Thom Steinbeck Interviewed

Thom, the son of John Steinbeck, discusses his dad, letter writing and his own career as a writer.

From the interview on Hairpin...

Anyway, I'd done something off the wall, I can't remember what it was, I'd gotten bad grades or something. It doesn’t really make a lot of difference. But my father sent me this very long letter, and he had very tiny handwriting — he wrote by hand — and it was like an 18-page letter. It took me a week to decipher this thing, because of his handwriting, primarily. And when I got to the very end of it, I noticed at the very bottom, he said, “Son, I want to apologize. I would’ve sent you a note but I didn’t have the time!”

Meaning, that ultimately, the greatest amount of time in all writing is spent editing. My father said there's only one trick to writing, and that's not writing, that's writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. Like sculpture. I mean, the first thing off the top of your head isn't the most brilliant thing you ever thought of. And then when you're writing about it, when you want others to understand what you’re still talking about, then it really requires that you edit yourself really, really well, so that other people can comprehend it.

But even he could get carried away. When he didn’t have time to edit it, I would get these 18-page letters. They were essays. And not as many always aimed at me. One and two makes three. Add four makes nine. It was sort of like, this is the process, and this is how it happens, and this is what you should observe in the process of it happening. He was very linear in his understanding of how these things went.