I don't know how much you, the reader, are enjoying these posts. I will say that going through Steinbeck's book, Journal of a Novel, has allowed me to revisit much of what I had gathered when I was reading through it the first time and I have even noticed other passages that I have gleaned a lot from. I would suggest reading each excerpt slowly and really thinking about each one. I believe there are multiple items one can learn from in almost each of the excerpts. Well, let's get to Steinbeck and away from Dark.
"Now the innocent sound and the slight concealment are not done as tricks but simply so that a man can take from this book as much as he can bring to it." --pg. 16&17
"Now that I am in it (the writing of East of Eden) I cannot see beyond it and increasingly it becomes difficult for me to see out of it." --pg. 19
"I don't suppose writing consists in anything more than doing it." --pg. 19
"I don't understand why some days (in writing) are wide open and others closed off, some days smile and others have thin slitted eyes and others still are days which worry." --pg. 19
"It is always amazing to me how we forget our failures. I guess if we didn't, we could not survive."-- pg. 22
"And as I have mentioned before and again and again--a story has a life of its own. It must be allowed to takes its own pace. It can't be pushed too much. If it is, the warp shows through and the story is unnatural and unsafe."--pg. 23
"There are few enough true things in the world. It would be a kind of sin to conceal any of them or to hide their little heads in technique as the squeamishness of not appearing in one's own book. For many years, it did not occur in my writing. But this was only apparently true--I was in them every minute. I just didn't seem to be." --pg. 24
"A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should almost be able to stand alone. If this is done then the breaks we call chapters are not arbitrary but rather articulations which allow the free movement of the story." --pg 25
"Things do happen and continue to happen on the outside. Isn't it odd that I now regard the book as the inside and the world as the outside. And just as long as that is so the book is firm and the outside cannot hurt it or stop it. And I must be sure that it remains that way by never letting time go by without working on it. For it is one thing to have in one's mind that the book will never be done and quite another to let it stop moving." --pg. 27
"And the book does move along little by little....It lacks tension and that is just exactly what I want and intend it to do. But it may cause trouble to you as a publisher because people have grown to expect tautness and constant action. It's like in present-day theatre. If there isn't shouting and jumping around, it isn't liked. For people seem to have lost the gift of listening. Maybe they never had it." --pg. 29
"The fact of the matter is that you just cannot tell how anything is going to work or how hard or easy it will be. It always fools you." --pg. 35
(I hope the ghost of John Steinbeck doesn't read this blog after reading this!)
"But God save me from amateurs. They don't know what they are but it is more serious than that. They immediately start rewriting. I never knew this to fail. It is invariable. For that matter, I think I dislike amateurs in any field. They have the authority of ignorance and that is something you simply cannot combat." --pg. 36
"Aren't they really living people? This is the time when I am glad I am or try to be a writer--the growth and flowering of something I seem only to plant and nurture for a while." --pg. 39
"And I think I want to make it clear that true things quite often do not sound true unless they are made to." --pg. 48
"I am not writing for money any more now than I ever did. If money comes that is fine, but if I knew right now that this book would not sell a thousand copies, I would still write it." --pg. 55
Happy Reading and thanks for stopping by,
David
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