From a conversation between John Irving and Stephen King that ran a couple weeks ago in The Manchester Journal:

John: I lost half a novel once. Half a novel I’d already written.

Stephen: Get out.

John: Yes, I lost half of “The Water Method Man,” my second novel. I had taken it with me to Europe, hoping that a film I had gone to Europe to write, that if it fell through, or if it didn’t occupy me through the course of a year, I had this novel to go back to.

But the film took most of the year, and by the time I went home, back to the United States, I took the novel – I took half of “The Water Method Man” back to the United States with me, and the trunk got lost.

Stephen: Oh my god.

John: You know, people kept saying, “We’ll find it, we always find these things.” It was lost in shipping (we were taking ships in those days). So I began that novel again, and I hadn’t read it in almost a year. I always had a feeling in the back of my mind that it was always much worse than what I had previously written. Months later, the trunk came back, there was the novel, and what I’d newly written was a hundred times better. I just started reading the old pages, and didn’t even finish reading them; I just knew it was wrong.

Stephen: Yea, back when word processors had come in, was about the time of “Pet Sematary.” I had written it, and it had a very flat ending. I can’t remember what the ending was, but my editor for Doubleday was gone, and Sam Vaughn had taken over. I did the book with Doubleday, finished it to get a bunch of books out of this author/management thing – they had basically made it into involuntary servitude for young writers. They would essentially re-write the contracts and I’d get my money from the early books.

Sam said, “Would you do a new ending? Something punchier?”

I said, “What if Louis Creed’s wife, instead of just dying, what if you put her in the Pet Sematary and she came back, and that was the end?”

Sam said, “That sounds great!”

I told him, “Let me write that for you, and it will take me about an hour and a half.” I wrote it, and it was about nine pages long. And then, I pushed the wrong button, and instead of pushing SAVE, I pushed DELETE, and I sent it all to data heaven. I screamed, and it was the only time I did that. My wife came running. She thought I’d cut my hand wide open (which is what it felt like). Then I wrote it again, and the second time I wrote it, I thought it was a lot better. But then I had nothing to compare it to, so maybe the first one was genius.

John: The novel Ken Kesey was writing between “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion” was in Ken’s writing shack on Puget Sound, and his wife threw the novel into the Sound. I guess she had issues with things he had been doing.

Stephen: I guess she did.

John: She went into the writing shack and threw the whole novel into the Sound, so Kesey said, “Oh well,” and began writing another novel, and he never re-wrote that novel that ended up in Puget Sound.

That “I guess she did.” kills me. The rest of the conversation is pretty good, minus the boilerplate on the front end where they each discuss their favorite charities like very successful CEOs or ballplayers at a check-giving ceremony.

(Via Sarah Weinman.)