📝 John Irving’s Writing Routine

Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.

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.”

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