The Clearing-House
I recently read Journal of a Novel, the collection of letters which John Steinbeck wrote to his publisher over the ten months it took to write East of Eden. Steinbeck wrote his first draft in a large notebook, using the right hand pages to write the book and the left hand pages to write this series of letters. He would start each working day with a letter, which was his way to clear his mind, establish a good writing rhythm and get his handwriting to settle down. The letters do a certain amount of reflecting on the story itself, explaining what his day’s work is going to involve, what characters are going to be introduced today, what he’s trying to achieve stylistically and so forth. They’re much more concerned, though, with the miscellany of Steinbeck’s writing process. His pencils are a particular obsession. He would buy round pencils (the hexagonal ones aggravated his writer’s callous) in lots of four dozen, and would sharpen a whole jar full before each day’s work, so that he could change as they became blunt. His electric pencil sharpener, incidentally, is another recurring subject (he seemed to feel guilty about using it, as if it was an incredible indulgence). He would keep using the pencils until the metal surrounding the eraser started to rub on the webbing of his thumb, then he would pass them on to his sons to use for drawing and replace them (the pencils, not the sons) with new ones. He talks a great deal about his writing bench, a drafting table which he made himself, about the angle of its incline and the reflectivity of its surface (he repainted it a couple of times to reduce glare).
Throughout the letters, he is very insistent on keeping his writing speed down. It seems that writing slowly enough was a constant discipline for him - I’m not quite sure why. He talks about the need to let the story “breathe”, which perhaps is a way of saying that he needed time to reflect on the progress of the novel as it went along, which makes sense. He also talks about the burnout that he suffered towards the end of The Grapes of Wrath, and perhaps he was pacing himself so as to keep his head straight.
I liked the book for a couple of reasons. I actually liked reading about his petty obsessions - it’s reassuring to think of the novelist being diverted by the workings of his electric pencil sharpener, or meditating on his emergent callouses. Creation probably always takes place in a space surrounded by these kinds of trivial details, and it makes me feel better knowing that my modern-day obsession with various bits of technology associated with the creative process is really just an echo of Steinbeck and his pencil jar. (Of course, I’m not writing a novel, and I’m not comparing myself with Steinbeck in any other sense).
I also liked reading this unedited manuscript, which was reproduced in book form more-or-less verbatim from the original copy. Now and then he begins sentences without finishing them. His spelling errors (apparently he had a few persistent ones) are corrected, but a lot of the poor grammar and clumsy expression is left in. It’s nice to have this insight into a writer with his guard down, making the same sorts of mistakes as the rest of us make, knowing that he was as capable as anyone of writing cringe-worthy sentences. (Of course, Steinbeck’s detractors may say that he produced plenty of cringe-worthy sentences before and after he wrote these letters. Personally, it seems to me that while he is prone to the odd flight of pomposity which jars with his otherwise simple and unaffected style, and while his politics might not be to everyone’s taste, one would be a dickhead to claim that the guy couldn’t write.)
I also quite like the idea of the writer’s “warm up” in the morning. I’ve been trying it, these last few days, starting with an unedited, unjudged splurge into a journal which nobody (perhaps including me) will ever read. I find that after a while just rambling away incoherently, I begin to get the urge to express something that might become public. I don’t have handwriting to worry about, obviously, but even at the keyboard there is a flow state, a level of concentration where the formation of sentences in my head seems to keep pace with my fingers as I type, and whole passages will spill out more-or-less intact, without having to be coaxed and massaged and erased and re-written. I’ve sometimes sat down with an idea for a blog post but then found myself so frustrated with being unable to get the first sentence to sit properly that I’ve given up and done something else instead. The journal, while being a pitiable document in its own right, can be seen as a sort of clearing house for the constipated ideas which result from too much thinking and not enough writing. My inner monologue, it seems to me, is not the best place for ideas to be explored - they tend to double back on each other and lose track of where they’re heading. On paper (or its various digital equivalents), they can be laid out one by one in something like a map, allowing me to trace them from beginning to end and identify cul-de-sacs and collapsed bridges along the way. The journal can be thought of as a hand-off - taking a stream of consciousness and transferring it to the page, gradually letting the page take over until the writing begins to think for itself. You can tell when Steinbeck gets to that point - he always says something like “Right then, to work.” You can even see the flow state emerging as he progresses through each letter - the beginnings tend to sound a bit dreamy and unfocused, then he’ll usually wander off onto some tangent for a while and talk about his carpentry or his kids or (most often) his pencils, then his mind will come around to the book. He’ll start writing about pages he has planned for the day, and I think as his flow starts up you can feel him getting excited about putting the rambling letter aside and getting stuck into the real writing. I like it.