Well...today is Wednesday and it is time once again to attempt to glean wisdom and knowledge from John Steinbeck's, Journal of a Novel. I hope you are getting something from these posts or that you find them entertaining in the least or find them challenging at the most. Here are the day's excerpts:
"Now the day progresses and I haven't put down a word yet, but it is coming and I almost ready. Almost! I have the tone now" pg. 72
"And an amazing number of pretty girls are passing by my window. I like pretty girls very much but I am old enough now so that I don't have to associate with them and that's a relief" pg. 72 (Funny, right?)
" Of course--that's the way it has to go. So simple when it finally comes to you. That's the way it is. You fight a story week after week and day by day and then it arranges itself in your hands." pg. 72
"I believe too that if you can know a man's plans, you know more about him than you can in any other way. Plans are daydreaming and this is an absolute measure of a man. Thus if I dwell heavily on plans, it is because I am trying to put down the whole man. What a strange life it is. Inspecting it for the purpose of setting it down on paper only illuminates its strangeness. There are strange things in people. I guess one of the things that sets us apart from other animals is our dreams and our plans" pg. 75
"This is the kind of a day I like. I can do a few sentences, then stop and enjoy them. Most days there is something else to be done afterwards, but this is Tuesday, if I don't finish until evening, it doesn't make a bit of difference. And how nice that is." pg. 77
"You know it is about time for me to throw out a flock of pencils. They are getting short and I detest short pencils." pg. 77
"The callus on my writing finger is very sore today. I may have to sandpaper it down. It is getting too big." pg 78 (Oddly cool and weird, right?)
"I am ready and the words are beginning to well up and come crawling down my pencil and drip on the paper. And I am filled with excitement as though this were a real birth." pg. 83
"But I learned long ago that you cannot tell how it will end by how you start. I just glanced up this page for instance. Look at the writing at the top--ragged and angular with pencils breaking in every line, measured as a laboratory rat and torn with nerves and fear. And just half an hour later it as smoothed out and changed considerably for the better." pg. 85
"But I'm very glad the book is not finished--I would hate to have it done. I don't like to think of the time when it is done. That will be a bad day for me. A real bad day." pg. 88
"The book dies a real death for me when I write the last word. I have little sorrow and then go on to a new book which is alive. The line of my books on the shelf are to me like very well embalmed corpses. They are neither alive nor mine. I have no sorrow for them because I have forgotten them, forgotten in its truest sense." pg. 90
"I worked over the week end on that other story and had to throw it away again. It takes me so long in planning to do the simplest thing. I don't know what will come of that." pg. 98
Happy reading and writing,
David
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