John Steinbeck and Me

I’ve been wanting to dip my toe back into the blog pool for a while now, but blogging is much like exercising: the longer you go without doing it, the harder it is to start again.

 

Tidying my hard drive in anticipation of a new laptop, I was surprised to find how many writing tips from my betters (read: just about everyone who can spell)I have compiled over the years.

 

Thus was born as misguided an idea as you are likely to find on the Internet outside of anything posted by Donald Trump. Using these tips from famous writers as fodder, I’m going to post my own thoughts about them, mostly how they relate to my writing, if at all. This could be an educational exercise, in which case yay for me. It could also be a catastrophe, in which case yay for you, as it’s always fun to watch someone else crash and burn when it’s their own damn fault.

 Today’s installment looks at six writing tips from John Steinbeck.

 Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

This is a variation of the dictum The Beloved Spouse™ taught me years ago: eat the elephant one bite at a time. I don’t think I could have written seventeen novels any other way.

 

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

This may be the one tenet I observe most religiously, so much so some first drafts look more like screenplays, as I leave notes for what needs to be filled in so I don’t lose momentum.

 

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

This is something I learned as a musician when a performance wasn’t going as well as I liked. I’d pick a single person in the audience, typically in the back row, and play just for them. As a trumpeter, this made me project, which forced me to breathe and phrase properly regardless of the volume. It works just as well for writing, even if the single person in my imaginary audience is me.

 

If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it — bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

See my response to Number Two above. It’s not unheard of for me to go back, complete the chapter, then throw it away in a later draft.

 

Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

Steinbeck’s version of ‘kill your darlings.’ I cut a whole chapter from the final draft of the work in progress, even though I really wanted it in there, so much so I made excuses to keep it in all previous drafts. Reading through it this time, knowing it was my last chance to make changes, forced me to realize that, while well-written and entertaining, it did not move the story and did not tell us anything about the characters we didn’t already know.

 

If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

It used to scare The Beloved Spouse™ when she’d hear me arguing with myself behind a closed door. It probably still does – as it should – but even she agrees it makes the books better.

 

I enjoyed this exercise more than I thought I would. I hope you did, too.