John Steinbeck’s 6 Rules of Writing

1. 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. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Later, Steinbeck offered this: “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.”

 

In Medias Res

 

 

In medias res, “in the midst [or middle] of things.” This technique is absolutely essential to the short short story writer’s craft. By eliminating as much of the setting, rising action, inciting event and complication, we take our reader directly to the conflict, and add back in only the essential details of the setting and rising action, etc. at the perfect moments. Let’s use Kafka’s “A Little Fable” as an example. Notice how the setting and rising action are woven directly into the presenting conflict. We are not given a long, winding landscape opening or character descriptor. We jump right into the main conflicts.

• Setting: Maze
• Rising Action: Search for escape, Search for cheese (did you imagine cheese in the trap, too?)
• Conflict: Mouse v. Maze, Mouse v. Cat, Mouse v. Trap (is there cheese in there?), Mouse v. Self (arguably the most important conflict)
• Climax: Mouse facing cat
• Falling Action: Cat instructing mouse to simply change direction (search for escape)
• Resolution: Cat eating mouse
• Denouement: What was your individual denouement? Perhaps it had something to do with Mouse v. Self? Perhaps it asked the important question: How do we navigate the challenges and dangers of our lives when caught in such all encompassing mazes? Or perhaps you experienced a fate v. free will resonance?

 

Optional Writing Assignment: Death on an Island

Optional writing assignments are for your own benefit and collection of works. We will not be workshopping these in class, neither online nor on campus.

 

 

 

1. Watch the above scene from “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding. 

2. Map the scene’s arc as given: conflict, protagonist, antagonist, setting, climax, falling action, resolution, denouement. Consider how not only short short stories but also scenes within novels can include full arcs as both given on the page and suggested for the reader’s imagination.

3. Now, write your own death scene in your own setting. Remember, your death can be literal or figurative. Your protagonist might be run over by a truck, a bus or a clown car. OR your protagonist might experience the death of innocence, career, relationship, such as in the Eckleburg selections. Be creative. Feel free to incorporate humor. Humorous deaths introduce irony and can be complicated and difficult and this makes for an intricate reading experience. 

4. Cut any backstory or beginning that leads up to the death and open the story in medias res, after the death has already happened. Feel free to change PoV and revise as needed.

 

Guidelines