Monday 12: From Vesna Maric — writer in residence at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival

9 months
2 weeks ago

‘The blank piece of paper is unimpressed. It hasn’t read your previous work.’ John Irving sits on the stage resembling Dennis Hopper with his cool demeanour, blue jeans and white hair combed back. He looks down at his hands and frequently peppers his musings on the writing life with dry wit. ‘I’m interested in the inevitable bad outcome of a story,’ he says. ‘I like the Oedipus myth, for example. When Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother, you know that’s not going to end well.’ His talk is, to writers and writing-enthusiasts alike, a lesson in what a life in writing is — or can be. Irving’s method consists of such hard discipline and persistence and knuckling down, however, that it makes the Japanese Zen Buddhists’ daily routine (meditating in a single position for anything up to twenty hours a day; all pain endured) like an all-day breakfast in bed.

Irving writes ten to twelve hours a day, every day, seven days a week. Not only that, he believes that this is the only way to be a truly excellent writer — or that a truly excellent writer can do nothing but write all day. Also that he or she must always know his manuscript inside out. Every mention of every small detail needs to be accounted for in the writer’s head, page number and all, at any point of the writing process. And this is achieved, says Irving, by constant, painstaking rereading and rewriting. Fifty, sixty times at least, of every manuscript you ever write. As I listen, I feel inadequate, ashamed. I am so lazy, I think. I can only muster four to five hours at the computer, five days a week. And then I’m wiped, nothing good comes out. I do reread and rewrite a lot, though, so that may offer some salvation. But I remind myself of how very different the writing process can be from one writer to another — Hemingway famously wrote standing up, and only in the morning, while others, like Balzac, only worked at night.

‘Were you born disciplined? Or did you learn to be disciplined?’ asks an awe-struck audience member. Irving pauses, as he does before each answer, takes a breath, fiddles with his arthritic fingers, a charming Zen master of sentence structure. You can hear him rereading and rewriting his answer in his head before he speaks. At one time in his life, he says, he taught writing and wrestling (not simultaneously), and the discipline of sport, the monotonous drill of training for hours on end, learning his skill and paying attention to detail, is what helped him set up his writing discipline. He talks about having a problem with anger as a young man. ‘Real life was too chaotic for me. Too many ambiguities, unanswered questions,’ he says. It made him angry. Real life, he goes on, simply fell short of the meaningful, purposeful structures of novels he’d loved reading, writers like Dickens and Melville where everything happened for a reason, and every cause had its consequence. He hated the chaos, the lack of a clear direction he found in ordinary, every day life. So writing, and the discipline that went with it, gave him meaning, a purpose. But I like the chaos of life, I realise as Irving talks, and I like the ambiguities, the unanswered questions. It’s chaos that everything was created from and it is the purpose of (good) literature to decode and underline the inconsistencies of human beings and the world, and perhaps with a bit of humour, to offer some salvation.

Irving’s talk is fascinating. He’s an old-school writer, a man who takes his task of creating fiction seriously. He hates first-person narratives, says he finds them limiting, and is at his happiest when creating intricate plots or researching the background material for his stories. On the day when Alastair Campbell, while promoting his first novel at the Festival, says it took him a single year to conceive, write and publish his book, Irving’s revelation that the idea for his latest novel (his 12th), Last Night in Twisted River, was brewing in his mind for twenty years, and took a ‘quick’ three years to write, gives me back faith in the writing process and the value of taking your time. True, writing is hard, slow work that can sometimes seem endless. But if you think plenty before you start, knuckle down and most importantly, enjoy it, it’s the best work in the world.

Vesna Maric is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Vesna Maric, Kapka Kassabova and Sathnam Sanghera in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Vesna’s latest book is Bluebird published by Granta Books.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Monday 12 October 2009.