The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving Page A

Hansen or Stephen Wright or T. Coraghessan Boyle or Susan Taylor Chehak or Allan Gurganus or Gail Harper or Kent Haruf or Robert Chibka or Douglas Unger how to write, but I hope I may have encouraged them and saved them a little time. I did nothing more for them than Kurt Vonnegut did for me, but in my case Mr. Vonnegut—and Mr. Yount and Mr. Williams—did quite a lot.
    I’m talking about technical blunders, the perpetration of sheer boredom, point-of-view problems, the different qualities of first-person and third-person voice, the deadening effect of exposition in dialogue, the crippling limitations of the present tense, the intrusions upon narrative momentum caused by puerile and pointless experimentation—and on and on. You just say: “You’re good at that.” And: “You’re not very good at this.” These areas of complaint are so basic that most talented young writers will eventually spot their mistakes themselves, but perhaps at a time when a substantial revision of the manuscript might be necessary—or worse, after the book is published.
    Tom Williams once told me that I had a habit of attributing mythological proportions and legendary status to my characters—he meant before my characters had
done
anything to earn such attribution. (The same could be said of Garcia Märquez, but in my case Mr. Williams’s criticism was valid.) And Kurt Vonnegut once asked me if I thought there was something intrinsically funny about the verbs “peek” and “peer.” (What could be “intrinsically funny” about
verbs?
I thought. But Mr. Vonnegut meant that I overused these verbs to a point of self-conscious cuteness; he was right.)
    When I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Gail Godwin was a student there, and the future (1989) National Book Award winner, John Casey, was in my class—Gail and John were “taught” by Kurt Vonnegut, too.
    Mr. Casey recently reminded me that Ms. Godwin was, upon her arrival in Iowa City, already a writer to take seriously. Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless.
    â€œPlease leave me alone,” Ms. Godwin warned the offending student, “or I shall be forced to wound you with a weapon you can ill afford to be wounded by in a town this small.”
    The threat was most mysterious, not to mention writerly, but the oafish lecher was not easily deterred. “And what might that weapon be, little lady?” the lout allegedly asked.
    â€œGossip,” Gail Godwin replied.
    Andre Dubus and James Crumley were also students at the Writers’ Workshop then. I remember a picnic at Vance Bourjaily’s farm, where a friendly pie-fight ensued; Dubus or Crumley, bare-chested and reasonably hairy, was struck in the chest by a Boston cream pie. Who threw the pie, and why, escapes my ever-failing memory—I swear I didn’t do it. David Plimpton is a possible candidate. Plimpton and I were wrestling teammates at Exeter—he was the team captain a year ahead of me—and our being together in Iowa seemed an unlikely irony to us both. (Plimpton had wrestled at Yale.)
    These were the days before the fabulous Carver-Hawkeye Arena; the Iowa wrestling room was up among the girders of the old fieldhouse. Dave Mc-Cuskey was the coach; he was friendly to me, but ever-critical of my physical condition. I was capable of wrestling, hard, with Coach McCuskey’s boys, but only for three or four minutes; then I needed to sit down and rest on the mat with my back against the wrestling-room wall. McCuskey frowned upon this behavior: if I wasn’t in shape to go head to head with his boys for “the full nine minutes,” then I shouldn’t be wrestling at all. I was content to shoot takedowns until I got tired; then I’d rest against the wall—and