John Steinbeck – A Letter For Beginners

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John Steinbeck, quotes, writing

John Ernst Steinbeck (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968)

I don’t want to write too much and spoil the perfection of the following letter that is addressed to aspiring writers. If anyone has looked for a mentor to guide them along this lonely road of letters, then I give them John Steinbeck’s inspirational texts. Here’s a man who trod the path, understood what writing was ‘really’ about, and managed to convey it in ways that us beginners could  understand.

So, this is for all those who cannot ‘see’ their way clearly and are confused as to where their road is taking them, and to those in particular who think ‘reading’ is experience enough to write a good book. Steinbeck highlights the necessity of an inner enlightenment for all wannabe writers, one that borders on the Buddhistic:

“Dear Writer:

 Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all – so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.

So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher’s side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.

It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic ’20s, and I was going out into that world to try to be a writer.

I was told, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”

It wasn’t too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time – a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.

      She told me it wouldn’t.

                                                                          John Steinbeck, 1963

Writer’s Journal | Notes About a Small Island, The Novel as Seedling (1)

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cyprus conflict, notes about a small island, novel, once upon a time in cyprus, poltical, short story, writers journal, writing

 … How the story fell upon my mind, and refused to leave…
… And grew into a thorny briar patch…
… Demanding to be told…

Years ago I had an idea for a novel. It struck me one day when I was doing something quite normal. Maybe I was washing the dishes, maybe I was taking a walk, but it was during one of those moments when your body is in autodrive and your mind elsewhere.

The story began with: ‘Why hasn’t anyone written about this before?’ At first, the question was small, a pin-prick in the brain. But later I realised it was in fact an old, dull ache born from an event of systematic racial intolerance that subsided and was later left to stew slowly in a stagnant mire of political and personal gain. It’s a well known fact that people get used to things they shouldn’t, things like pain, hunger and even death. Of course, this had nothing to do with those things, but harboured within it the traces of such suffering and was seeking justice to its burnt pride. It offered me its tangled skein of problems and asked me to listen to the voices therein.  

Writing a story is hard enough, but giving a story the justice it deserves 
requires phenomenal talent. All I had at my possession was an above average passion for books and an appreciation for the written word. So it was here I began my search, between dusty pages and forgotten tomes, for remnants of the question. I racked my brains, trying to come up with a book, a film, a play, anything that was a half-decent attempt to portray this neglected area of history. I was to my dismay, met by silence and denial.

Art had next to nothing in its vast repertory that was a study of the country, its people or their history. Any accounts were abridged version of events written predominantly by outsiders. I poured over military documents, political correspondence, ‘eyewitness’ accounts, but all were sterile, too neutered to be  a faithful representation of events. The question pulsed its’ red light, ‘Something is missing, something is wrong’. Yes, I could see it now. Something was missing. It was the absence of the hand-over-the-heart, the honesty, the coming-clean. It was the absence of the voices in the skein, those who could still recount the past on the rough-hewn syllables of their mother-tongue.   

This silence, this absence was denial and it issued from a particular political ilk that championed democracy and fairness, but was (as the indelible ink of history would have it) the very demon that fanned the embers of racism. 

For months I thought about this, and an anger welled up inside me. There were so many stories to tell, so many versions; the culmination of which would be the chorus to break this unreasonable silence. These stories weren’t in any 
historical books or anthologies, instead they existed as fables of old did: on the dying breath of story-telling. No one ever thought of recording it in print. My family is one of the rare ones that still talk about that time, talk about it in its ugly glory. Through them I saw what the question really wanted: the grassroots of the problem. It wanted the events as it happened, the series of cause and effect as it unfolded under the relentless glare of the mediterranean sun. It wanted the chorus of voices, each unique yet the same in their own ways to merge with the elements of a small island on that day on June 1974, and sing their deafening cicada song to a world who would rather forget them. 

Men and women now in their eighties had faced the ugly, mindless wrath of war. Some had seen things that had pushed them to murder, madness and suicide. Others did things for country and religion that they carry around with them today like a guilty sin. People went missing, whole villages were razed to the ground. There were the tortured with some still alive to tell the tale. There was an artillery bullet through the hipbone of a five-year old girl, four years in hospital clamped together by metal because of metal and a lifetime (a half-life) confined to wheel-chairs.

Yet after three decades people are trying to build a future for themselves, free from the horror and shame of their near-past. But the skyscrapers and the luxury villas, the five-star hotels and expensive shopping malls are not bringing any comfort. Money is a temporary panacea. It does not fill the strange void, the gaping alienation of a nation. The bones of the dead, the eternally silenced, push at the foundations of these new-fangled buildings. At night, the dreams of the new, forgetful generation are troubled from the tremors of their ancestors shuddering in unmarked graves. It is like the hum of a coming earthquake, a deep guttural unearthly hum. It’s a rule: no one can build a future by burying the past. The truth will out. And it is the charge of a writer to tell the truth, the way it needs to be told.

All the above, in all its straight and flowery language fell upon my mind in a matter of minutes, yet took months to spool out into its full-length. Thought moves fast, and one thought follows another at lightning speed until you have a many-headed hydra; reason upon reason to tell a story, to strengthen the validity of it in the world.

As I said, this idea for a novel happened years ago, and I still wrestle with it. I write almost daily, but there is so much to write. It began with a people and a particular moment in their quiet yet complex history, but has extended to the rocks and the seas and the wind. I used to listen to people recounting the history of their personal lives during that time, but now I find everything in the hum of the earth, and all the silent souls it bears inside it.

Unauthorised Absences & The Writer’s Bug

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Haruki Murakami, margaret atwood, Nabokov, writers block, writing

Conquering the blank page is often the hardest task of an aspiring writer…

That’s the way they used to write it in the school register: ‘Unauthorised Absence’. A capital ‘U’ in the margin. That was the shameful mark of a ‘skivver’, a player of ‘hookey’, the class rebel, the tell-tale sign of one who smoked surreptitiously at the back of the bike-sheds. Not that I ever skipped school. Perish the thought! I was a good girl, a model student, teacher’s pet. Really. Honest. Ok, well not quite…

But I’ve been a bit naughty lately, in that I haven’t posted for a while. As you’ll have noticed. To quote Jack Jordon from ’21 Grams’, “The guilt, the guilt will suck you down to the bone”, and that’s exactly how I felt when I realised my transgression. It was only at a friends house last week (when we all got to talking about our respective blogs) that brought on the bone-sucking guilt. So here I am apologising for my unproductive, unforeseen disappearance act. Sharing our blogging experiences made me think about this place and what it really meant to me. It feels like I’ve had it forever, but it’s only been four months since I started blogging here, yet I’ve grown rather fond of it. Before I became a wordpresser (if there is such a word) I had a place on windows live spaces with very little readership. While it was an ideal place to cut my teeth, it didn’t have nearly enough tools that WordPress.com has to offer its bloggers.

However, unlike here, I was blogging more often yet the lack of readers made it feel like I was talking to myself half the time. The final move to a better platform came when Microsoft did away with its mediocre stats page (without warning I might add). Major mistake. As the final straw, I did a toss-up between the book bloggers favourite (blogspot) and it’s more intellectual adversary (wordpress). Now that I’m comfortably settled here and have regular readers, things have become more serious. Suddenly there’s a pressure to produce, to write articles of quality that will generate discussions, questions and hopefully inspire other bloggers too. There is a feeling of responsibility, and that brings with it a learning curve that helps to hone my writing skills and develop an eye for what is a good subject for a blog and what isn’t.

But I digress…While blogging is a whole other kettle of fish among the myriad forms of internet writing, I have been engaged with a totally different, more traditional method which brings me to the reason for my absence: I have begun a novel.

Yes, the writing bug now has me well and truly in its thrall; in a way that I have been praying and praying it eventually would. In the past the muses have not been kind to me and I have learnt that youth is often a disadvantage when it comes to the art of the novel. Coherence, plausibility, experience and of course the all important catalogue of ‘read’ books all go contribute to some aspect of becoming a well-rounded novelist.

As a life-long reader there were times that I’d find myself going through books with a kind of envious longing. As I pass by bookshops I dared to imagine my book, with my name on it filling the shelves. But the daydream would dissolve when I thought of authors like Atwood and Murakami, about how theirs is an inspired genius, a talent that is born not learned. My muses would tell me this, but then they’d also tell me about how half of a writer’s art is his craft, and how at least THAT could be learned through hard work.  

Sometimes a beautiful passage would make me wonder ‘why can’t I write something like this?’ To make matters worse, my family have often said the same thing too, ‘you have imagination, you like books, why don’t you try writing one?’ Or, ‘you read so much, can’t you think up a story?’ But by far the worst is ‘it can’t be that difficult!’ Albeit, its said with all the goodwill in the world, but it’s still irritating. It takes all I’ve got not to turn around and snarl back ‘but it IS that difficult! Can’t you see?’ Writing out of all art forms is the most difficult to understand. In it’s unworked state, without the guidance of an intuitive mentor it is an unruly force that behaves in vastly different ways in different people. 

I think we can agree that some people are naturally gifted. They can just ‘write’ it all out in a coherent manner and be done with it. But for the rest of us, it takes a lot of hard work. Using myself as an example, I can say that for the longest time I carried the ‘idea’ of my novel with me wherever I went. Fully formed as it was, it was my lack of writing skills that stopped me from getting it down on paper the way I wanted it, or more importantly, the way it deserved to be written. After a few unsuccessful, messy attempts, I let it sit at the back of my mind and took the radical decision to allow myself the time to get to know my craft.

After a few years of reading intensively and studying the works of prominent authors, I began to understand that writing is much, much more than merely putting words on paper. It is a way of thinking, a method of Cartesian logic that needs to be re-learned, even though it is, by origin, innate. I set about listening to audiotapes of authors talking about their craft and making notes about how they felt, the difficulties they faced while they set about creating in this loneliest of crafts. The trials and tribulations of each differed, yet the main bugbear of ‘writer’s block’ and performance anxiety (especially after a particularly successful book) were among those that struck a chord with me.  

I began to see many mutual points of suffering between me and authors like Saul Bellow, Katherine Mansfield and Vladimir Nabokov. I was relieved (if relief is such a word) that getting stuck, beating yourself up over a few sentences and the general worry and stress of writing is something that carries on throughout an author’s life and can even be the fuel that drives them to reach their potential best. It was then I decided to make peace with my anxiety, and funnily enough, only then did my story finally come forward and yield itself to me.

It’s been three months now, and my research has gathered a momentum and a logic that is slowly helping me unravel the knots in my narrative. Unlike last time, I’m not in a hurry to get things down as quickly as possible. I take the time to reflect and think calmly on what I have to say and how I want to say it. Needless to say, every now and then the writing bug will take me away from the blog, but it’s all for a good cause.  So there. I’m not playing hookey. When you don’t see any posts for a week or so, it means I’m working hard in finding the meaning of ‘writing’. I’ll be recording my journey as I go along, and if my findings are blogworthy I’ll be sharing them here along with you and my other bookish things.

Book Review | ‘Winter Trees’ – Sylvia Plath

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50 books a year, book review, Cornwall, Hollywood, poetry, sylvia plath, Vagina Monologues, winter trees, writing

Book Challenges: 50 Books A Year (no. 36)

This slim collection contains poems by the late Sylvia Plath which were written during the last nine months of her life. They are hailed to be the most revealing and enigmatic of her works which document the simultaneous mourning and celebration of the human condition.

It is hard to read a Plath poem without taking her life into consideration. While most poets write with pen and ink, you get a sense that Plath went one step further and wrote from the blood. Plath had a dark gift, a way of tapping into the exquisite pain of human suffering that makes her  impossible to separate from her work. Throughout her short career as poet and writer, it was this often too-personal tie that made publishers uncomfortable. Her savage way of conveying her emotions is evident in ‘Lesbos‘; a bitter letter to Sappho which also doubles as an unashamed portrait of Plath’s domestic despair:

“Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible
migraine…

I should sit off a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.”

Needless to say the poems in this book are written from a strong feminist lens and span issues of love, parenting, childbirth and death. Upon my first reading, I found it quite difficult to get into Plath’s particular mindset. But having said this, one must remember that she was probably by now in her deepest depressive stages and suicidal to boot, so it’s only natural for me to connect up to a certain point. The first thing I noted was the darkness that seeped from every poem she wrote. As I re-read them and entered into her narrow, desperate world I realised that these were not ‘poems’ but rather the abstract confessionals of a woman on the edge.

“The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.

My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself…” – from Childless Woman

Despair confuses people, and coupled with depression often makes it difficult to see right from wrong. Yet when I analyse Plath’s poems, I realise that despair and depression were her source of sustenance, and this is what makes this collection of poems so special.  Her words are carefully chosen, with a deliberate economy that brings her visions into high-definition. As I finished the last poem ‘Three Women’ (which was intended to be a poem for three voices and later recorded for radio) I saw a sad glimpse of a talent that, if she had lived, would have been one of the greatest modern poets of our times. The piece resonates with the many myriad facets of procreation; the success, loss and abortion of it. It is an echo of womankind through different ages and the other things that ‘mother’ and ‘motherhood’ really give birth to. A masterpiece, and a precursor to the ‘Vagina Monologues‘, here is a small extract:

“I am slow as the world. I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon’s concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility”  

I recommend this to anyone with an interest in Sylvia Plath. For first timers, it may be a bit too much, but reading it a few times over will help you to understand what’s going on. Plath tends to write in cryptic code, cracking the code is a bit like adjusting your eyesight to one of those 3D posters from back in the 90’s. Fun, but it needs a bit of effort, and good poetry always demands a bit of effort from its readers.

I give this 3/5 stars.

Related articles

• P.H. Davies – A Life of Plath (phdavies.wordpress.com)
• Choosing Sylvia Plath’s poems (guardian.co.uk)
• For Sylvia Plath’s 80th Birthday, Hear Her Read ‘A Birthday Present’ (openculture.com)
• The Times are Tidy, Sylvia Plath (bookheaven.wordpress.com)
• Janice Joplin and Sylvia Plath (pastparallelpaths.wordpress.com)
• My Love Of Sylvia Plath (mysurreallifeismyreality.wordpress.com)
• Carl Rollyson – American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (2013), Book Trailer (phdavies.wordpress.com)
• Sylvia Plath’s Beautiful, Bittersweet Musings on Life (flavorwire.com)