More Effective Writing

I’ve begun re-reading Steinbeck’s “East Of Eden.” I’d hoped to find a copy of “Grapes of Wrath” as it mines the Great Depression in a way few great American books do. I also believe that the “Grapes of Wrath” is essential reading these days and very appropriate for the times in which we live.

But I was unable to find a copy and settled upon “East Of Eden,” a big, almost biblical, epic of a book. It’s the story of the Hamilton and the Trask families, the cycle of life and death, living on and from the land and the main character of the book itself, the Salinas Valley in California. I believe it was Pearl Buck who wrote, “write what you know.” And that is what Steinbeck does. If you’ve not read this book, do.

What makes Steinbeck’s writing so agreeable is the action in his writing. Something is always happening, even when he’s describing something as simple as flowers growing on a hillside. Four pages into the book he writes of California poppies:

“These too are a burning color–not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.”

Now, I’ve never seen a California poppy, but I damn sure know what one is like now. If you read the sentence closely you’ll note that there are no adverbs and few adjectives. There isn’t a single word in the sentence, or in the first several pages, anyone with a reading level above the Eight Grade would need a dictionary for, either. Besides, when you get into the nuts and bolts of the sentence it’s really rather boring, no?

And yet the description lives. Why? Well, as any Freshman Comp textbook will tell you, the sentence lives in the verbs. A “burning” color? A liquid metal that “raises” a cream? And the extended metaphor of milk and cream, solid gold and that which is liquid? Give me spartan prose that lives any day over a bunch of words I barely know.

I know Steinbeck is out of fashion in the salons and uber-literate magazines of the East Coast, that Hemingway still rules the roost and Delillo, Roth and Updike are probably the most widely read in high-brow circles. But there is a reason Steinbeck won a Nobel Prize and a reason he’s still read in Middle and High Schools across the country. One could do worse.

source: agonist