I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

One thing I've learned about myself is that I'm very literal.

I'm very straightforward.

I want ideas to unfold in a linear way.

I think a lot about the rules and the right way to do things.

And while this is sometimes my strength, it's also sometimes my weakness.

So I always watch, for example, when someone sees a solution that I wouldn't see, or

grasps a possibility that would never have occurred to me.

One example of this has delighted me for years.

The novelist John Steinbeck is very well known for work such as The Grapes of Wrath,

East of Eden, and The Pearl.

For many years, he worked intensively on a book that was a retelling of the myth of King

Arthur, which in the end became his novel, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights.

And a letter to his editor, Chase Horton, on August 10, 1959, Steinbeck discusses the

problem of when in history to set his telling of the myth of King Arthur.

I know that for me as a writer, this issue would have presented a very straightforward

set of questions.

What period would I choose?

How much research would I need to do to be historically accurate?

Did they have the rules of shivalry?

Did they have horseshoes?

How exactly did people dress at the time and so on?

...