Steinbeck's routine ran on patience, not bursts. He aimed for roughly a page a day, wrote it all in pencil, and warmed up each morning by writing to someone else before he wrote for himself.
A Page a Day
Steinbeck thought a single finished page was good progress, even if it took him the whole day to get there. He'd rather move forward slowly than stall trying to perfect what he'd already written, and he trusted that small, steady gains would compound into a book. That patience was deliberate, not laziness. He once told a writer friend to forget the size of the manuscript and just hit one page a day, and he held himself to the same standard across some very long novels. The pace sounds modest until you do the arithmetic. A page a day, kept up without drama, is how a four-hundred-page book actually gets written.
He wrote longhand in pencil, going through dozens a day and insisting they be round so the barrel didn't dig into his fingers over a long session. He liked a soft, dark lead that let him write without pressing, which kept his hand fresh deeper into the day. The mechanics of that get their own page on whether Steinbeck wrote in pencil, but they fit the same philosophy as the page-a-day pace. Remove friction, protect the body, and keep the work sustainable for the long haul a novel demands.
The Warm-Up Letters
His best-documented habit was the daily warm-up. While drafting East of Eden in 1951, he used a large lined notebook and wrote a letter to his editor Pascal Covici on the left-hand page before starting the day's novel on the facing right-hand page. The letters weren't mailed and weren't meant for anyone. They were a way in. He'd talk through what the chapter needed, grumble about his insomnia or the weather, sketch where the characters were headed, and by the time he'd filled the left page his hand and his head were both moving. He admitted he had to dawdle a certain amount before real work began, and these letters were the dawdle that got him there.
Here is the diary of a book and it will be interesting to see how it works out.
John Steinbeck, Working Days, 1938
The warm-up did real work beyond loosening his hand. It let him think out loud about problems before they hit the page, so a tangle in chapter twelve got chewed over in the morning letter instead of stopping the draft cold. It also gave him a private place to manage his own head. He was a chronic worrier about whether the book was any good, and the journals are full of him talking himself off the ledge and back to the desk. The ritual turned a writer's worst hours, the ones spent dreading the work, into a low-pressure on-ramp toward it.
Those East of Eden letters were later collected and published as the book Journal of a Novel. It wasn't the first time he'd done this. He kept a similar work diary, later published as Working Days, while pushing through The Grapes of Wrath in a hard five-month stretch in 1938. That journal is full of self-doubt and pep talks, a record of a man arguing himself back to the desk morning after morning. Both books show the same thing. For Steinbeck, writing about the writing was how he warmed the engine and kept his nerve. The whole picture lives on the full John Steinbeck writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Make the target small. One real page beats a guilty zero.
- Warm up in writing. A few low-stakes paragraphs can unlock the hard ones.
- Keep a working journal. Steinbeck used his to talk himself through doubt and keep a record of the climb.