On John Steinbeck

I don’t remember reading John Steinbeck.

Oh, I’ve read most of his books (I’m pretty sure only the lengthy East of Eden is unread by me). What I mean to say is that I don’t remember sitting in a classroom or library or whatever and thinking, “I’m going to read John Steinbeck.”

My reading of Steinbeck likely started with an excerpt from The Red Pony, as I clearly remember thinking it was particularly gruesome that the poor pony died and was being eaten by buzzards when the boy who owned him found him.

Moralistically, I’m certain I know why this book was included in the anthologies we read in elementary school: Take care of what you own and listen to those wiser than you. And maybe that was Steinbeck’s intention when he wrote that particular tale.

Now that I’ve read what is likely my first bit of Steinbeck commentary and criticism, in the form of Stephen George’s “John Steinbeck: A Centennial Tribute,” I understand a bit more of why Steinbeck wrote as he did.

His wife Elaine summed it up nicely for me:

John believed in man. That’s what his Nobel Prize speech says. He said, “You believe in the perfectibility of man. Man will never be perfect, but he has to strive for it.” That’s the whole point. That was religious. He didn’t believe in any church creeds, but he said to me when he was dying,” Don’t you let a bunch of people get together and tell yarns about me. Make sure it’s the Episcopal burial service.” And I said to him, “Do you believe?” And he said “I’m like Socrates before he drank the hemlock: I don’t know if there are gods or not, but in case there are . . . “

The more I reflect on what I’ve read of Steinbeck, the more I agree what Elaine Steinbeck says here is true. He wrote about Man with the capital M, while concentrating on the little stories that, to mankind, to government, to the media, to man’s neighbors, mean little or nothing. And by that he pointed out the imperfectability of Man.

I believe Steinbeck stands with two other authors – Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis – and to a lesser extent, humorist James Thurber, as the authors who best capture America. I won’t say at its best or at its worst, because all of these writers focus on the good and bad, but whether it’s best or worts I don’t care to comment. What all have in common is their ability to look at the man vs Man, and see how the man – George Babbitt, Tom Sawyer, Tom Joad, or Walter Mitty – fit into the mold of an American man, or into a mold of America itself. Some of these men are treated poorly by America. Some of them treat America poorly. Some are wise. Some are innocent. Some are selfish. But all are Man in the big sense of the world, trying to figure out how to fit into it or make it fit them, for better or for worse. That’s where I can use that phrase.

If you’re curious about Steinbeck, or already know him, I can’t recommend George’s book enough. It’s got touching tributes, and scholarship – even criticism, all in about 190 pages.

And there's also this:

Steinbeck in Space

The last story in Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” could have been written by John Steinbeck, if Steinbeck wrote science fiction.

Save for the setting on Venus, “Logic of Empire,” which follows two Earthmen unequally convinced that slavery exists in the “colonies” of Earth and decide to find out who is right by signing on as laborers on Venus for a six-year sting, sounds clearly like Steinbeck’s tales told from the orange groves and fields of California. They quickly discover that the tales of servitude they’ve heard are true and that the songs of Tennessee Ernie Ford could just as easily be sung about the plantations of Venus as they are about the coal mines of Appalachia.

Maybe Heinlein was inspired by Steinbeck as he took social strife to the stars. Or maybe this is Heinlein before he got a bit weirder as his career went on. In any case, it’s better than the typical utopian sci-fi where the Enlightened Earthmen and associated hangers-on go hurtling into the cosmos to solve others’ problems because everything back home? It’s peachy.

In any case, “The Green Hills of Earth” is an interesting read as we see the cares and woes and triumphs and tragedies of life on Earth spread to settlements on other worlds and moons in the solar system. It’s an interesting contrast to the typically utopian view of the settlement of space.

Heinlein introduces us to space hoboes. He introduces us to a spaceman who overcomes his fear of falling in a rather unique way.

Had I read these tales as a younger version of myself, I may not have been as excited to live on the Moon or further afield – as I fully expected the opportunity would exist. Who wants to be a slave on Venus, or an effete twerp who moves back to Earth from the Moon only to find out you miss Moon Culture too much?

In a way, some of the stories reminded me of this:



Which may go a long way in explaining why the more utopian view of space settlement is more popular.

However – I find I like writers before they get too strident in their finger-wagging. I don’t mind the subtle wag as they’re often fun to identify. But when all that’s going on leads to the author winking and blinking and wagging his finger, I get put off.

Also: Steeeeinbeck Iiiiin Spaaaaaaaace!

NaNoWriMo Forums: Terrible Advice for Writers

The best writing advice I’ve ever heard comes from science fictionist Ray Bradbury, who basically said that you’ve got to write a lot of crap for the good stuff to finally make it out.

If I’m ever a famous writer, I’ll pass this advice along, but add what I call the Nefario Principle: It’s got to be good crap.

Here’s what the Nefario Principle means: You’ve got to be trying hard to write the good stuff even when you’re writing the crap, or else all you’ll ever be able to produce is crap.

Point in favor of the Nefario Principle: Much of the advice given in the NaNoWriMo forums, most particularly those focusing on the magical 50,000-word count necessary to “win” the contest. I learned a lot more about writing a novel churning out 120,000-plus words which I took seriously in “Considering How to Run” than I ever would learn using the language-inflation tricks proposed even tongue-in-cheek by those in the NaNoWriMo forums. Here’s a sampling:

I know you have them, what are your down and dirty tricks (without cheating) to reach 50k. Last year I wrote out the full names for EVERYTHING.

A persons name. Instead of Dr. Pascal, It would be Doctor Pascal Jonathan Himes
+3 words

I had a company named Shilo but the full name was Shilo Helping Hands Psychiatric Care and Rehabilitation Facility. Ridiculous to write each time, but I did.
+7 words

It got annoying but my main character worked in the hospital so the name was mentioned oftened and he ran into a TON of people so it was + two or three words all the time.

No, no, and no. I know the ethic here is “edit later,” but I’m kind of in the Richard Rhodes/”How to Write” camp when it comes to thinking why should I purposely load my writing with crap I know I’ll have to edit out later to meet some artificial word count total when I should instead concentrate on making my writing better, economizing on time in the process?

Do I have such tricks? Yes. I’ll do a little Virginia Woolf repletion once and a while – but it’s for effect – I hope – rather than word-count padding. Or word – count padding, I should say, increasing the word count in that phrase from two to four in the process.

Then there’s this, which is even worse:

Over complicate everything: "And he did then, with much gusto, verily grip his fingers around the weisswurst, a german sausage made from the meat of veal, otherwise known as baby cows or calves."

(This isn't mine, but a firend of mine's) Complain: "I hate so and so. She ticks me off so much. She's always telling me that I have to edit instead of rewriting everthing. I don't want to edit. I want to rewrite it. And who is she to tell me to edit? She's not an editor."

Flower language: make a character that sort of rambles on and on "Her hair was every color imaginable--blue, purple, red, green, black, brown et cetera (always two words--it's proper and boosts your word count), et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, amen."

This leaps right over John Steinbeck’s desire for occasional hooptedoodle right into the poodle factory where you’ll find yourself concentrating too much on mundane details and forgetting that your reader wants your characters to tell the story – and even tell them what they look like through action rather than description. A good writer gets out of the way of his or her characters. This kind of writing just puts the writer in the way, like my kids in front of the TV when I’m trying to watch.

I know the joke here is that the word count is an illusion, but they can’t track stats on NaNoWriMo if they’re saying “At the end of the month, have written a good book.” No. That’s too subjective. It’s easier to build little bar charts focusing on word count rather than on quality – though they can tout that “Water for Elephants” was a NaNoWriMo originee, so quality is there! Meh, I say. I’m only doing NaNoWriMo this year for fun anyway. The word count is secondary. I’m a lot more worried about getting my characters to the final destination than I am about how many words I can use to get them there.

Watching the Hooptedoodle

Illustration used on the Fair Use principle, as is the quoted material below.

I spent about an hour this morning editing my novel, "Considering How to Run," realising that indeed as perfect as I thought it was when I finished the first draft this summer, it's got enough holes in it to make it look like a slab of Swiss cheese And that's okay; re-reading it is helping me see the holes and giving me ideas on how to fill them in, as well as showing me the places where I need to add stuff, and the places where stuff needs to be edited out.

All the while as I worked this morning, however, the word "hooptedoodle" kept going through my mind.

Hooptedoodle comes from a prologue John Steinbeck wrote for his novel "Sweet Thursday." The prologue, barely a page in length, remains the best bit of writing advice I've ever come across. It reads:

One night Mack lay back on his bed in the Palace Flophouse and he said, "I ain't never been satisfied with that book Cannery Row. I would of went about it different.

And after a while he rolled over and raised his head on his hand and he said, "I guess I'm just a critic. But if I ever come across the guy that wrote that book I could tell him a few things."

"Like what?" said Whitey No. 1.

"Well," said Mack, "like this here. Suppose there's chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. That's all right as far as it goes, but I'd like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter's going to be about. Sometimes maybe I want to go back, and chapter five don't mean nothing to me. If there was just a couple of words I'd know that was the chapter I wanted to go back to."

"Go on," said Whitey No. 1.

"Well, I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing -- I kind of like to figure out what the guy's thinking by what he says. I like some description, too," he went on. "I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it -- but not too much of that."

"You sure are a critic," said Whitey No. 2. "Mack, I never give you credit before. Is that all?"

"No," said Mack. "Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy's writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with the language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that's writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story came out."

Eddie said, "Mack, if the guy that wrote Cannery Row comes in, you going to tell him all that?"

Whitey No. 2 said, "Hell, Mack can tell anybody anything. Why Mack could tell a ghost how to haunt a house."

"You're damn right I could," said Mack, "and there wouldn't be no table-rapping or chains. There hasn't been no improvement in house-haunting in years. You're damn right I could, Whitey!" And he lay back and stared up at the canopy over his head.

"I can see it now," said Mack.

"Ghosts?" Eddie asked.

"Hell, no," said Mack, "chapters . . . "

Steinbeck's little lesson here gets repeated a lot in writing instructions offered by writers both famous and not-so-famous, notably as in Elmore Leonard's well-known advice to writers, seen here.

Steinbeck offers good advice, some of which I'm taking as I edit this book of my own. But hearing Mack and Eddie and the Whiteys talk about house-haunting, part of me wonders if Steinbeck at the same time he's offering writerly advice is poking fun at people who offer writers advice, especially since they seem willing to offer any kind of advice to anybody in any situation. After all, one of the main reasons writers learn the rules is so they can figure out how to break them.

Still, the chapter idea has merit. As I re-read my own work, I see that now, thought having only the barest of divisions at the time seemed to work. That certainly works for Terry Pratchett and other authors.

Steinbeck himself breaks his own rules -- notably with "Travels with Charly," in which he dons the hat of a journalist, rather than the hat of a hooptedoodle writer. Still, they're good rules to live by, until you're ready to break them.

Who Reads an American Book?

This is coming out of the blue, so bear with me.

Several years back in a college poetry-writing class, we got to talking about Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, and how the story has become a symbol of Spain. Someone in the class asked the professor if there were an American author whose writings have become a symbol of the United States. This professor said no -- that the nation was too young to have produced such an author.

That thought bugged me for a long time. So today, I present a few authors whose writings can be said to represent the United States:

• Sinclair Lewis. From Babbitt through Arrowsmith to It Can't Happen Here, Lewis' writings embody two quintissential facets of the U.S. culture: Migration form the small town to the big city and the desire to make fame and fortune without really having to work for it. Both Babbitt and Arrowsmith follow characters who have great ambitions but see their dreams tripped up in their own shortcomings, specifically (for Babbitt) his desire to conform and (for Arrowsmith) his desire for something constantly out of his reach due to fear of failure.

Reading Babbitt is a profound pleasure. Anyone who says they can't see a bit of themselves in George Babbitt is, frankly, a liar.

• John Steinbeck. No American author has better captured both the beauty and the ugliness of the American spirit. In The Pastures of Heaven and Cannery Row, he finds American character at its best, albeit flawed by the nature that makes us all human. In other works such as The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, he identifies the side of Ameridan character that drives one to succeed at all costs, even if the costs are the lives and livelihoods of fellow human beings. Winter of Our Discontent is his most haunting novel, in which we find a character driven to despair by his pursuit of the American Dream.
  

I plan on adding to this list form time to time. Both of these authors, of course, paint a pretty gloomy picture of the American character. There are others who paint with different strokes and with brighter colors (James Thurber, L. Frank Baum and Mark Twain come to mind).