Whenever I read the letters or memoirs of publishers and editors past, I am struck by how many of the principles they used still apply. These principles are rarely articulated in full, or discussed publicly today, yet despite all the change, they endure – I have noticed them in my own publishing work too. For me, a key principle is that publishing is a creative process. The following essay explores a classic example.

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When the American novelist John Steinbeck was writing East of Eden, his editor Pascal Covici gave him a large black, blue-lined notebook. It was not the first time Covici had done this. The large format served an added purpose: each morning, on the left-hand side, Steinbeck would pen a letter to Covici as part of his mental limbering-up process, discussing what was on his mind that day, and then on the right he would compose the text of the novel. 

Of course, Covici would not receive these ‘letters’ until the work was completed. Steinbeck would send his editor the drafts of his novel each week, but not the letter pages. Their real purpose was as a creative springboard. Steinbeck noticed that when he would write a letter, his handwriting would initially be untidy, but as soon as it began to even out, he knew it was time to switch to the other side of the page.

The letters began in January 1951 and continued until November of that year. The writer had been thinking about the novel for a number of years, and so his work is methodical, writing a passage or character description each day. In the ‘letters’, he provides a running commentary on what he is working on and why, and how challenging he is finding it. Sometimes, the morning’s letters end with a clear and confident ‘And now to work’, but just as often they contain an unsure ‘we shall see’, ‘I will try’, or ‘I think I can’. One day he is full of joy; the next, he sinks, wondering where his creative energy has gone. 

But as well as the morning correspondence, Steinbeck would write actual letters to Covici, would phone his office, request specific pencils and research on certain words, and Covici would come to visit the writer. Their communication was constant.

A few months into the novel, Covici tried to give the writer feedback on its complicated plot development, including the thoughts of others at Viking Press, and Steinbeck reacted badly. He insisted that Covici wait until the novel was finished before saying a word, that commercial interests played absolutely no role in his writing, and yet, not long after, Covici is again providing feedback (positive this time) and Steinbeck reacts well. Yet when Covici visits him while on holiday on Long Island and they have dinner, it ends badly and Steinbeck’s ‘letter’ the following morning is full of apologies for his behaviour.

And amidst it all, there is real affection in the posted letters. They are often signed off with love. The two had worked together for decades, through the success of Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Covici was seventeen years older than Steinbeck and played an avuncular role, discussing the turmoil of the writer’s relationships, reasoning out his worries, reassuring him about his writing, keeping him up-to-date on the publisher’s dealings, and encouraging work on the new novel.

Over the eleven months of work on East of Eden, Steinbeck wrote 250,000 words. The resulting work is remarkable, a novel that frays the nerves even more than The Grapes of Wrath, due to the troubled relationships of two sets of brothers and the shocking portrayal of evil that is the character Cathy. 

If you read East of Eden, and then read the letters (which were posthumously published – though Steinbeck never intended them to be – as Journal of a Novel), Steinbeck’s achievement is bewildering. It is a rare documentation of the creative process. There is nothing straightforward about the development of the work – he plans, prevaricates, writes, struggles, persists, writes again, swinging between confidence and self-loathing, and Covici is part of every step. It is difficult to know if the novel would have been completed without him. East of Eden is, in fact, dedicated to the editor. 

Does any of this sound familiar? Isn’t this what publishing is? The writer at work, the emotional turmoil, the creative struggle, inching towards the masterpiece, and then, finally, the moment of triumph? When East of Eden was published in 1952, Viking printed 110,000 copies and it was an immediate success. It is undoubtedly a classic publishing story, but let us be clear: there is a lot going on here. 

When we think about publishing, we usually talk about the writer’s process, and there are good reasons for this. It has long been a principle of publishing that the writer is at the centre. The late Robert Gottlieb, editor at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and later The New Yorker, is clear about it in his 2016 memoir Avid Reader: ‘it’s the writer’s book, not yours’. And yet the creativity of the writer cannot be cordoned off. The writing is part of a wider creative process that unfolds with the publisher. It is rare that we get a profound insight into this wider process, but we do with East of Eden.

In Thomas Fensch’s 1979 study of their letters, Steinbeck and Covici: The Story of a Friendship, Covici empathises deeply with Steinbeck’s process and begins to take any criticism of the developing work personally. He writes: 

What you say about my reaction to praise and criticism of your novel, E. of E. is not funny. Not only do I know the inception of it, the hell you went through before the story took shape in your mind, but I have made myself a part of the book as you put it on paper.

He adds: ‘And because of my nearness to it I so much dread the possible criticisms and am constantly searching in my mind, after each chapter I read, for literary generalizations and theories of art in general which could be used against you. Something I have never done before.’ The two relish the creative process they are involved in: on the very same day, 18 July 1951, Steinbeck was writing in his morning letters to Covici, ‘You are having fun, aren’t you? This is a time of great joy. It will never be so good again – never.’ 

There is something else going on too. In the course of the letters, Steinbeck refers to a wooden box that he is making for Covici. The writer was quite handy and an aspiring inventor. When the book is finished, Steinbeck presents Covici with a varnished wooden box with a green felt lining and the completed manuscript of East of Eden inside. In the book’s unorthodox dedication, Steinbeck refers to the box and addresses his editor. ‘Well here’s your box’, he writes:

Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts – the pleasures of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation. And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you. And still the box is not full. 

The box takes on further significance when the editor brings it, along with some of Steinbeck’s ‘letters’, to a sales meeting about East of Eden. At this stage, the publisher’s sales staff had read the manuscript and they already believed in its importance, that it was the most important book they were going to publish since The Grapes of Wrath, but when they saw the box, Covici writes, ‘I never heard so many ahs and ohs.’ One of the sales staff then read aloud a profound extract from one of Steinbeck’s ‘letters’ that discussed the role of literature in society. The response in the room was intense, and Covici’s letter, dated 6 June 1952, recorded it:

When this was over there was absolute quiet in the room – I could hear a little fly buzzing over the ceiling. It seemed to me as if somebody were going to burst out crying. No word was spoken for I don’t know how long. Never in my 30 years attending sales conferences have I ever experienced anything like it. Here we were assembled to talk about an important book and without saying a word, in complete silence as if in prayer, we all felt and thought alike. It was a memorable experience. 

What can we learn from these fascinating letters? Is the Steinbeck–Covici relationship a relic of a publishing era now gone? The point I want to make is not that all publishing is like this, or should be like this, or that this kind of dynamic is easy to achieve, but that the publishing process certainly has the potential to be like this, depending on whether or not it is treated as a creative process or something routine. The creative publishing relationship is always open to us as publishers and editors, even today.

When publishers treat publishing as a creative process – tuning into their own creativity, being unafraid to engage with raw ideas and take risks, embracing the creative processes of those around them – they increase the chances of producing remarkable work. When they treat publishing as routine – going through the motions, working efficiently but predictably, seldom thinking about why they do what they have always done – it produces unremarkable work.

Creativity, as per the Steinbeck–Covici example, is not something abstract. It is a process with clear but challenging stages, and the more conscious we are of that process, the better we are able to engage with it. But how much do we know about creativity, or talk about it in our publishing work and make space for it, or are we content to leave ‘creativity’ to the writer? The reality is that publishing creativity is challenging and requires time, space and commitment. The key is not to approach ideas in a linear way, but from different angles – experimenting, connecting, persisting, and repeating this process. That is what a writer does, which is what makes their vocation so extraordinary.

No matter how experienced or knowledgeable a publisher becomes in the logistics of publishing, it is the multi-faceted, dynamic creativity that will make the difference. I recognise this through my own publishing: when dealing with a challenging text, or a dilemma with an author, or thinking about readers, I would often take myself off to a quiet corner and try to work out what to do. Putting words and dilemmas on a page, writing around them, I noticed how ideas would start to connect and spark off each other and solutions would emerge. 

But what was this process? I took it for granted for years – I thought it was simply about headspace and quiet – but gradually I realised it was something else, and noticed that it contained within it a number of definite stages – begin with a basic idea; play and experiment; add and subtract; persist until the appearance of a creative ‘flow’; arrive at a new workable idea; begin again. The more conscious I became of this creative process, the more I relied upon it. Furthermore, I found I was applying it to every aspect of my publishing work – commissioning, editing, design, production, sales, marketing – and it always made the difference between what was a perfunctory solution to a problem and something that made a publication stand out. Publishing history is full of examples of when a creative approach has made the difference. 

To return to Steinbeck’s East of Eden: in April 2008, Robert Gottlieb, who I quoted earlier, wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books titled ‘The Rescue of John Steinbeck’. For any admirer of the novelist, it is a tough read: Gottlieb works through Steinbeck’s entire oeuvre and lambasts his ‘philosophising’ and critiques of capitalism. The editor’s criticisms are not to be discounted: he had read through all of the novelist’s output in preparation for the piece. 

But his tone changes when he comes to East of Eden: he writes that Steinbeck’s ‘descriptive style is by now highly fluent and convincing’, that ‘the reporter Steinbeck is often effectively at the service of the novelist Steinbeck’. ‘Yes,’ Gottlieb concludes, ‘the book is highly overheated, its fervid drama uninflected by humor or irony, but it’s hard to forget.’ 

Hard to forget. I think any publisher, editor or writer would be satisfied with that judgement. What makes it hard to forget? What made the writing so fine? Why is the novel different from others? Could it be because of the intense creative process that surrounded the book, from Steinbeck to Covici to Viking? In publishing, creativity makes the difference.