Recipes

I love cooking. I love that thrill of trying some new recipe, something you’ve never made before. I’m always a little disappointed when it doesn’t turn out or it’s just not to my tastes. But! When something new turns out well, when you take that first bite and you know this a new favorite, and OMG! how did I not know about this, I made something great today. That, my friends, is one of the best feelings in the world.

I bring this up because A: I made this last night. It was AMAZING! I’ve never had the dish at all, let alone made it at home. And, even though chicken and pasta are far from Oliver’s favorites (he complains loudly whenever I announce I’m making one or the other, let alone both), he was blown away by it. We stuffed our faces with it the last two nights. That’s how good it was, he ate leftovers without complaining. He still talked about how great it was. Go forth, make yourself some. Now. Well, not now, because it’s 9:30 at night now, but soon. You will not regret it. Unless you’re vegetarian. Then go make it with some eggplant slices dredged in egg and coated with panko  (japanese bread crumbs). You’ll still thank me.

And, finally, B: Because I’ve come to realize how similar writing and cooking are. Bear with me. You have a recipe for either. I know, I know, everyone hates formulaic fiction. But there’s still a recipe that’s followed in good fiction. You need characterization. Enough to make your characters feel real. And part of that is making sure their motivation is visible and understandable, even if the reader wouldn’t react in the same way. You need worldbuilding. Enough to suck the reader in and make them feel like they’re living in the pages of your book. You need a plot. Even if it’s about a person changing, there still has to be a plot. You need conflict to drive that plot, lest it fizzle out. Proper grammar allows the story you are trying to tell to be understood. There are a dozen more things.

Just like cooking, they can be combined in different quantities for different effects, but there is still a base formula to follow. And just like cooking, when you write something new and it falls flat there is the disappointment. Maybe you can fix it with a few tweaks, maybe the dish needs to be dumped out and remade from scratch (hello, completely rewriting the book), but at least you probably know where you went wrong and have an idea of how to fix it this time. You might not. It might take four or five tries. You might never get it right, or vow never to make it again. Much like me and pork chops until this last year.

But in both writing and cooking, maybe you should give it another shot later on. Don’t give up on something forever. Just because you don’t have the skill to make something now, doesn’t mean you’ll never have the skill needed. In the last five years both my writing and my cooking skills have steadily grown. Every time I do either of them a lot, when I get to the end of a big push I can look back and see how much better I am than I was before.

And just like cooking, when you get it right there’s that stupendous thrill when you take a bite/reread a section and realize, not only did it turn out, but it turned out really well. Especially when it’s something new, some new experiment you have tried before. Fried rice when you’ve never made asian food, or a science fiction short story when you’ve written few short stories and no sci-fi. Man, that feeling really is the best. So off I go, with a belly full of a delicious new recipe, to work on that sci-fi short story that’s turning out better than I ever would have expected.