I Can't Know what You don't Know
“If I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I’ll just have to work from a background of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I can expect of my poor brain…If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.”
The quote above comes from Steinbeck’s daily journal, which was posthumously published, and he wrote these lines a few weeks after starting The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve started with this because I want to use a few passages from the novel in this post, but also because I find the quote so helpful and inspiring. To hear a writer as masterful as Steinbeck bemoaning his ‘ignorance and inability’, yet in the same breath coming up with the idea of honesty, sustains me in my efforts. This is all any of us can do, write with honesty and keep pushing against the voices in our head that are always ready to undermine our efforts.
So. Carrying on from there…
I recently gave my son a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, and while he was busy finishing other books I nicked it to read myself. This was one of the books I loved most in my teenage years - though I had no thoughts of becoming a writer then – and I was interested to see how it would read to my older self. I loved it all over again. This is surely one of the strongest anti-capitalist stories ever written, and reading it alongside current news reports of badly-paid immigrant farm workers in California, picking crops with the thick clouds of forest fires in the background, was a powerful call to the continued activism sadly still necessary eighty years later.
What I want to talk about in this post, though, is the writing. And specifically the way in which Steinbeck introduces characters. Here are three examples:
“Outside, a man walking along the edge of the highway crossed over and approached the truck. He walked slowly to the front of it, put his hand on the shiny fender, and looked at the No Riders sticker on the windshield. For a moment he was about to walk on down the road, but instead he sat on the running board on the side away from the restaurant. He was not over thirty. His eyes were very dark brown and there was a hint of brown pigment in his eyeballs. His cheek bones were high and wide, and strong deep lines cut down his cheeks, in curves beside his mouth. His upper lip was long, and since his teeth protruded, the lips stretched to cover them, for this man kept his lips closed. His hands were hard, with broad fingers and nails as thick and ridged as little clam shells. The space between thumb and forefinger and the hams of his hands were shiny with callus.
The man's clothes were new—all of them, cheap and new. His gray cap was so new that the visor was still stiff and the button still on, not shapeless and bulged as it would be when it had served for a while all the various purposes of a cap—carrying sack, towel, handkerchief. His suit was of cheap gray hardcloth and so new that there were creases in the trousers. His blue chambray shirt was stiff and smooth with filler. The coat was too big, the trousers too short, for he was a tall man. The coat shoulder peaks hung down on his arms, and even then the sleeves were too short and the front of the coat flapped loosely over his stomach. He wore a pair of new tan shoes of the kind called "army last," hob-nailed and with half-circles like horseshoes to protect the edges of the heels from wear.
This man sat on the running board and took off his cap and mopped his face with it. Then he put on the cap, and by pulling started the future ruin of the visor. His feet caught his attention. He leaned down and loosened the shoelaces, and did not tie the ends again. Over his head the exhaust of the Diesel engine whispered in quick puffs of blue smoke.”
∞
“A man sat on the ground, leaning against the trunk of the tree. His legs were crossed and one bare foot extended nearly as high as his head. He did not hear Joad approaching, for he was whistling solemnly the tune of "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby." His extended foot swung slowly up and down in the tempo. It was not dance tempo. He stopped whistling and sang in an easy thin tenor: "Yes, sir, that's my Saviour, Je–sus is my Saviour, Je–sus is my Saviour now. On the level,'S not the devil, Jesus is my Saviour now."
Joad had moved into the imperfect shade of the molting leaves before the man heard him coming, stopped his song, and turned his head. It was a long head, bony; tight of skin, and set on a neck as stringy and muscular as a celery stalk. His eyeballs were heavy and protruding; the lids stretched to cover them, and the lids were raw and red. His cheeks were brown and shiny and hairless and his mouth full—humorous or sensual. The nose, beaked and hard, stretched the skin so tightly that the bridge showed white. There was no perspiration on the face, not even on the tall pale forehead. It was an abnormally high forehead, lined with delicate blue veins at the temples. Fully half of the face was above the eyes. His stiff gray hair was mussed back from his brow as though he had combed it back with his fingers. For clothes he wore overalls and a blue shirt. A denim coat with brass buttons and a spotted brown hat creased like a pork pie lay on the ground beside him. Canvas sneakers, gray with dust, lay near by where they had fallen when they were kicked off.
The man looked long at Joad. The light seemed to go far into his brown eyes, and it picked out little golden specks deep in the irises. The strained bundle of neck muscles stood out.”
∞
“Tom stood looking in. Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and her strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor. Her thin, steel-gray hair was gathered in a sparse wispy knot at the back of her head. Strong, freckled arms were bare to the elbow, and her hands were chubby and delicate, like those of a plump little girl. She looked out into the sunshine. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”
These passages contain the reader’s first glimpse of three central characters: Tom Joad, arguably the protagonist of the novel although every member of the Joad family carries the story at various times, Jim Casey, the retired preacher who travels with the Joad family, and Ma Joad, the strong matriarch who works throughout the book to keep her family intact.
Look how much we are given. How deeply and thoroughly we are introduced to this person with whom we will spend the next 475 pages. How we are invited to linger before the action of the scene continues.
This kind of writing doesn’t come naturally to me. I hear things more than I see them, hear people’s voices, hear the rhythm of sentences in my head. But as a reader it is this sort of detail that feeds me, that really embeds me into a story, and so recognising that fact I have learned to write with all my senses. And this is the hard work of writing. Because you have to IMAGINE things. You have to create people and worlds that are specific and unique to a moment in time.
A lot of the writing I receive for editing is voice-based. Led by a strong, direct voice, which can be an exciting thing, giving the reader an instant connection to a character. But as the story continues, if voice is the only vehicle sustaining the prose, this usually becomes a problem. Think about reading a diary. It’s often compelling at first -– because one feels one is getting a glimpse into a secret world, the private world inside a person’s head – but after a little while the entries become same-ish and skippable. This is what can happen when there is only voice and no detail.
For me to really inhabit a story, I need to be able to imagine it. I need to see it, hear it, smell it, touch it, taste it. And that means the writer needs to have done the same.
So although I am not a fan of overwritten prose, which usually involve abstract adverbs and adjectives rather than concrete detail, I am a huge fan of giving me things I can imagine.
Because I can’t know what you don’t know.
Try stealing from Steinbeck. Doesn’t have to be as rich as this - you could just use a few of the things he describes and tell me about your own character’s version: their clothes, their eyes, the songs they sing.
And be honest. Keep going.