Self-Edit Like An Opera Composer

One of the highlights of every summer for me personally is attending a performance (or two) from Opera in the Ozarks. I particularly love their Sunday afternoon shows where, in addition to great opera, you also get free ice cream and an hour-long opera talk before the performance.

Earlier this summer, I attended The Crucible and La Traviata at Opera in the Ozarks, and they were both excellent (as always). During the opera talk about the former, I learned about the writing method of composer, Robert Ward. As is true of many composers, he wrote the music after the libretto text was finished. What interested me the most as an editor, however, was his chosen method of doing so—he kept reading the words aloud as he worked.

When I get asked what my single top editing tip is for writers, I always say to read the text aloud. I’d actually been meaning to write a blog post on how beneficial reading aloud is, and that opera talk just reinforced that it’s an important topic to cover. Though Ward was reading aloud for musical reasons—to ensure that the words matched the music—and not editing reasons, reading aloud is still highly beneficial for writers and editors.  

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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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