It’s that time of the year again, when the cinemas feel like a buffet of stories. Every corner you turn, a new adaptation or reimagining of a beloved book is waiting to grab your attention. The Hunger Games is still holding court, but soon enough, Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, and countless other films are queued up like eager students at a school assembly. For a writer—or anyone who thrives on stories—this is the season that makes your fingers itch for a pen, your mind wander into imaginary worlds, and your heart beat in sync with a narrative you haven’t even begun to tell.
I have always loved John Steinbeck. I mean, who doesn’t, really? There’s a kind of honest, almost merciless clarity in his writing that hits you even when you’re reading about dust, grapes, or the endless sun of the Salinas Valley. I remember reading East of Eden for the first time, curled up on my bed in a tiny HDB flat in Singapore, and thinking: here is a man who understands the cruel, beautiful contradictions of life. Love, greed, loyalty, betrayal—he lays it bare without flinching. And while I’ve never grown grapes or walked among Californian migrant workers, his truths resonated as if they were stories of my own kampung, my own neighbourhood, my own little universe in Singapore.
Which brings me to an interesting point: good writing, anywhere in the world, feels local and personal at the same time. You can read Steinbeck in California and think of the dusty streets of Little India or the tropical haze over Bedok. And just as Steinbeck captures the human struggle against forces bigger than themselves, local writers too have captured the quirks, the absurdities, and the hardships of life in Singapore. Take, for instance, Alfian Sa’at. His poetry and plays, especially in the early 2010s, dissect the city-state with surgical precision. In his work, you find the crowded MRTs, the fluorescent-lit corridors of HDBs, the pressure to conform, and the subtle acts of rebellion that exist in every corner. Whereas Steinbeck writes about vast fields and moral universes, Alfian writes about narrow alleys, family dinners, and the weight of expectations in a society that prizes order and efficiency. But both writers, at their core, are interested in the human condition. Both insist that the world is rarely fair, that suffering is inevitable, and that beauty—whether literal or metaphorical—is as fleeting as it is essential.
So, back to writing. Steinbeck has six rules that have stuck with me since I first read his 1975 interview in The Paris Review. And I’ll admit, I sometimes read them like a gospel for a writer floundering in a city that rewards pragmatism more than imagination:
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Seriously. Just write one page a day. Lose track of the 400 pages looming over your head. When it’s done, you’ll be surprised.
Write freely and rapidly. Get it down, all of it. Don’t rewrite until it’s complete. Editing in the middle is usually a mask for procrastination, and it kills the rhythm of thought, the magic of unconscious association.
Forget your generalized audience. Nameless, faceless readers will scare you to death. Instead, write for one person. It could be a friend, an imagined mentor, or even your younger self in a tiny bedroom in Singapore, staring out at the HDB courtyard below.
If a scene gets the better of you, bypass it. Come back later. Often, the scene didn’t belong there in the first place.
Beware of a scene you love too much. If it’s dearer than the rest, it’s probably out of place.
Dialogue must be spoken aloud. Only then does it sound like speech. Reading it silently is like trying to catch fish with your hands—you might see them, but you won’t feel the pulse of life in the water.
When I think about these rules, I often juxtapose them with what Alfian Sa’at does in his local work. Steinbeck’s advice is timeless, universal, almost pastoral in its patience. Alfian’s work, by contrast, is sharp, immediate, and urban. But the principle is the same: clarity, honesty, and connection to a singular human experience. Steinbeck would have loved Alfian’s ability to capture the chatter of the hawker centre, the tension in the corridors of power, and the unspoken anguish of people who never quite fit the Singaporean ideal of success. Alfian, in turn, might have appreciated Steinbeck’s patience with human frailty, his capacity to make the struggles of one man echo the struggles of a thousand.
2012 is a curious moment in literature and film. On one hand, Hollywood adaptations dominate the box office, sweeping audiences into grandiose visual feasts. On the other, local writers like Alfian are quietly chronicling life with a laser focus that is easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention. It reminds me, as I sit in a Cathay Cineplex watching Snow White and the Huntsman, that narrative—whether sprawling across continents or constrained within a single HDB flat—is always a reflection of human desire and human flaw. Charlize Theron’s queen isn’t just obsessed with beauty; she’s terrified of mortality, of decay, of irrelevance. In Singapore, women face a subtler version of this terror: whitening creams, gym culture, face masks, Botox appointments, the constant digital pressure to be “picture-perfect.” The stakes may not be life or death, but the psychological toll is no less real.
And here’s where Steinbeck’s advice resonates. Writing for one reader, focusing on what truly matters, bypassing what’s extraneous—it’s all a way of preserving authenticity in a world obsessed with spectacle. You can watch Snow White and the Huntsman and admire the CGI, the flocks of black birds, the enchanted forests, but if you don’t feel the human stakes—the queen’s fear, Snow White’s moral ambiguity—you’re watching pretty pictures. Likewise, Alfian’s work is visually quieter, but if you tune in, the stakes are there: identity, desire, rebellion, belonging.
It also occurs to me, in 2012 Singapore, that reading Steinbeck and Alfian in parallel teaches something about scale and intimacy. Steinbeck writes of California, a place where the horizon can swallow a man whole. Alfian writes of Singapore, a place where the MRT crowd can crush your personal space, but moral and emotional landscapes are just as vast if you pay attention. Both demand empathy from the reader, whether for migrant workers or a teenager stuck in a society that prizes success above humanity.
And what of beauty, the obsession that drives Snow White and the Huntsman? The queen’s vanity is monstrous, yes, but also deeply human. In Singapore, we see it every day, less literally but no less intensely. Women and men, pressured to maintain appearances, chase perfection in the gym, in plastic surgery clinics, on Instagram feeds. Sometimes it feels like everyone is consuming themselves—literally, figuratively, psychologically—in order to keep up with an impossible ideal. Steinbeck would have called it a fundamental human struggle; Alfian would have pointed out the absurdity, the comedy and tragedy intertwined in the everyday.
Reading them together, I feel a rare kind of satisfaction. Steinbeck reminds me of patience, of writing as an act of survival and love; Alfian reminds me that observation and immediacy matter too, that the small acts and moments of urban life are just as worthy of attention as epic tales of struggle. As a writer—or a cinephile, or simply a human being—these lessons are invaluable. They make me think, when watching movies or reading books, about the interplay of ambition, morality, beauty, and human frailty.
So as the year winds on, and more adaptations and stories flood the screens and pages, I find myself thinking about Steinbeck’s rules, about Alfian’s quiet precision, and about the universality of storytelling. It doesn’t matter if you are writing about California dust, Singapore streets, or the magical forests of a fairy tale; what matters is honesty, focus, and a willingness to confront the complexity of your characters, your people, your world.
I walked out of the cinema that day in 2012, thinking not just about Charlize Theron’s performance, but about the pressures we place on ourselves and on one another. About beauty, fear, morality, ambition, and survival. About the stories we tell, and the stories we read. And about the quiet joy of discovering, in the words of Steinbeck or Alfian, that human truth can be as magnificent and as messy as any CGI castle or enchanted forest.
In the end, whether you’re reading East of Eden or a local play, watching Hollywood spectacles or Singaporean short stories, it’s the same lesson: people are complex, society is demanding, and storytelling—good, honest storytelling—is the closest we get to understanding either.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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