Good Writing: It's All in the Recipe

I've spent the better part of my married life learning how to cook.  Those early months were not pretty.  Though I enjoyed eating, I lacked the capacity to simmer, steam, and stew the raw ingredients.   Dinner often consisted of Tuna Helper or fried ham steak.  Eventually, we progressed to something more "gourmet."  Gavin took chicken breast, seasoned it with whatever we had on hand, and then sauteed it in a mixture of liquid flavorings--worcestershire, soy sauce, or lemon juice.  We tossed the result with buttered rice or noodles.  Bon Appetit!

When I brought my firstborn daughter home, I found myself with large chunks of time on my hands.  Since newborns do just three things--sleep, cry, and nurse-- I found myself rocking the baby and watching endless hours of programming on the Food Network.  And thus, I learned to cook.  I began to understand the value in marinating meat, being careful to use just the right pots and utensils.  When marinating with something acidic like lemon, you couldn't leave it on the meat too long or it would actually "cook" it.  You couldn't use a metal pan.  To make spaghetti sauce taste like it had been simmering all day, add a little beef stock.  Don't over-mix the bread dough or your pastry would be tough.  I watched, and I remembered, and I experimented.

Little by little, our limited menu expanded.  I tackled stuffed pork tenderloin and grilled salmon.  I began to add my own twists to some of the dishes--a pinch of cinnamon here or a touch of tabasco there.  I printed out our favorites, refining them until at last I had my own cookbook of sorts--family favorites I could make again and again.  I declared each dish delicious because I had studied the technique, then perfected it myself.

Oh, I made mistakes in the process.  Once I tried to heat the ceramic insert of my crock pot directly on the burner of my stove.  After a series of puzzling pops, all six quarts of a very chunky vegetable soup exploded in my kitchen.  Another time, I drizzled hot chocolate over inflated balloons in an effort to make these darling little chocolate nest bowls I had seen one beloved pastry chef demonstrate.  The hot chocolate caused the balloons to burst, and I ended up scraping the cocoa confection from every surface and crevice in my entire kitchen.  Two years later, I was still finding chocolate on isolated door hinges and light fixtures.  And yet from both of those experiences, I learned some important lessons.

1.  Having the right parts on hand make a big difference.
2.  Process matters.
3.  Patience prevents disaster.
4.  Persistence pays off.

So writing is a lot like cooking.  I have all these ideas just jiggling around in my head like the ingredients for a gourmet souffle.  I want to get them all down as fast as I possibly can.  That souffle is going to be really good when it's done, but I don't want the whole thing to collapse.  The perfect combination of plot, characters, conflict, and climax can be pretty fragile.   I don't want to get ahead of myself.  I'm spending some time studying the masters and learning the craft, practicing with proven exercises, then beginning at the beginning and proceeding step by step.  Good art is rarely accidental just as a good dish is rarely the result of unguided happenstance.  In the creative recesses of my imagination, something delicious is percolating.

As Julia Child noted most sagaciously, "No one is born a great cook.  One learns by doing".  Hunched over my keyboard as I am right now, I can eat that up and taste the satisfaction of having done all I could to perfect the technique that makes for a great dish...or a great script.

May I Have a Word?

As a little girl, I clutched a treasured picture book.  I still remember the bright yellow background and the red ink outline of a chicken and an egg on its cover.  The tattered corners betrayed my selfish possession of it.  I loved this story without words.  Though many other books crowded the shelf in my room, I retrieved this one most often.  And despite the lure of Dick and Jane and Dr. Seuss and all the Little Golden Books, I preferred to narrate the illustrations myself.  I didn't need my mom or dad to make time to share it with me.  I could "read" this book all by myself! 

As I grew older my verbal capabilities matured, but because I could not yet write, this little tale became my very best friend.  Soon, I mastered my letters, and in time written words  and sentences emerged.  One day, I grabbed the book and wrote my own story, marking up those pages filled with promise with a beginning, middle, and end all my own.  The mystery and the magic faded as I directed the plot's outcome. But a new story unfolded--one I had created and could now share with anyone willing to open the book and find what I had already discovered and recorded.

Even now, I love words.  I love how they have the ability to inform, influence, and inspire.    A series of sounds strung together describe events, arouse desire, and foster encouragement or dismantle it.  They shape our thoughts.  They wrap us in warmth.  At the same time, we discover things about the world that chill us to the bone.  What power they hold!

Nathaniel Hawthorne was exactly right when he said, "Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."