A Session with Steinbeck

I’m a very opinionated reader, especially when it comes to the genre of “Classics” and those authors who’ve come to be revered over the years. Having been an English major and then made it a point to pick up “Classics” for a creative project, I’ve read my fair share in this category of literature, and I have beef with too many idolized authors. Steinbeck, for better or for worse, is not one of them, and so it was with great delight that I so recently read Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975).

Of his works, I’ve made it through thirteen, so far. Not everything I’ve found enjoyable or good. The Grapes of Wrath has some very strong points just as it has some very weak points. The Pearl was not my favorite, but, oh, do I adore Travels with Charley. In Dubious Battle really surprised me (in a good way), and I’ve had incredibly rich discussions about East of Eden. 

It’s important you understand that I’m not trying to solely sing the praises of this author I really like and admire because I’m not trying to make any claim that he’s the best American writer or that his pieces should be at the top of every “Classics” list. What I’d like to do today is simply pass along some of the wisdom he’s given us through his stories—and also in the collected letters his wife and a fellow writer put together and edited after his death. 

And you should know that Steinbeck was a prolific writer, not only with his fiction but in his personal correspondence. Thousands of letters were returned to Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, when they announced they were putting a compilation together. Many of those letters, as seen in the book, are quite long. Almost mini essays sometimes, depending on who he was writing to and what his topic was. It’s a lot of words. So many words.

Of course, not all of those letters deal with writing and how he was developing his craft, though most of them mention, at least in passing, what he was currently working on. So, if you’re a Steinbeck fan, I recommend giving the compilation a read, but, if the point is to read it for all the writerly insight, let me speed up the process and extract that for you.

We’ll start with a piece of advice I’ve not heard from any other author but that I think can be helpful, especially as you’re starting out on your first draft of an idea. 

When you’re writing, you can’t think too much about your audience, initially, because you need to write your story for you and go from there. That being said, Steinbeck would have you think this: “Forget your generalized audience…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” (689).

In a different letter, he mentions how he did that for one story by imagining he was telling it solely to his sons. As he crafted East of Eden, he was telling it to his friend and publisher, Pascal Covici, and did so by starting those writing sessions with “warm-up” letters to Covici (which were compiled and published in 1969 as Journal of a Novel; quite good). 

The purpose of this suggestion is to keep you in your lane. With every story, you’ll have choices to make. Does a character make this decision or that one? Do you need to include more backstory to provide context or will adding more be going overboard? Writing is constant decision making, and, because so much is going on, you can accidentally swerve back and forth between multiple lanes, making it all confusing and jumbled. Having that person—someone you actually know—in your mind can ease that decision-making process by giving you a concrete visualization of your story not just being some intangible thing that’s veering here and there but soon to be a literal product you can hand over to that person and say, “Here, read this.”

So much of what will make that audience want to read is this next idea that crops up again and again, as Steinbeck thinks of why stories matter and why the good ones really work—the idea that all tales are rooted in something entirely human.

Later in his life, Steinbeck was obsessed with an attempt at rewriting Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur, which tells the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table), and, during his work on that, he has a realization about why Malory told the story the way he did. Why Malory allowed certain moral and character failures to persist. 

And it’s because “a novelist is a rearranger of nature so that it makes an understandable pattern, and a novelist is also a teacher, but a novelist is primarily a man and subject to all of man’s faults and virtues, fears and braveries” (520). That humanness doesn’t detract from the richness of the story; it enhances it. Because that makes plot events more compelling and realistic. That complicates matters so that we have to see how characters react and behave. That makes us feel something, as readers.

It’s like what Steinbeck remarked, defending to his publisher certain choices he made in The Grapes of Wrath manuscript. He said, “I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are being written” (167). Real life provided all the inspiration, scenery, and characters he needed to tell the story, and striving to reflect that was his main goal. 

I think sometimes we can get too caught up in trying to come up the most original or fantastical plot ideas, twists and turns that will hook readers or make our plots stand out for being so unique. Slice-of-life and the everyday can be just as, if not more, compelling as the fairy tales we may tell. It just depends on how you utilize your craft skills to pull out the humanity of a piece and convey it to your readers. And, even in the fantastical, you keep your audience grounded by portraying emotions or situations or thought processes that are an ordinary part of life. No matter your genre, these common—yet often poignant—elements should be baked into the foundation of your story.

The last Steinbeck insight I’ll leave you with is, again, a theme he touched on multiple times in his letters. For him, finding joy in his work was incredibly important, and I believe, if asked, he’d even say it was necessary.

What I know he said was this: “There is a school of thought among writers which says that if you enjoy writing something it is automatically no good and should be thrown out. I can’t agree with this” (443).

This isn’t to say, of course, that every story idea you come up with is going to be brilliant or that every time you sit down to write you’re going to have fun or the words will come easily. There were weeks, even seasons, when Steinbeck lamented to friends that he was having a tough time with his projects or not getting much written. Unfortunately, that’s a given to the experience of being a writer.

What he consistently commented upon and put in his letters was how fulfilling the work was, even on slow days. He enjoyed digging into the characters. He enjoyed just getting one more page completed and added to the rough draft pile. In times when he was between projects or stuck, he’d talk about needing to get back to work, about missing his words and his efforts.

If Steinbeck was alive today, I’m sure he’d second me on this: I hope you genuinely like the project you’re working on and that sitting down to crank out some words brings you joy. I hope you delight in brainstorming bursts where all you do is think about your ideas and where you’d like to take them. 

We all might not be as prolific as Steinbeck or be so lucky as to get to make a career out of writing, but, if his life in letters has passed along anything, it’s that you are your stories, in all that they are ordinary and revolutionary and legendary. Pursue your ideas, tinker with them, pack them with humanity, and keep writing them down, one page at a time. 

You know, it was Steinbeck’s birthday on the 27th. He would have been 124 years old, if that was a thing. To me, he’s a little bit timeless because, when I read his stories, the themes and emotions he’s given us connect as well now as they did at their time of publication. I imagine they’ll continue that way into the future. So, happy belated birthday, Steinbeck, and thanks for helping us to see how we can stay connected like that with our words, too.