John Steinbeck's Rules of Writing

Last week Dakota POllock called from Mexico City. He has a serious friend down in the DF. A woman. Ilsa. He'sin love and not afraid to say it every time we speak. I 'm happy for him. He's stopped drinking. A good thing. He's still in his thrirties. My sobriety began at 69 after throwing up blood and after a successful emergency operation or procedure to stop the internal bleeding bleeding from my liver, a young doctor at NYU hospital told me me, "It ddoesn't look good."

It hadn't, but I survived and I'm glad Dakota won't have to travel the same road, because he drank heavier than me and might have only made forty. Buena Surta.

He is revising his first novel and said that he had read John Steinbeck's rules for writing. He was surprised that I hadn't heard of them. I was too. I love Steinbeck. CANNERY ROW is perfect. That conversation was three days ago and today I search for Steinbeck's six rules. I should have read them decades ago. Maybe I had. Here they are from the man himself

Now let me give you the benefit of my experience in facing 400 pages of blank stock-the appalling stuff that must be filled. I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone's experience which is probably why it is so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.

1. 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.

2. 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 fow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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

Simple, but I would have added, "Take a typing course." My typing sucks and still does. I blame it on maulyxsia, in that my fingers know how to spell, but can't navigate the QWERTY keboard with racking up typos en masse.

The opening lines to CANNERY ROW 1945

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.”

In the morning, when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay … Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again … The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora’s emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong’s grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some part or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora’s – the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row.

-Cannery Row by John Steinbeck