I finished a volume of Steinbeck’s early short stories yesterday, The Long Valley, and as usual, was overwhelmed at his careful development and delivery of each story (highly recommend!). I am always stuck in the giant empty room of my mind when it comes to actually thinking of topics. His stories are rich in detail and wind like a brisk river, breaking satisfyingly at the end. I found the stories in this volume particularly memorable.

And so I pause and ask myself- how does he do it? Obviously, there is preparation that goes into the crafting of his tales.

One of the stories I read yesterday was “Johnny Bear”. Here is the tale of a guy, who because of his job, ends up in a small, quiet town where not much is up. His job has him on a crew that is dredging out a marsh to cut the flow of water from where he’s working to a neighboring area nearby- so we get a political angle. The area is poor, and we learn he takes a crappy room from a lady in town. There is not much to do in the town except to go to a bar- but we learn that the bar is the social hub of the community, and our protagonist also soon learns that within it, an autistic savant shows up every evening and, like a tape recorder, vocalizes conversations he’s overheard between other for whiskey. Our protagonist finds himself in one episode one evening. The bar patrons buy Johnny Bear whiskey for his moments of recall.

Within the community are two land-owning sisters who are revered as honest and admirable and good, anchors in an otherwise sullied spot of the world. In one Johnny Bear playback, he has been at their house, and he parrots a conversation the oldest sister has with their physician- revealing the younger sister attempted suicide at one moment. The bar crowd is shocked and unsettled by this revelation, and our protagonist talks with his chief friend in the tale, Alex, about the revelation. Alex happens to be a longtime neighbor of the sisters and their family. The community is shocked by cracks in the sister’s reputation. But Johnny Bear is smart enough to know how to get his whiskey, and keeps the sister’s place as his source.

And then the story crests with a final scene at the end. Back in the bar, Johnny Bar is again parroting for whiskey, and we learn the younger sister has succeeded in ending her life. We learn she was pregnant. And we learn how through a few short lines Steinbeck provides at the end of the story, that, when grasped flood her actions with meaning.

Every story in this short story volume, “The Long Valley”, is like this. Strong character development, clear story progression, strong visual details. Terse, intentinal, economic language. And each story turns hard and firm at the end.

How do you get to that place- where you have an adequate vocabulary to richly describe the places and people in rich detail, where you have a clear storyline developed in your mind that you know how to effectively execute the rise and resolve, where you can combine the two well enough to craft stories with kick, like his?

I guess every fiction writer hopes to figure out how to do this.

Or, in my case, to even find something interesting enough from within my head to write about.

I know one suggestion often made is “Write what you know about.” Steinbeck knew the Salinas Valley very well, and so his stories from there ring with authenticity because he writes about places in that region he is very familiar with. I suppose it applies to any writer wanting locale to play in their works: you have to know where you’re from a little deeper than what you are familiar with day by day.

And another thing apparent from Steinbeck’s writings. To write about people, you need to listen to and observe people.