The champion of the everyman hero, Steinbeck is best known for classics such as Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, and many more. His ability to write at the heart of the average American and appeal to his contemporaries’ sensibilities has made his books time capsules for the time of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Although his subject matter is in the past, his “realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception” are truly a timeless quality of his style and thankfully he’s left plenty of advice for future writers to draw inspiration from:

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

Write about an everyman hero of today. What would their aspirations or goals be? How would that juxtapose with the world around them?