There are several blog posts out there that compare writing to baking. They start with recipes and ingredients and go from there. I’ve read a lot of them and all I can say is “no,no,no!” They start in the wrong place! A good story and a good baker start at the beginning. Keep reading to find out what I mean.
Cookies
As a child, I ate a lot of homemade cookies. My mother was an excellent baker. I knew exactly where she kept the cookie jar, an old crock in the dark recesses of our cupboard. I loved munching on her lunchbox cookies—chocolate chip cookies, or oatmeal raisin cookies or peanut butter cookies. I also enjoyed her Christmas cookies—coconut macaroons, Russian teacakes, date-nut bars, thumbprint cookies and sugar cookies in a score of different shapes. Every holiday season, we visited my great-aunt Josephine. Her cookies were spectacular creations of little bright packages—bonbons, spritz, springerle, rugelach, and cookies whose names I never learned. Each one was more delightful and delicious than the next. I grew up eating cookies.
In Kindergarten, I remember the first time we were told we would be having cookies and milk for our snack. We were each given a fig newton and a windmill cookie. The shock of disappointment scarred me forever! I learned not all cookies were created equal. Fortunately, about the same time, I made a trip with my mother to the local bakery, where a kind old woman gave me a cookie for being a good girl. (Was I?) It was a soft gingerbread man with raisin eyes and buttons down the front. A cookie that I wanted to play dolls with, but I ate him, all the same. Eventually, I even found a few store-bought cookies that I liked. Kindergarten blues were replaced when they brought in iced animal crackers, covered in chocolate or pink or white icing with little sugar dots all over them.
Baking
By the time I was ten, I was baking chocolate chip cookies. I already knew from my early days crawling around the kitchen where mom kept the sugar and flour, in huge, round tins with tight lids on the floor of the cupboard. I could read the recipe that she followed (the one on the Nestles chocolate chip bag). I knew how to crush nuts and use the silver stand mixer we had. I understood the process, to cream the sugar and butter first. The toughest part was lighting the gas stove to preheat, because it did not have a pilot light. Even then, my chocolate chip cookies were delicious.
Reading
But all of that is baking. At the same time that I was eating my weight in cookies (it’s hard to believe but I was a skinny child), and venturing into baking, I was reading voraciously. First, before I even knew the alphabet, I was paging through our Mother Goose fairy tales book, finding rhymes by the corresponding picture and reciting them as my grandma did. I graduated to my own little golden books and memorized them as they were read to me, too. By second grade, I could read well enough to borrow books from our school bookmobile, where the librarian favored biographies of the US Presidents. I made it through John Quincy Adams before I branched out to other stories.
In grade school, I read a massive amount of Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Dana girl mysteries and filled in time between them reading Newberry Honor books and other fiction from the library. Mother would let me get any book at the library, regardless of whether it was in the appropriate children’s section or the adult section, and she would read the books, too. Our tastes differed. She liked Zane Grey westerns (he was from Ohio, too), but she indulged my fascination with mysteries and fantasy.
I also ready all my school assignments. History was a joy, geography less so. I read my father’s magazines. He favored popular mechanics and photography magazines. I liked going to the dentist’s office because he had National Geographic magazines. Every once in a while, I’d see a Look or a Life magazine at one of my friends’ houses. There were cartoons and newspapers, comic books and picture books. My friends and I even read the Sears catalogue, a lot! (We cut out pictures for our paper dolls and play houses.) Reading was all about stories.
Writing
And reading led to writing. I wrote my “autobiography” in fourth grade, illustrated with photographs taken by my dad. In fifth grade, I wrote about saints and their inspirational lives for Catholic school competitions. By the time I was eleven, I wanted to be a writer, and I got my first Writer’s Digest magazine, all about markets (published in Cincinnati, Ohio). By the time I was leaving grade school, I had written character sketches of friends, letters to unknown pen pals, and an opinion piece (that I quickly outgrew) that I sent in to a magazine!
Baking and writing don’t start with ingredients or recipes. They don’t start with understanding or thinking or planning. They don’t start with equipment. The analogy may help in understanding all of that process and production. But truly, baking and writing start with consuming!
So my experience says: Eat cookies or any other baked goods. Devour the written word. This is where the story, the analogy between baking and writing, really starts. This is what helps you know what you like, what texture, flavor, ingredients are right for you. Whether you want little nibbles or big, hefty stories. Whether sweet or spicy is your style. This is where you feel the love and learn, in turn, to put love into your craft. #baking #writing #bakingandwriting