Four Ways to Edit like a Chef

Last time I used the equation:

Thought + Write + Edit =
Ingredients + Cook + Garnish

Since I’m backasswards, I want to talk about editing first.  We have the most control over the last part of the creative process, which is why we fuck it up.  We let our insecurities, frustrations, and expectations get involved, and then throw everything away.

You have a disassembled word cake that just came out of the oven.  Now what?  Here are the pitfalls to editing, and strategies on how to avoid them, all by thinking like a chef:



1) Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen.  Cooking is not a democracy.  There is a definite hierarchy.  Someone is in charge, and anyone who gets in the way is kicked out (sometimes nicely, sometimes not).

In your brain, who’s in charge of your word kitchen?  How many parts of your personality are offering “advice” and telling you how to stir your macaroni and cheese?  Do you let the images of your family and friends and teachers and critics into your kitchen?  Are they hovering over your stove?

If so, politely tell them to get the fuck out of your writing and go wait in the dining room.  Especially your critic needs to get out of the kitchen, and wait until you are done cooking.

I know this doesn’t make any sense, and goes contrary to everything you’ve ever been told about writing, but your critic doesn’t edit.  You edit.  Your critic waits until you are done, then eats your words, then writes a review.  They might send the dish back because it’s cold or needs salt or whatever, but never let your critic into your writing space.

Be your own word dictator.



2)  Leave the Drama in Your Writing.  You are not a five-star restaurant.  You don’t eat on gold plates.  You aren’t bedecked in diamonds.  When a chef cooks a steak, they know it’s just a steak.  

So why do writers act all high and mighty about what they do?  Your words are just words.  Do you freak out about making a sandwich?  No you don’t, so don’t freak out about writing a sentence.  Don’t act like writing is life and death.  Put the melodrama in the story, not in the process of writing the story.



3)  Presentation is Everything.  Here’s an ugly truth: everyone judges books by their cover.  What?  No way!  That’s not fair.  Yup, it isn’t fair, and life is not fair.

If you wrap a sandwich in paper, people will pay less for it than if a dude in a suit brings it on fine china to their table.  That’s life.  Hardback books cost triple what a paperback costs.

So when you edit, think about how you present your words.  It should match the intended audience.  For example, I can be edgy and swear on a tumblr blog, but in a college paper or a job, I would clean up my language.

Accentuate befittingly.  If you bake a chocolate cake, you might not want to decorate it with mushrooms.  Make sure the language you’ve chosen highlights your core idea (or most likely ideas). 

When I write haiku, I format them like haiku, and I frame them with hashtags so everyone knows it’s a haiku.  In a larger philosophical sense, art is anything in a frame, and as an artist, you need to make a conscious decision about your frame.





4)  Know When to Let Go of the Plate.  Imagine that a cook takes forever to bring your food, then as they’re about to drop the plate on your table they stick their finger in your mashed potatoes and say, “Oops, sorry, need to add more salt.  Be right back.”

You would leave that restaurant and never come back.

When you edit, your goal is to finish, then move on.  As I tell my kids, “Stop farting around.”  Fix your writing, and send it to the table.   Chefs are never like, “Oh no, I’ll never bake a cookie like that one again!” 

Here’s your zen moment: you can only grab something new if you’ve let something else go.   So let your old writing go.  Then you can write something new.


…


Happy writing!

Good Writing is Good Cooking

oftemm: I just love your poetry. I read it and wonder, “How do you even come up with these kind of things you write about?” I’d ask for an answer but I’d rather be kept in curiousity. :)
Don’t you stop your writing!

Thank you!  I’m glad you enjoy my work.  I want to answer your question, even though you begged me not to.  :)

…

Good Writing is Good Cooking

Think + Write + Edit = Ingredients + Cook + Garnish 

1) Think/Ingredients.  Words are concrete thoughts, so it makes sense to begin with how to think.  The best writing begins with the best thoughts.  No one wants a piece of cake made with month-old eggs and moldy flour.

So spend time thinking.  Exercise your thinking.  Stretch your brain as far in the past as it can go, then imagine being very tiny, then imagine being massive.  Imagine love.  Remember an enemy.  Remember what someone said.  Combine thoughts.  Mix them around, and see what batter forms.  Then when you have a thought that feels roughly like it could exist in reality, stick it in the oven.


2) Write/Cook.  Writing is an oven.  It’s cramped.  It’s hellish.  It seems like it takes forever.

It’s also something you have to do over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.  Anyone who does anything excellent either had luck or had work.  You can’t control the former, but you can definitely influence the latter.

I’m a quantity over quality type of person.  You think every day, so write down what you think every day.  No good chef is like, “Sorry, I have the ingredients, but I’m not going to cook today.  I’m waiting until I figure out the Next Great Recipe.”  Get in the word kitchen and write.  Don’t set out to write lobster and caviar words: write cookies and ice cream and salad and french fries.  Write what sustains you.


3)  Edit/Garnish.  This is the place where a lot of people get stuck.  If you only have the first two steps, then all you have is writing, the majority of which is garbage.  Most of your word muffins are burnt or lumpy or gooey or dry or clearly inedible.  If you pass off your writing to other people without editing it is trash.  (Unless you won the word lottery, congratulations! You can retire to your own private literary island!)

"Oh no! My precious words! Everything I write is the best thing ever!  That’s how I feel!"  Nope.  It isn’t.  Other people will take one bite of your pastry, and if it tastes like shit, they will not take bite number two.

So how do you edit?  Same way you prepare a cake: let it cool, decorate it, and serve it on your best porcelain.  Think about what you wrote.  Take time with each sentence, every word.  Say it out loud.  Cut off the burnt pieces, the cliches, the clunky word flow, the lapses in grammar.  Frost your writing with a thesaurus. 

(At some point you will be able to edit AS you write, but this takes practice or else you might end up throwing everything you write away.  Writer’s block is overzealous editing, which is a topic for another post.)

I like the haiku format because it forces me to slow down and edit.  Unless I’m lucky and the words taste divine, I’m probably going to have to garnish my work before its tasty.

4) An Example.  I start with the thought:

"Good writing is something that is a good thought that you write down, and you do that a bunch and then you read what other people write and you figure out what is good then you edit it and then it has to echo through people like a drum."

Which is absolute drivel.  So I edit out the garbage:

"Good writing is something that is a good thought that you write down, and you do that a bunch and then you read what other people write and you figure out what is good then you edit it and then it has to echo through people like a drum.”

I check a thesaurus, and I find that “reverberate” is a stronger word than “echo”.  It also means I can get rid of “drum”.

"Good writing reverberates through people."

I look for words better than “people”.  I like the alliteration of “being”.  Also, this applies not just to writing, but to art in general.  A little bit of reformatting and I have:

good art /
reverberates /
in your being

#haiku #sixwords #poetry

Sorry Kids

...

sorry kids

we won't walk to the zoo today
the animals all have colds
we won't drive to the moon today
too far for cars I'm told

we won't swim in the nile today
so nothing will chomp our toes
we won't gallop in Spain today
like unlucky Lucia, oh no!

we won't fly with eagles today
watch out for pointy talons
we won't drink with fish today
(an ocean is how many gallons?)

we won't ride a comet today
do they even have seat belts
we won't stroll on the sun today
our ice cream would probably melt

wherever will we go today?
come over here and look
of anywhere that's fun, I say
the best place is a book.

...

Why You Should Never Read a Blog

I'm watching Lost on Netflix streaming at the moment, and I've come to the conclusion that I hate television.

I really do, but not in the way you are thinking. Rotting my brain with all the crappy people doing crappy things thrills me, so that's not the issue. What bothers me about normal t.v. shows is that they go on and on and on and on and on, for season after season after season.

Now it's not so irritating after the show is over, and I have a definite timeline for how many hours of my life a specific show is going to devour. In this case, Lost has six seasons, so I realized when I started that I needed to set aside a certain number of brain cells to kill. (Twenty seven neurons burn out every time Jack talks, just like Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn in LotR when he exclaims, "You cannot wield it! Weenie man, away!")

The same thing applies to a blog. They have indefinite endings. Whoever you are following is just going to keep blathering on about crap, and never really get to a conclusion. At least until they are dead, which is the one crucial advantage that books and movies have over television and blogs.

So I beseech you. Please, do not read blogs, at least until they have an exact stopping point. That way you are truly certain that once you start, you can see the end in sight.

Genre Combinations

First of all, watch this:



Now, I realize the above clip is meant to be humorous, and it is, though I also got a separate and equally valid lesson in it, which is that certain genres do not do well when combined together. I can only name a few instances where combining aspects of fantasy, science fiction, cowboys, horror, you name it, has turned out well.

Whenever a Star Trek episode veers into a holodeck, the story rapidly declines into Suckville. Cowboy vampires, robots with swords, dragons in the present, these all sound neat in theory, but when put onto a screen or in a novel, you end up with campy crap.

I don't know why that is. Maybe the dissonance between discordant images shatters any suspension of disbelief the audience has built up over the years. Perhaps we can take bloodsucking fiends in one movie, and guys with lasers in another, but when you combine the two into vampire cyborgs, we step back and think, "Hey, that's lame," which is shorthand for when we deny the piece any plausibility.

So it works in the video above, but if anyone is thinking it would be great to make a science fiction musical theatre review with knights and dragons, please reconsider. The world will be a better place if you don't.

Fiction Writer's Block

Recently, I've been thinking about writing fiction, and I admit, I tend to be less than super coming up with narratives about imaginary people and places. (Which is not to say that I haven't in the past, I just haven't pursued it with any determination recently.)

I mean, sure, I can take the advice of every creative writing teacher I've ever had and write about what I know, however, at some point when writing something untrue you have to eventually come up with something fake. It has to be something fabricated enough to count as fiction without feeling artificial. The characters have to move and act and think and most of all talk in realistic ways without being real.

Unfortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it) I tend to enjoy synthesizing aspects of ideas, and I am less than stellar understanding the motivations and desires of real people, let alone imitations that I've created. I'm getting better with time, and since the only way to continue improving is by doing it over and over again until I come up with something that isn't utter drivel, I had better get cracking and write something, even if the characters are wooden mouthpieces for my own philosophies.

It's better to have written poorly and sucked, than to have never written at all.

Taming the Wild Thing

Since I take care of a three year old boy, I need a working strategy on how to discipline him when he does something naughty, like push his sister, dump all the crackers on the floor, or throw a tantrum when he doesn't get his way. Because he can't sit in a chair for longer than one minute without fidgeting, my wife and I considered that he may have ADHD, even though neither of us have any real understanding of what that is except through lists of imprecise "symptoms." When we compared his behavior to his girl cousin, who is particular and polite, and far more reserved, we noticed a huge divide between them.

Fortunately, we found this book. I generally have a hard time recommending books about parenting, because of the twofold reasons that they tend to be very self-helpish and authoritative, qualities which elicit my skepticism. When I saw that my wife had bought this book on a whim I thought, "Great, use time outs and positive discipline. I've heard it all before."

This is different though, because instead of applying a one size fits all approach, where the obvious differences between most boys and girls are swept aside due to politically correct ideology, the author instead explores the issue from a practical standpoint using studies to support his evidence. One critique I have is that this lengthy reference section at the end of the book should have been integrated into the rest of it, so that his conclusions are more transparent, but whatever. As if I'm seriously going to follow up on scientific papers anyway.

However, I had already been using exercise and the outdoors as a way to calm Justin. Instead of timeouts, I replaced them with "long walks" as in, if you keep doing what you are doing, I'm going to take you for a one to two mile stroll around our neighborhood. This is the first book I've found that specifically recommends this, though not as a punishment. (Which I realized at the time was counter to what I wanted long term, but I didn't see a choice, since time outs weren't working. He'd just sit and laugh at me.)

The most important thing I took away from this book is how to immediately apply consequences, then after he's calmed down, get him to explain to me what he did wrong, and what he can do differently next time. For example, if he's hitting his sister with a book, I take the book away, then he looks at me, tells me that he hit his sister with the book, and that next time, he could choose not to hit his sister.

The second thing was the idea that time-outs where he's sitting in the same room as me are counterproductive, and not really a "punishment", because he's getting my attention that entire time by screaming, squirming, throwing pillows, or just getting up and walking around. The author instead replaces a time-out with a "time-away" in which the kid is sent to a safe room where you can shut the door, and keep the door shut regardless of what they do (as long as they don't have a history of self-destructive behavior, like self-biting or jumping out of windows).

This has worked like a charm on Justin, and not only gives him time to calm down and reflect on what he's done, it also has dramatically reduced yelling in our household. Instead of lecturing him, or screaming at him that he's not listening, I can silently pick him up and stick him in the bedroom, and let him freak out on his own, not unlike this boy.

When he's calmed down, he can tell me what he did wrong, and what he can do differently next time. Also, this means I get to be a better parent, because instead of flipping out, I can remain calm and collected, and be the type of parent I want to be.

Perhaps there are two wild things that need to be tamed.

Top Secret

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a plant, mostly influenced by reading this book.

Like the boy in the story, I wanted to discover a formula that would unlock the key to human photosynthesis, so that no one would ever go hungry again, and so that we would never, ever have to harm any other life form for any reason.

I wanted to stick my feet in the dirt, and share the ground with the worms and bugs, and say, "Hey Mr. Bug, don't worry, I'm not going to harm you. Let's be friends." And the squirrels and birds would live in me and make nests on me and conceive babies in my leaves, and crap on me, but hey man, who cares? I'm a tree.

Someday, will science fulfill my dream, with solar power across the landscape, and stick my brain in a cyborg box, like Nixon on Futurama? Will I live forever as a man/machine symbiote, harnessing nourishment from the sun? Do the prophets and heavens and aliens, the warmongers and peaceniks, the meek and the strong, only have a chance at tranquility when we cast off the shackles of our locomotion and gullet?

Though I'm sick of the cliche, I'm also equally sick of being the scorpion.