Writing and Cooking

So, as I asked in an earlier post, why does it seem so much easier for some people to write than for others?

Why are some better at it than others, especially when we now have spell check, grammar check, even creative writing software that will tell you if your sentence structure gets repetitive?

Let’s go back to the kitchen for a comparison — not to write on the napkins, but to compare writers to cooks.

Think of the worst meal you’ve ever eaten at a friend’s house (keep the name of the friend to yourself). Now think of the smell and the texture of the food, the slipperiness or toughness, or graininess or grit; consider how it looked on the plate, or the fork, or in your hand; recall how it felt going into your mouth (and what it did thereafter — I’ll let you extend this image as far as you’d like to take it). 

Now think of one spectacularly and genuinely amazing meal. Breathe in, smile, and remember. Remember the flavors, the aroma, the play of the textures, the delights of all the various tastes, the play of the herbs and spices, the sauces and the sizzle; let the echo of its delicacies bring you back to the moment.

Whoever made the bad meal probably meant as well as the person cooking the great meal. 

Let’s assume they probably both had access to a range of ingredients; let’s assume they probably took time and care in the preparation of the meal. 

But the results? The results were different.

For some people it comes almost intuitively.

My Sicilian grandmother could barely read, never owned a cookbook, never followed a recipe, and never gave one. Yet she could not only make a meal for 20 people with $20 worth of groceries, the meals she made from nothing were, to this day, some of the best meals people ever had. (My cousins still talk about Grandma’s spittini;you never had anything better than that.)

One of her daughters, however, couldn’t cook for love or money.

My loving aunt did not inherit her mother’s talents. To make it worse, my aunt also tried to be fancy: she came of age when so-called “ethnic” cooking was on its way out and so she followed myriad Campbell-soup-can recipes for casseroles made with white mushroom sauce. Nobody wanted to eat at her house. It wasn’t because she lacked enthusiasm or effort. She simply didn’t get it.

There was no flavor. It was generic. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good. And I feel guilty saying that even now (forgive me, Aunt Gloria).

And the sad part is, she could have learned. If she’d stopped looking at recipes and started studying at the elbow of her mother, the master, she could have learned. She looked to the wrong place for guidance. She didn’t develop her palate. She stuck to preparing the same dish over and over even when those at the table never asked for seconds.

At the risk of overusing the kitchen spoon to beat this culinary imagery too vigorously, I want to refer you to Margaret Atwood’s essay “Spotty-Handed Villainesses.” 

Atwood offers writers an important lesson about the necessity of moving away from the generic, the safe, the closely-guarded, impersonal and dull effort, however comforting it might seem: “When my daughter was five, she and her friend Heather announced that they were putting on a play. We were conscripted as the audience. We took our seats, expecting to see something of note. The play opened with two characters having breakfast. This was promising — an Ibsonian play perhaps, or something by G.B. Shaw?… The two characters had more breakfast. Then they had more … Each asked if the other would like a cup of tea. What was going on? Was this Pinter, perhaps, or Ionesco, or maybe Andy Warhol? The audience grew restless. ‘Are you going to do anything except have breakfast?’ we said. ‘No,’ they said. ‘Then it isn’t a play,’ we said. ‘Something else has to happen.’ And there you have it, the difference between literature — at least literature as embodied in plays and novels — and life. Something else has to happen. In life we may ask for nothing more than a kind of eternal breakfast … but if we are going to sit still for two or three hours in a theatre, or wade through two or three hundred pages of a book, we certainly expect something more than breakfast.”

In essays, too, you have to make something happen. Perhaps making something happen in a piece of creative nonfiction is even more crucial than inventing action in fiction. It’s certainly more difficult. You need to remain within the plausible and the actual; rarely can angels, earthquakes, superheroes, or time-traveling back to the Children’s Crusade rescue your prose from accusations of tedium, dullness, or narcissism.

Writers, I think, are like cooks; we have to find a way around the ingredients, a way to use what talents we do have, embracing a sense of creative and personal imagination when approaching our task.

Put down the recipe. Pick up the knife.