John Irving Interview
Check it out.
Tldr:
You cannot build on your past experiences in fiction if you are still muddling through those experiences—you need some hindsight.
Magazines and television are cheap and constant alarm mechanisms. Publishing has been imitating (or trying to imitate) the movie business for so long that I'm surprised anything reputable about publishing has survived—barely. But the problems with publishing have nothing to do with people reading less; publishing's problems have everything to do with publishers growing greedier—trying to sell more books instead of publishing better ones.
When The World According to Garp was a hardcover bestseller—and it never climbed very high on the hardcover lists—I think that you could be bestseller on the showing of 40,000-60,000 copies. Such a number wouldn't even make the lists today. I sell more books, in more countries, each time a new book is published.
Just because the culture of TV and movies is in decline, and publishing seeks to imitate the movie business, don't count readers out. They're everywhere. They may not be a part of the great majority, but an inquiring intelligence and a truly good education and a global point of view aren't part of the great majority, either. Readers will always do just fine.
We're expected to talk about our books, a little, and then shut up about everything else. Why? Don't creative minds have creative ideas?
We are anti-intellectual, we don't value the arts, and we don't sufficiently support education.
I'm always reading more than one book at the same time. ... I'm also reading Ron Hansen's new novel, Exiles—about the shipwreck that inspired Gerard Manley Hopkins to go back to writing poetry. Hansen has written some elegant historical novels—The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford among them. And I am reading Edmund White's Hotel de Dream—what White calls "a New York novel." It's also historical: about Stephen Crane, who is dying, dictating a novel to his wife—about a boy prostitute in New York in the 1890s. It's a novel-within-a-novel, and it's flawless.
By the time I got to Garp—my fourth novel—I had learned how to compose a novel, to consider the whole story before I began, to follow a grand scheme. These are issues of learning a craft, of studying the architecture of storytelling—also, not a matter of talent, and certainly not an intellectual process. I am a hard worker, and I recognize that repetition—the necessary concomitant to having something worthwhile to say—works in novels the way refrains and choruses work in music.
I think I really didn't hit full stride as a storyteller until my sixth novel—The Cider House Rules—and I've known more about what I'm doing ever since.
Tldr:
You cannot build on your past experiences in fiction if you are still muddling through those experiences—you need some hindsight.
Magazines and television are cheap and constant alarm mechanisms. Publishing has been imitating (or trying to imitate) the movie business for so long that I'm surprised anything reputable about publishing has survived—barely. But the problems with publishing have nothing to do with people reading less; publishing's problems have everything to do with publishers growing greedier—trying to sell more books instead of publishing better ones.
When The World According to Garp was a hardcover bestseller—and it never climbed very high on the hardcover lists—I think that you could be bestseller on the showing of 40,000-60,000 copies. Such a number wouldn't even make the lists today. I sell more books, in more countries, each time a new book is published.
Just because the culture of TV and movies is in decline, and publishing seeks to imitate the movie business, don't count readers out. They're everywhere. They may not be a part of the great majority, but an inquiring intelligence and a truly good education and a global point of view aren't part of the great majority, either. Readers will always do just fine.
We're expected to talk about our books, a little, and then shut up about everything else. Why? Don't creative minds have creative ideas?
We are anti-intellectual, we don't value the arts, and we don't sufficiently support education.
I'm always reading more than one book at the same time. ... I'm also reading Ron Hansen's new novel, Exiles—about the shipwreck that inspired Gerard Manley Hopkins to go back to writing poetry. Hansen has written some elegant historical novels—The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford among them. And I am reading Edmund White's Hotel de Dream—what White calls "a New York novel." It's also historical: about Stephen Crane, who is dying, dictating a novel to his wife—about a boy prostitute in New York in the 1890s. It's a novel-within-a-novel, and it's flawless.
By the time I got to Garp—my fourth novel—I had learned how to compose a novel, to consider the whole story before I began, to follow a grand scheme. These are issues of learning a craft, of studying the architecture of storytelling—also, not a matter of talent, and certainly not an intellectual process. I am a hard worker, and I recognize that repetition—the necessary concomitant to having something worthwhile to say—works in novels the way refrains and choruses work in music.
I think I really didn't hit full stride as a storyteller until my sixth novel—The Cider House Rules—and I've known more about what I'm doing ever since.
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