on writing - john steinbeck

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.  (Via BrainPickings)

As with all writing advice, take these bits as food for thought.
They may be true for you, they may not.  

By Julia Yellow

on writing - john steinbeck

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-eyed
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-, six-, or ten-
thousand words.

By Rainer Tenhunen

on writing - john steinbeck

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

By Francesco Chiacchio