Words To Live By (One More Time!)

John Irving's The World According to Garp is one of my favorite novels for many reasons, among them, his ability to bring you inside the head of his characters. It's one of the books that...well it would be too much to say I was trying to follow in its/his footsteps when I started to try to write fiction. But it would not be too much to say I was (and am) frequently aware of it as an aspiration.

Given his and its success, there's no question I'm not alone in that. However, it added to my pleasure in discovering this, from Irving's interview in Writers at Work 8, given while he was in progress on A Prayer For Owen Meany:

I feel the story I am writing existed before I existed, I'm just the slob who finds it, and rather clumsily tries to do it, and the characters, justice. I think of writing fiction as doing justice to the people in the story, and doing justice to their story-it's not my story...

Yes. That's exactly how I feel, and seeing it said by a "real" writer...they don't come much realer...gives me a little more hope (I don't have faith, I have hope, but that's another post).

In the same interview, he also quotes one of my favorite sayings about writing:

Didn't Faulkner say something like it was necessary only to write about "The human heart in conflict with itself" in order to write well?