By John Steinbeck
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 and 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.
