Over the past two years, I have been reading a certain book and that book is, "Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters". It has taken me this long for a multitude of reasons, but the main one is that for being a book that is less than 200 pages (my copy contains 182 pages), it contains more wisdom and knowledge about writing, the writing life, and a plethora of other subjects than I've gathered from a single book in a very long time. When it comes to reading books about the subject of writing, I've only read five of them from authors that I put a little or a lot of stock in either what they wrote or how they wrote it. If you were to go to your local bookstore and locate the section where these types of books are kept, you would notice that the number of titles is mind-boggling. And what is even more bizarre to me is that almost a third of these titles are written by someone who has not written much else besides the guide. Yes, they usually have their Master's degree or PhD in Literature, but I just find it a little odd. It would be like me writing a guide on parenting because I've been a father for almost 6 months now. Of the books about writing that I've read, Flannery O'Connor's, Mystery and Manners, and now this book have had the most impact on me in relation to how I think about writing in general and how I attempt to approach my own weak attempts at setting my own thoughts down in written form.
I was going to do my usual book review for this book, but after finishing it about a month ago, I began thinking that just doing that would really sell it short after all that I had gathered from this book. As mentioned on the back cover, this book is not just Steinbeck waxing eloquently about how he writes, it is more like the book you would get if you mixed an autobiography, with a writer's workshop, and then added some personal letters in for either extra flavor or an added, edible garnish. If you have never heard of the book, stop what you are doing (except the reading of this blog, of course), go to the library, check this book out, and read it very slowly. The whole concept of this book is that each morning from January 29th of 1951 to November 1st of 1951, Steinbeck wrote a letter to his friend and editor, Pascal Covici, on one side of the notebook he used to write the original copy of his novel, East of Eden. He did this in an attempt to" get his mental arm in shape to pitch a good game...". Each of these letters reveal so much about the novel, Steinbeck himself, the trials and tribulations of the writing life, Steinbeck's love, care, and concern for his family, and lastly the "gladness and terror of writing".
So, what I've decided to do is each Wednesday, offer to you, my loyal readers of the HTH, some advice about writing from a master writer. I'm going to start with Steinbeck and then move onto O'Connor, add some Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dillard, and many others along the way. Wednesday's will for a very long time be known as, Wednesday's Wisdom for Writing, around this place. And yes, your Wednesday's will never be the same. So here we go:
"I am choosing to write this book to my sons...I shall tell them this story against the background of the country I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I discovered that there are other rivers. And this my boys will not know for a long time nor can they be told. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers. Perhaps that knowledge is saved for maturity and very few people ever mature. It is enough if they flower and reseed. That is all nature requires of them. But sometimes in a man or a woman awareness takes place--not often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. The craft of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness, a writer tries to explain the inexplicable"
John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, pg. 4
Happy reading and writing,
David
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