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Though many students have read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men as a mandatory assignment, many students will be happy to know there is more to this author than an eccentric, melancholy book. The following are four pieces of advice for fiction writers that were originally written in a letter to writer Robert Wallsten in 1962.
- “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.”
- “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewriting 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.”
- “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.”
- “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 thing, you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.”
Though a bit contradictory, Steinbeck offered this advice after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature:
“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that make a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”
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