Steinbeck’s East of Eden hit me hard. It is, on one level, a book that deconstructs excuses and demonstrates that, no matter what you’d done in your past, you always had the ability to choose to do the right thing. That was next-level self-reflection when I first read it.
It’s also a fine story and it doesn’t come across as preachy, which it absolutely would have in the hands of a lesser writer. I should probably mention that I’m biased; I find him an incredibly appealing author, a proper socialist, and pretty good looking too.
So, depending on when you ask, I might well list East of Eden as my favorite novel. But…did you know that he also wrote a book about the book while writing the book? Steinbeck wrote his novels in longhand on big sheets of paper and a stack o’ sharpened pencils, on the front of large sheets of paper. However, he liked to “warm up” before he started working on the story, so he kept a diary on the backs of the paper.
In most cases, he’d write a little bit about what we going on in his life at the time, then lay out what he hoped to accomplish with the day’s writing and how he planned to accomplish it. He’d include reminders to use short, simple sentences for action sequences and things like that. Once he was sufficiently warmed up, he’d start the actual work on the front of the next sheet.
As fortune would have it, many of these sheets have been preserved and even collected. The diary he kept while writing East of Eden has been published under the name Journal of a Novel. It’s one of my favorite non-fiction books, offering tremendous insight into what he was trying to do with East of Eden and the many technical tools he brought to bear to do it. His writing makes everything feel so effortless, but if his own journal is to be believed, there was a lot of work behind making it look so easy.
There are fascinating side stories as well, particularly those involving the name of the novel. He didn’t come up with “East of Eden” until he was more than halfway through writing it. It boggles the mind to imagine any other title, so it’s a little shocking how close we were to having something far more pedestrian and less suited to purpose.
Included in the collection are the letters he wrote to editor Pascal Covici while he was writing. The back and forth between the writer and the editor are yet another window on how the novel came into being. It’s also a reminder that even the titans need good editors and I shouldn’t expect to succeed with anything less.
I went to a book signing by Neal Stephenson where he moaned a bit when someone asked “the dreaded process question.” I’m sure writers do get tired of answering it, but reaction speaks to just how much interest there is in how the sausage is made. Journal of a Novel is a long, but genuinely interesting, answer to that question. If you’re in to that sort of thing, I strongly recommend it.