Writing is Like Cooking

Writer: Cheryl M. Perry

Ok, hear me out. I was recently writing something for a group I work with. I had four months before the writing was needed for an event. The organizers of this event did not know me very well, so I’ll excuse them for not understanding how writing is done…by me anyway. So now, I feel obliged to explain the writing process as it applies to me and my word works in the language of the kitchen. Please forgive me, I’m a foodie to the end and compare most things in life to the growing, cultivating and/or cooking of food,

Let’s say you are planning a potluck lunch to attract like-minded folks to your not-quite-known-to-the-public organization. I volunteer to cook one of my signature dishes: Chili Maple Roasted Brussels Sprouts for the big event. I have made this dish lots of times, but like with most recipes, according to my whims and the availability of ingredents, it can come out differently each time I cook it. But you are impatient and anxious about how things will turn out. You want all the food at your potluck to taste delicious and since you have never had my Chili Maple Roasted Brussels Sprouts, you want to verify the deliciousness of it.

So, several days before the food is due, you call and tell me you want to eat the dish I am preparing. You need to know beforehand that this is something that will attract would-be eaters to your organization and the work you do. You don’t want to save this to the last minute in case Chil Maple Roasted Brussels Sprouts is not to your liking. I have all the ingredients necessary, but I haven’t put them together nor roasted them in a 375 degree oven for 35 minutes, so I send you a raw Brussels sprout. Just one. It looks like a cute little cabbage. It tastes like a grassy bud. It’s hard and difficult to chew. In fact, you are not happy that this is the vegetable I will be featuring at your potluck. So, you panic and cancel the whole event. This annoys me, so I go into my kitchen and cook enough food to feed a WordPress convention just to work off some steam and cook some asparagus with it. Nothing is wasted in my culinary or writing endeavors.

If you ask someone for the end product without giving that person the time to complete its creation, you are essentially asking them for a tough and chewy bud. As it is with cooking, so it is with writing. Any writing worth its salt has a list of ingredients (even if it’s just in the writer’s head) that, when assembled, measured, mixed and given a proper amount of cooking time, will result in something greatly different than the list of its components. Editing is equivalent to adjusting the seasonings and re-evaluating the time required for completion.

So you may be guessing Chili Maple Roasted Brussels Sprouts is a metaphor for a speech I volunteered to write. Unpaid and on my own time, I managed to crank out some of the juices stewing in my head toward that goal. Then came the demand to see the finished product early on (2 1/2 months before it was due) in order to assess if this was indeed what was desired for the event. I gave a weary look at my ingredients. They were magnificent yet, unincorporated, with no delightful coalescence of the parts into a delicious whole. Alas, the only thing I had to offer at that time was the equivalent of a raw Brussels sprout. I knew that was not going to taste anything like the pleasant fusion of a finished product. I sent it off to the anxious and impatient one with trepidation.

You may assume it did not please the palate as a fully cooked meal might. There was a lot of sputtering and a bit of choking on my raw ingredient. This wasn’t what they asked for (of course not). Where was the expected dialog? What was the intended message? How disappointing this speck of writing. I will admit, on its own, the raw ingredient I sent was seemingly not the required product, but one component of a speech that would later define and blend with the sum total of pieces required to fully cook a good word meal. Now you see, I’ve started to combine the language of cooking with that of writing. You can cook the books, but you can’t write the chicken. It’s getting terribly confusing.

So, I conceded the truth that lack of trust simply fouls the stew and allowed an abrupt dismissal of my contract without a fuss. But like any good cook/writer, I considered seeking a more enlightened audience. I kept writing. When I have a lot of odds and ends ingredients, I have been able to make a wonderful meal. So it may be with my little speech that was. Some day the piece may be printed in the New York Times or abandoned for all eternity to the mysterious workings of my laptop computer, just as any meal may be savored then forgotten over time. Reading is a lot like eating. Bon apetit.