John Steinbeck's Writing Routine

Before Steinbeck wrote a single word of prose each morning, he sharpened his pencils. Not one or two pencils. Two dozen of them, arranged point-up in a cup on his desk. He favored round pencils specifically, the Blackwing 602 for its soft lead and the way it moved across the paper. The sharpening ritual could take fifteen minutes, and people who watched him work found it slightly maddening, this long careful preparation before anything happened. Steinbeck didn't think of it as delay. He thought of it as the start of the process.

His routine has been studied and misquoted for decades, mostly because of East of Eden and the strange document he left behind while writing it. Every morning in 1951, while working on what he knew was the most ambitious novel of his life, Steinbeck wrote a letter to his editor Pascal Covici in a ledger notebook. Those letters are now published as Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, and they're one of the most useful documents we have about how a serious American novelist actually thought about his work, day after day, through the grind of a long book. The routine they reveal is specific, a little eccentric, and if you look at it right, completely transferable.

The Pencil Ritual

Twenty-four pencils sounds like a lot until you consider what Steinbeck was asking of them. He used a very soft lead, which dulled quickly on the page. For the long sustained push of a novel chapter, he'd burn through six or eight pencils in a single session, and if he had to stop to sharpen mid-sentence he lost the thread. So he sharpened them all at the beginning, made sure they were ready, and lined them up where he could reach them without thinking. When one went dull, he put it down and picked up the next one. The writing never stopped.

The Blackwing 602, which Steinbeck favored along with other writers of his era, has a particular feel under the hand. The lead is soft enough that the pencil glides without much pressure, which matters over a four-hour session. Hard lead requires you to press into the page, which tires the hand and, more to the point, tightens the mind. Steinbeck seemed to understand, or at least to have worked out empirically, that the physical effort of writing should be as small as possible so that the mental effort could be as large as possible.

There's a version of this principle in every serious writer's toolkit. Hemingway chose pencils because they slowed him down enough to think. Steinbeck chose the softest pencil available because he wanted the physical friction reduced to almost nothing. Both approaches were right, for their own work. The underlying idea is the same: whatever you're writing with, you should have thought about why. Tools are decisions, and decisions about tools reveal something about what you value in the act of writing itself.

For Steinbeck, the sharpening ritual was also time to think. By the time the twenty-fourth pencil was ready, his mind had been working on the day's pages without quite knowing it. He'd been moving his hands and letting his attention drift toward the work without forcing it. The ritual created a controlled approach to the draft, a way of coming in at an angle rather than throwing yourself directly at the blank page. He didn't call it that. He just knew it worked.

Writing Letters as a Warm-Up

The more interesting half of Steinbeck's routine during the writing of East of Eden is the letter system. Every morning before he wrote any prose, he wrote a letter to Pascal Covici, his editor at Viking Press, in the left-hand pages of the same large ledger that held the novel. The letters were private, never intended for Covici to read during the writing process. They were a way of getting the pen moving, of clearing whatever was clogged in his head, of talking himself into the state the novel required.

The letters published in Journal of a Novel cover the full span of the writing year, from January 1951 to November of the same year. Reading them is like watching a man rope himself to the desk. Some mornings he wrote about the quality of the light through his window in New York. Some mornings he wrote about his sons or his marriage to Elaine or the dog. Some mornings he simply said he was afraid the book was no good and then, having said it, wrote the next chapter anyway. The fear went into the letter and stayed there, and the prose pages on the right-hand side were left clean.

This is a more sophisticated technique than it first appears. One of the real problems in any long writing project is what to do with the ambient anxiety: the doubt, the second-guessing, the comparison to other books, the fear that the whole thing is going wrong. Most writers let that material mix into the actual prose, which is why first drafts often feel cluttered with authorial nervousness. Steinbeck gave the nervousness its own page. He contained it. By the time he moved to the right-hand side of the ledger, the worst of it had been said and set down and left behind.

Writers working on literary fiction tend to face this problem most acutely because the books are long and the standards are self-imposed. There's no genre blueprint telling you the revelation should go here and the confrontation should go there. You're inventing the structure and the tone and the emotional logic at the same time, every day, while also doubting whether any of it is worth doing. Steinbeck's letter system was a pressure valve. It let him be scared and then let him write anyway, and the two activities stayed in separate columns.

The Quota He Refused to Count

Steinbeck set a page quota for himself during East of Eden but refused to tally it obsessively. The entries in the Journal of a Novel letters show him recording the day's page count with a deliberate lightness, as if the number mattered less than the fact that pages existed at all. He understood that an obsessive relationship with word count could pull the writer out of the dreaming state the work required and drop them into an accountant's mindset, which was death to the kind of fiction that actually meant something.

Earlier in his career, during the writing of The Grapes of Wrath in 1938, Steinbeck kept detailed journals that were published posthumously as Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath. Those journals show a writer who knew exactly how many pages he needed and when he needed them, managing a production schedule on one hand while trying to stay inside an emotional experience on the other. He wrote the novel in about five months, averaging roughly two thousand words a day. The pace was brutal and he said so in the journals. He also said he couldn't let himself think about the pace while he was making it.

The practical lesson here is about the relationship between measurement and absorption. A writer needs enough awareness of their output to maintain a sustainable pace, but too much attention to the number yanks them out of the story and into performance mode, writing toward a target rather than toward a truth. Steinbeck managed this by recording the count and then moving on. He logged it and forgot it. The next morning was a new day, and what mattered was the next page, not the tally of previous pages.

Jackson Benson's biography The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer describes a man who took his work completely seriously without taking himself seriously at all. While writing, he kept his books to himself and avoided reading reviews when they came out. His attention stayed intensely, almost superstitiously, on the daily practice rather than the outcome, and the outcome was East of Eden, which he considered the book he'd been working toward his entire life. The dailiness was the point. The dailiness was the thing.

John Steinbeck's Morning Writing Routine

Steinbeck's morning routine during the East of Eden year started at a rolltop desk in his workroom in his house on East 72nd Street in New York City. He described the setup in the letters to Covici: the desk with its pigeonholes, the ledger open in front of him, the cup of sharpened pencils to one side, and the quiet of early morning before his family was fully awake. He was fifty years old while writing the book, and he knew it. The letters carry a current of awareness that the years were going and the major books were behind him except for this one, which he intended to be the large thing.

The morning began with the letter. A page or two, sometimes three, to Covici. Whatever was in his head went there first: thoughts about the book's structure, complaints about the weather, memories of the Salinas Valley where he'd grown up, meditations on the biblical story of Cain and Abel that runs through East of Eden's center. The letters were not polished. They weren't supposed to be. They were the warm engine before the engine was needed.

Then he moved to the right-hand pages of the ledger and wrote the novel. He aimed for six manuscript pages, though the actual count varied. When the six pages were done, or when his attention gave out somewhere around noon, he stopped. He did not go back to look at what he'd written until the next morning. The afternoon belonged to his sons and his wife and the city outside the window. In the evenings he sometimes read, sometimes went out. The manuscript stayed closed. By the time he opened it the following morning, something in him had already been working on the next passage without his permission, and the letter to Covici helped him find out what that was.

Sources

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters by John Steinbeck (Viking Press, 1969) is the primary source for his daily routine during the writing of East of Eden, published from the original ledger after his death. Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938–1941, edited by Robert DeMott (Viking, 1989), documents his working process during his most celebrated earlier novel. Jackson J. Benson's The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (Viking, 1984) is the definitive biography and covers his work habits across his entire career. Additional context comes from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (Viking, 1975), which collects correspondence that illuminates his discipline and daily thinking across decades.

What You Can Steal

Steinbeck's routine produced one of the most ambitious American novels of the twentieth century, and it did so through habits any writer can adopt without spending a dollar. Here's what actually transfers:

Write the fear down before you write the book. Steinbeck put his doubt into the letters and left it there. The prose pages stayed clean because the anxiety had somewhere else to go. Any private warm-up writing, a journal entry, a letter you'll never send, serves the same function.

Sharpen your pencils before you open the draft. The ritual is a consistent physical action that signals to your mind the writing state is starting. Do the same small thing every time, in the same order, before you begin.

Use the same notebook for warm-up and work. Steinbeck's left-hand pages and right-hand pages created a contained world. The ledger held both the approach and the arrival. Keeping them in the same physical object made the transition between them feel shorter.

Set a quota you can sustain for months, not days. Six pages sounds manageable until you've been at it for six months. The quota should be something you can do when you're tired, when the writing is going badly, when you'd rather be anywhere else. That's the number that finishes books.

Don't look back until the next morning. Steinbeck read yesterday's pages as part of starting today's session, not as a separate revision pass. The forward motion of the draft is more important than the cleanliness of any individual page. Let the pages cool overnight and read them once, quickly, before you pick up where you left off.

The Routine at a Glance