John Irving’s Writing Routine

"I have nothing against my laptop, but it’s too fast, too easy. Writing by hand is more like drawing."

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