Steinbeck's most quoted advice isn't from a craft book. It's six blunt rules he scribbled in a 1962 letter to a friend who was stuck on a draft, the same year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Paris Review printed them years later, and writers have passed them around ever since.
Stop Trying to Finish
Steinbeck's first rule is the one people remember. He told Wallsten to abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the four hundred pages, he said, and just write one page a day. There's a strange logic in that. The whole book is too big to picture without flinching, and the size of it is exactly what freezes most people at the desk. Shrink the goal down to a single page and the dread has nothing to grab onto. The math takes care of itself, because a page a day for a year is a finished novel, but you never have to think about the year.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps.
John Steinbeck, letter to Robert Wallsten, 1962
Coming from Steinbeck, this carried weight. He'd just won the Nobel and he'd already finished some of the longest, most ambitious novels in American letters, so the advice wasn't the wishful thinking of someone who'd never made it to the end. It was a working method from a man who'd written The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden a page at a time. The same idea shows up in his own journals, where he kept reminding himself to take the book in small daily bites rather than choke on the whole thing.
Write Fast, Fix Later
Rule two: write freely and as fast as you can, and throw the whole thing on paper. Don't correct or rewrite anything until the full draft is down. He thought stopping to polish was usually just an excuse to avoid going forward, a way to feel busy while the book stalled. Get the messy version out first, all of it, and worry about the sentences once you can see the shape of the whole thing. This wasn't theory for him. He practiced it across his longest books, refusing to circle back until a draft was complete.
Rule three pushed against stage fright. Forget the faceless audience, he said, because it'll scare you to death and, unlike the theater, it doesn't really exist anyway. There is no crowd out there judging the page as you write it. So write to one person instead, someone real you know or someone you've imagined, and let that single reader stand in for everyone. It turns the act of writing from a performance into a letter, which is a far easier thing to start.
The other three rules cover the practical traps that snag a draft. If a scene gets the better of you and you still want it, bypass it and go on, because once the whole book is done you may find the scene was fighting you because it didn't belong there. Be suspicious of any scene you love more than the rest, since the favorite is usually the one that's out of proportion and needs cutting. And if you're writing dialogue, say it aloud as you write it, because only then will it carry the sound of real speech. The same patience runs through the full John Steinbeck writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Shrink the goal to one page. The book is too big to hold in your head. The page isn't.
- Draft now, edit never (yet). Get it all down before you touch a word.
- Write to one reader. Pick a name and write the book to them.
- Read your dialogue out loud. Your ear catches what your eye misses.