Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
‘John Irving At Home’ is a short film by Director Shaul Schwarz who was invited out to the authors house to film him, talk to him and take a peek around the writers sprawling house. In the film Irving talks about a little about his writing process and his love of wrestling while taking us into his very own wrestling gym as well as the office where he writes in the old fashioned way – with pen and paper – in front of windows looking out onto the forested hills of southern Vermont.
Irving says about his writing:
I can’t imagine being alive and not writing, not creating, not being the architect of a story, I do suffer, I suppose, from the delusion that I will be able to write something until I die. That’s my intention, my hope.
And while we’re on the subject of John Irving here’s an extract from a previous interview in which the writer was asked about his thoughts on the future of the book.
Here’s what he had to say:
If I were twenty-seven and trying to publish my first novel today, I might be tempted to shoot myself. But I’m 67 and I have an audience so I’m not especially worried about my future in the book business. But I think it’s much harder to be a young writer, a writer starting out today than it was when I started out, when my first novel, Setting Free The Bears, was published back in the late sixties. Here was a novel that wasn’t even set in this country, it was about a couple of Austrian students and it had a historical section which was easily half the length of the novel about the Nazi and then Soviet occupation of Vienna, not a very American subject.
I remember years later asking the guy who published that first novel if he would publish that novel if it came across his desk today, this was back in the 90s, and my old friend and editor and publisher, what I saw was, he hesitated too long. You know? He waited. He thought, “Oh, God, how do I answer this one?” And then he said, “Well, of course I would publish it today.” And I said, “No, you wouldn’t. I saw the hesitation.” And he laughed and said, “No, of course, I wouldn’t.” Very telling. And I think it’s a lot tougher to be a first novelist, to be an unknown novelist today than it was for me and so I worry about what’s going to happen with those good, younger writers. But I don’t think the book is in any particular peril, I think the book is going to survive