Lessons in Writing . . . from the Kitchen

It’s dawned on me several times that I frequently use cooking and/or food metaphors/similes in explaining concepts about writing and/or publishing to my clients.

Part of it is my background in teaching and tutoring. I have some well-honed examples that just work because they’re easy to relate to, and I’ve carried them over to editing easily. As James Beard noted, “food is our common ground, a universal experience,” so simple examples revolving around food and basic cooking concepts are usually easily understood when you’re using them to make a point.

Part of it is also just that I love to cook and eat, and if I’m going to use an example to make my point, I’m going to default to something that’s fun for me to write about. Furthermore, the more I cook and the more I edit, the more overlap I see between both cooking and writing. The writer Paul Theroux explains it better than I ever could: “Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation– experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.” If you’re an author, you probably recognize a lot of the process of writing in that quotation too.

So, here are a few of my most used cooking to writing metaphors and the common writing issues/misconceptions they address.

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Think Like A Librarian

As some of you know, I work part time at my local library in addition to running my own editing business. I love my library job and appreciate the fact that, since it is a small rural public library, I often get to do things that would ordinarily be limited to professional librarians with MLS degrees. I do a fair amount of reference work and program development, as well as working the circulation desk, but one of my favorite things to do is readers’ advisory (RA). I’ve long maintained that working at a library makes me a better editor and that working as an editor makes me a better library associate, and RA is one of the reasons I believe this so strongly.

Saying I provide RA services to patrons is a formal way of saying that I’m the person whom people are referred to when they need help finding something new to read. It’s a fun challenge–I’ve handled requests that range from “crime fiction, the gorier to better” to “gritty mysteries with no profanity” to “horror set in insane asylums” to “funny Southern fiction”–and a few weeks ago, I presented a training to my library coworkers on how to offer effective RA services. In the process of working on the presentation, it dawned on me that a lot of this is useful to writers too.

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