Steinbeck's Rudimentary Suggestions

Novelist John Steinbeck once told an interviewer that writers are "a little below clowns and a little above trained seals." And yet, despite such skepticism, he was fiercely dedicated to the writer's craft, which he described as "the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness."

In a letter to his editor, Pat Covici, Steinbeck said that the writer "must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

In the mid-1950s, when comedian Fred Allen decided to write his autobiography, he turned to Steinbeck for advice. Here, as Allen recalls in the foreword to Much Ado About Me (Little, Brown and Company, 1956), are Steinbeck's "rudimentary suggestions for the beginner":

Don't start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don't try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember.

You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first, but kind of think of it when you aren't doing it. Don't think back over what you have done. Don't think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the manner of detail--cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling. Don't make the telling follow a form.

For any sort of descriptive or narrative writing, Steinbeck's recommendations appear sound. Fill a rough draft with precise descriptive details: "Put it all in." Afterward, when it's time to revise and edit, eliminate details that prove to be distracting, repetitive, or irrelevant: "cutting comes later."

Steinbeck echoed this advice in one of his final interviews: "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."

Composing Descriptions:

• How to Write a Descriptive Paragraph
• Model Descriptive Paragraphs
• Composing Descriptive Paragraphs and Essays
• Sentence Recombining: The Flood, by John Steinbeck
• Forty Writing Topics: Description

Image: John Steinbeck (1902-1968)