Advice from John Irving: start at the end?

I grew up going to the library every Monday while my sister was at band practice.  I got to know a lot of the librarians during those morning visits. We'd talk about books, and they'd give me suggestions of books to read.  I remember one librarian who always read the last paragraph of a book first.  She said it made the plot more fascinating.  As she read, she'd be wondering how a certain moment or chapter moved her closer to that last paragraph, and she'd note when certain aspects of the last paragraph suddenly made sense.  When she told me this, I was a devout believer in starting a book with no expectations.  I even refused to read the summary on the back of the book.  The few times I did read the last paragraph before starting the book, I felt as if I were betraying someone, as if I were keeping some great secret from someone.  

I think the librarian and John Irving were talking about the same thing, just from different perspectives.  John Irving's advice also reminded me of something Arthur Golden told my short story class when he visited Wofford last semester.  We had read Chekhov's "Anyuta," and Golden asked us why it was important for us to know that Klotchkov was a medical student in his third year.  In other words, he wanted to know what that bit of information had to do with the plot of the story.  Golden explained, as many other people have explained to me over the years, that every character and every detail needs to move the story forward.  So, I guess knowing how a story will end makes it a little easier to understand what details are necessary to move the plot forward.

Anne Lamott talks about plot in Bird by Bird, but I'm not sure she'd agree with Irving's process.  She talks about character, dialogue, and setting, which create plot.  I thought it was interesting that she had a chapter called "Plot" in which she talks solely about character development and a chapter called "Characters" in which she talks solely about plot.  She says "Don't worry about plot.  Worry about characters" (page 54) because plot grows out of characters.  She recommends that you don't fix too hard on how your story will end up, but "fix instead on who your people are and how they feel toward one another, what they say, how they smell, whom they fear" (page 61).  Lamott completely believes in the organic, uncontrollable nature of writing.  She believes in being an observer who listens and watches her characters.  To her, writing is a vivid and continuous dream, and the ending is only slowly realized.  And when we reach the ending, "we need to feel that it was inevitable, that even though we may be amazed, it feels absolutely right, that of course things would come to this, of course they would shake down in this way" (page 61).

Of course, there is no right or wrong way to go about writing something.  Perhaps John Irving and Anne Lamott's advice isn't that different after all.  They both start with a seed of something, what Lamott calls the image inside a one-inch picture frame.  The idea is to start writing.  And I guess you never know how a story is going to begin anyway.  The first sentence you write down might, after many drafts, end up being the last sentence of your novel.