On Writing the Last Sentence First/John Irving

I love the New York Times Book Review conversations with authors—Sam Tanenhaus meets a writer meets a camera.

The current subject is John Irving, now nearing the completion of his twelfth book, Last Night in Twisted River.

What I find extraordinary about this conversation is what Irving reveals about his process. He writes, he says, his novel's last sentence first, and that sentence never changes, not even the slightest grammatical bit. Seven months to a year after finding the book's last sentence, Irving writes the novel's first words, and over a long stretch, then—years—the story develops. The beginning of an Irving novel will go through many iterations. The ending will not.

When I think back on the poems, short stories, memoirs, fables, and novels I've cranked my mind around—the things that I have tried, through the years, to write—I cannot think of a single instance in which I had glimpsed the last sentence before arriving right on the doorstep of that very last sentence. Vastly limited in my ability to look ahead in that way, I begin at the beginning, and I feel my way (often blindly) through. Never do I write so much as a pairing of words that goes unchallenged or unchanged (my books endure upwards of two or three dozen edits, and no sentence is spared). Never do I know, as intensely as Irving knows, enough to declare, This is done, solid, fixed in time and typeset.

(If I were to tell you how many iterations each of my blog posts go through, how they endure changes sometimes days after posting, you would ask yourself if my company is worth keeping.)

It works for Irving—this knowing where he's going. It no doubt works for others. But I never know, and I suppose I need this long bath of uncertainty to keep me rising at 4 AM, to keep me sitting here at my glass desk, to keep me hoping. I want to know, in my books and poems (in these blog posts, even), what is going to happen next, and in tiny fractions every day, my brain cedes bits and pieces.