In Mr. Hart’s class one year, perhaps the Spring or Fall of 1995, we had the pleasure of slogging through The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I didn’t understand it. It was a poor-man’s novel, focusing on plights of the poor, and what did that have to do with middle-class America, or more specifically, middle-class Massachusetts?

The answer might surprise you in more ways than one. Some of us remember being tortured by the novel in high school, tortured only because the focus was on dissecting the novel and talking about symbols rather than trying to see what the author was trying to say. Such as it is with the classics, though. I read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald many times but didn’t really read it as a story until Professor Duncan Nelson’s class.

I am on a classics kick that I hope stays permanent, and so The Grapes of Wrath is on my reading list. So, it was very delightful to see that Brain Pickings, the wildly successful blog by Maria Popova, reviewing Working Days: The Journal of the Grapes of Wrath. I have always been morbidly curious at how authors write their books, mainly because I am a writer myself, and as I read how an author writes a novel, the author as well as the work becomes more real to me than before – even if they’ve been dead for forty years. I have yet to read the East of Eden Letters, which was published shortly after Steinbeck’s death.

A journal is a chronicle. If the author of it thinks that he is going to publish it, it will be the worst lie ever written, but if he thinks that it will never be seen, never be published, and he forms a contract with himself to be true to it, then it will be perhaps even more true than the stories he or she writes. What Steinbeck does in this journal is chronicle how he comes to develop the story. It reveals the inner workings of the author and the work. Contrary to what I might have thought, Grapes was pretty well formulated in Steinbeck’s mind when he sat down to start it. This is in contrast to my own novels, A Once Distant Memory, which is a mess right now, and Molon Labe which is a disaster like the book Steinbeck was writing before Grapes, entitled ‘The Lettuceberg Affair.’

What fascinates me is that Steinbeck stuck to a rigid schedule, five days a week, two thousand words a day (roughly a chapter, it seems), and projected himself over five weeks. This type of schedule kept him busy, but was not so constrained that he would have no possible chance of finishing it.

So, here’s the riddle: how does a writer like Steinbeck, riding on the waves of success after Of Mice and Men create a masterpiece like Grapes? The truth is, very carefully, and very deliberately. He wrote that he felt he was becoming a hack, and that he had deluded himself into thinking that everything he wrote was worth something.

I am there now; Bad Moon Rising was pretty successful, For None of Woman Born a little less so, only because I have not started a massive book blog tour just yet. A Kiss After Dying remains my favorite, oddly enough, since the first draft of the story was written inside of a week and the subsequent rewrite cost me nothing but blood sweat and tears. A Once Distant Memory is in my editor’s hands, so I won’t touch that just yet, but Molon Labe is a project I would love to chronicle, and maybe I will. The story’s framework is there, somewhat, but the more I think about the novel the more acutely aware I am of the numerous limitations the story suffers from, and that the main character is little more than an extension of myself. Sure, all writers are like that. Their main character is often themselves, for better or worse. In this case, Jeff has no real purpose; he simply drifts. I need to anchor him. He is 25, and needs to have graduated from college through an accelerated program, and have insurmountable amounts of student loan debt that causes him to seethe beneath the surface at the government that has allowed students to be little more than ATMs (in the words of Elizabeth Warren). And so the revolution begins, not against America, but against an America that is in the back pockets of corporations. If there is ever a two-faced Janus, you can see him or her in the form of your congressman and senator.

I will probably start this project today; it is interesting not just because I follow in the footsteps of a great writer, but because my desire to write a story has been superseded by my desire to write literature, something lasting, something important, a modern novel for a modern America, a representative voice of the masses of men who lead lives of quiet desperation.