Roasted Carrot Soup. Photograph by Food52.com.
Today I decided to make roasted carrot soup, which got me thinking that writing and cooking are particularly ripe for comparison. At first glance, both seem easy. Buy these ingredients and prepare them, and voila, dinner. Come up with a plot, write it out, and voila, novel. Both cooking and writing seem like tasks than can be planned and executed through clarity of thinking, fidelity of execution, and sheer force of will. Maybe this apparent simplicity is why everyone you meet on an airplane is writing a book. (Why is it always people on airplanes? Maybe that’s the only place I talk to strangers.) Of course the reality is that there is a fair bit of magic to both good cooking and good writing.
As someone who has outlined two novels, and then written two totally different books than the ones I’d so carefully plotted, I can testify that simply writing down the journey of characters from point a to point b is not the same thing as storytelling—just as tossing the ingredients for a soup into a pot and turning up the heat is not a substitute for the careful preparation, seasoning, and adjustments of real cooking.
I admire the economy in a recipe’s format. It tells a story quickly, without excess. It whittles the plot down to the bones. Here are the ingredients and their proportions. Here is how you put them together. But I think it’s also a particularly deceptive form of writing, one that can obscure the true challenges, and pleasures, of cooking. The best cooks I know use recipes as guides, starting points for dishes that they will taste and tweak and sometimes disregard all together, swapping in ingredients or changing temperatures when what’s called for makes no sense to them.
So too, the best writers understand the alchemy of story, the strange portals that open when you are trying to follow an outline or an idea about where a plot will go. The characters refuse to obey. The words sound trite and contrived. The heart drains out of the project, the air goes out of the room, and the joy goes out of the work. Don’t get me wrong: having an outline often keeps me going, making me feel as if I know what I’m doing. See! I’ve got plans! It testifies to my ambitions. Fooling myself into thinking that I’ve merely got to get from point a to point b, can get me writing. And once I’m going, I can cast the plan aside and improvise.
In the kitchen, sadly, I’m not much of an improviser. I haven’t logged enough hours to have a sure sense of substitutions or variations myself. But fortunately I can borrow my gumption from other cooks, via online sites like Epicurious and Food52, where people share their experiences with recipes: their adjustments and improvements; their failures and triumphs. It’s like a writing workshop for cooking. We’re all engaged in the same enterprise and we all care deeply about the outcome, so together we praise, we critique, we tweak, we try again.
That this kind of collaboration exists in cooking makes me think it must be intrinsic somehow to the act of creation. To know if something is working, we need to share it, and in sharing it we can discover solutions we wouldn’t have come up with alone. We can borrow ideas and find new courage. That’s what encouragement is: the cultivating of courage.
So I’m grateful for the insights of others, as well as their tips and tricks for getting a recipe to work. I’m terrible at chopping things. I used to blame my knives, but I think it’s my general lack of patience and penchant for perfectionism. My onion dice will never look like Bobby Flay’s. Reading about other’s cooking experiences allows me to realize that hardly anyone’s dice look like Bobby’s, and it doesn’t really matter in the end. We all have skills that we’re better at than others, and we can compensate for a sloppy dice with a passable julienne or, when all else fails, a food processor.
So too with writing. I heard man-of-the-moment George Saunders talk about this idea in a superb, quirky, writing documentary called Bad Writing. He said that writers often only have a couple of talents that they can pull out of their packs—the ability to write witty dialogue, the apt metaphor, the zinging description—and the trick to writing well is figuring out how to bring those good parts together, how to distract the reader from the parts of their writing that are not as accomplished. How to make people appreciate the finished soup instead of noticing the brutally mauled onion.
Writers who realize that they don’t need to be the best at everything, but simply good enough to get to the great parts, are the ones who are most successful. It’s been a long time since I got my MFA but, again and again, when my classmates are successful, it’s often not the superstars, but the ones who have not given up. And so I leave you with the recipe for the Roasted Carrot Soup I made today. It tastes so savory and complex, you’d never know that my dice was sloppy, that I ran out of garlic, or that the carrots got a little overroasted. One spin of the immersion blender later, I got to the great part. Eat it while you write.
I really enjoyed this post Caitlin! As someone who blogs about cooking and writing, I was particularly intrigued, and agree that there are many similarities between the two. The soup sounds wonderful, perfect for the end of winter.
Excellent expansion on your simile, Caitlin. I think the collective input is especially important. The other day I was telling one of my classes how writing is odd in that it is a solitary activity yet still requires some sort of community. I also think that a lesson can be learned that while try to cook for a number of palates, you cannot please them all. And thanks for including a vegan-friendly recipe! Great post.
A great post. This reminds me of an interview the LA Times blog did with Michael Chabon, where he talked about the kinship between writing and cooking:
“As a cook, I came into this inheritance of different traditions, of the American tradition, my Jewish tradition, my mother’s family and the family she grew up in. My cooking kind of emerged from both a written inheritance, actual recipes written down by my mother and grandmother, and also in the cookbooks that became important to me, and I also involve my own approach, my own changes in recipe.
I think in a way, that’s sort of what you’re engaged in doing as a writer, too. You come into this inheritance of things that have been done and the ways in which they have been done, and people who influence you sort of pass along what they think is important, and what they think you need to know how to do. But over time you begin to make changes, what you think are improvements or alterations, because you like the way it comes out better. In that sense, there’s less a question of rejecting or accepting the past, less an anxiety of influence kind of thing, than there is an evolution of your own culinary style as applied to language and storytelling.”