In pencil on a yellow pad...

"I'm sure that if he were writing today he would love computers and word processors. He would learn to use them too. Then he would sit down and write his books in pencil on a yellow pad.

"I have heard some writers say they can write anywhere. It doesn't matter where. It did matter to my writer: the work-room was the most important room in the house.

"I could always tell when he was about to write a book. There would be lapses in his conversation; he would stare off into space, be inattentive. Then there might be a time of good humour: he had decided what he was going to write and how to go about it. Then would come the final stage when we all knew that not one word we were saying was getting through to him."

Elaine Steinbeck on John Steinbeck, 1995