fulfilling--these virtues?

JI: Thomas Hardy insisted that a novel had to be a better story than something you might happen upon in a newspaper. He meant "better" in every way: bigger, more complex, more connected, and also having a kind of symmetry or closure--even achieving a kind of justice, or at least an inevitability, in the end.

George Eliot, too--and of course Dickens. Their novels were designed. David Copperfield once remarked that he found real life a whole lot messier than he expected to find it. Modernism in literature upholds the theory that a novel can be a patternless mess (without a plot) because real life is like that. Well, good novels, in my view, are better made than real life.

If I like Dickens better than Hardy or Eliot, it is chiefly because Dickens is also comic. Even the contemporary novelists I most admire are nineteenth-century storytellers: Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Marquez, Robertson Davies. They all love plot, developed characters with interconnected stories, and the passage of time and its effects; not surprisingly, given my taste, they are all comic novelists, too.

I think the most modern novelist I admire is Graham Greene--"modern" in the sense that his emotions are inscrutable and, at least compared to the abovementioned four, he is very spare. But Greene was also a good storyteller, and he sought a symmetry or closure to his novels; the architecture mattered to him.

Good stories are constructed--they have a structure.

HG: You are certainly successful in the United States, but you are even more successful--both critically and commercially--in Canada and many European countries. Do you have any theories about why that should be true?

JI: Oh, there are many theories, but they're not all mine. My foreign publishers have their own theories about why this is so, and other authors have suggested reasons to me, too. I don't subscribe wholeheartedly to one answer, because there seem to be so many.

Here is what some other authors have demonstrated to me. Günter Grass is widely hated in both literary and political circles in Germany today. The Tin Drum is arguably the best novel ever written about World War II, certainly the best from a German perspective, and when Grass was exposing the Germany of World War II to his fellow Germans, his fellow Germans--like the rest of the world--loved and admired him.

But Grass shifted his penetrating gaze to contemporary Germany, and to a deeply historical and psychological analysis of what makes Germans so ...well, German. Now the Germans don't like what they're hearing from him. They want him to stop punishing them with his visions. That everything he predicted about German reunification has largely proved true ...well, naturally this doesn't make him popular, either. He is a great writer who is revered outside Germany, but despised within.

And Grass is not an isolated example. We have our own--Kurt Vonnegut. He is regarded outside the United States as a virtual prophet; he is often ridiculed at home. To a lesser degree--meaning less praised abroad, but also less condemned in the United States--Joseph Heller is like that. In my view, Vonnegut and Heller are this country's most original novelists; we should treasure them, but we don't. And then there's Salman Rushdie. In England they write terrible things about him, but here we love him--as we should.

So a part of my being more popular away from home is nothing more than that. Novels like The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany are certainly critical of the United States--the abortion history in the former case, the Vietnam period in the latter. And even Garp was read (especially abroad) as a kind of sociology of the polarization of the sexes in North America.

I am not an anti-American--although many Europeans see me that way, and I'm probably more popular in Europe because of it.

Harder to explain is that A Son of the Circus was sixty-three consecutive weeks on the German best-seller lists, making Germany a bigger country for me, saleswise, than any other country in the world. Do Germans like "difficult" books more than Americans do? Surely they must. One look at the German best-seller lists--even forgetting my position on those lists--is a lesson in cultural differences. Lots of literary titles are on those German lists, and lots of hard-to-read books, too. The same is true in France. And in the Netherlands, and in the Scandinavian countries, the numbers of readers of serious fiction are huge. Canada's best-seller lists are much more impressive than ours--meaning many more literary novels are represented.

What can I say? Most Americans who read at all read junk. The British best-seller lists are also disgraceful.

I think it is a fair generalization to say that European readers of fiction like novels to be challenging, to be demanding; nor do they follow trends or fashions in reading taste in the lemminglike manner of many readers in the United States. The media bears some responsibility for this. I have been interviewed in many foreign countries, and in the United States; the European journalists are more literary--meaning they've read more novels, more good ones, and they write about books in a more literary way.

The prevailing attention given to authors in this country concerns little more than the perpetual question concerning what is autobiographical in their novels. Authors are minor celebrities here, or else they're entirely unknown. And authors' lives are the subject of most interviews here--when authors are the subjects of interviews at all. We're certainly not as important in American culture as film and television celebrities or sports heroes.

In Europe, authors are important to the culture. I don't mean, either, that authors are more celebrated as celebrities there--not at all. Our books are more celebrated in Europe; books and authors are central to European culture. Here (in the United States) I feel that most interviews I have given have trivialized my novels; the journalists are looking for superficial autobiographical levers with which they can pry open my books. But novels aren't secrets. The good ones aren't gossip. Maybe the simplest way to put it is that the journalists who write about novels and novelists in Europe, and in Canada, are better than they are in the United States.

With very few exceptions, that has been my experience.

HG: I have the impression that, when you sit down to write, the sentences, even the paragraphs, are already formed in your head. Is this so?

JI: Many times, yes. I spend more than a year, sometimes two, just taking notes. I don't like to begin a novel until I know the story, know the principal characters, know how and when they meet each other, and when and how their paths cross again. I have to know the end of a story before I can imagine the best beginning. I come to the beginning last.

Your impression is largely correct. When I start telling a story, I already know the story. There must be authority and authenticity in a storyteller's voice; readers must trust that the storyteller is an expert, at least on this particular story. How can you be an expert if you don't know what happens?

By the time I write the first sentence of a novel, I don't want to be inventing anymore; the invention is largely behind me by the time I begin. I am just trying to remember what I've already imagined, in the order I've already selected as best for the reader. Telling a story is as much knowing what information to withhold as it is knowing what to tell.

In the case of A Widow..., I knew that Marion's coming back, and Ruth's seeing her and starting to cry, was where the story had to end. I knew what I wanted Marion to say, and that this would be an echo of what we'd already heard her say to Ruth as a child. But it took me the longest time to work my way back to the beginning, to find the first occasion for Marion to say something like "Don't cry, honey, it's just Eddie and me."

I'd been taking notes for a year and a half--I knew everything about Harry, and the death of the boys, and all about Ted, and even Hannah--but I still hadn't found the episode that is now the beginning of the novel, when Ruth catches her mother making love and Marion says, "Don't scream, honey . . ." and so forth. When I found it, I knew I was ready to begin. "One night when she was four . . ." and so on. That was a hard line to get to. All the rest just followed; they were waiting in place.

HG: Were there any places in the novel--or in any of your novels--where the characters took over what you had planned for them and started doing things that surprised you?

JI: No. Never.

Oh, all right, there have been small surprises, but the characters essentially remain as I have imagined them. I'll tell you what I mean by a small surprise. I knew Marion would come back and buy Ruth's house, with Eddie. I didn't know that Eddie would be so smitten with the idea of owning Ruth's house that he would go so far as to propose buying the house with Hannah. Naturally Hannah's reaction to that idea wasn't hard to imagine, but Eddie did surprise me in this one respect: he wanted that house badly enough to embark on this simply terrible proposition. It was a funny moment, and I decided to see where it took me.

I believe you earn those occasionally spontaneous moments only by carefully planning all that you can; if you've done your homework on your characters and their stories, a few good accidents will happen and you can take advantage of them. That's a far cry from trusting in accidents.

A good story must feel to the reader that it happens naturally. But it's not so natural being natural. In my case, it's mostly planning.




© Copyright 2010 by John Irving. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.

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