God never meant me to cook good food. When it comes to spices, herbs, flavors and proteins, I’m a major disaster. I mean major. My home economics teacher recognized this when I put tablespoons of oregano in her braised radishes instead of the teaspoons she specified. (Who braises radishes anyway?) My husband figured it out the night I added sugar to the meatloaf instead of salt. He thanked me for inventing meat cake and took me out for a burger instead. The fact is, the kitchen never excited me as much as the printed page does. So instead of cooking the regular way, I cook with words. One thing I have learned is that Great Cooks aren’t Born, They Are Made. Julia Child had to go to school, August Escoffier learned through an apprenticeship, and Justin Wilson was taught by his mother. The same goes for cooking with words. All writers start out as great readers, picking up skills by studying the best. And like all students who’ve watched accomplished teachers, those would-be creators studied their texts, picked up their tools and concocted….horrendous messes. Good books and teachers can help you get started but nothing is a substitute for…
I learned to read because of envy. Some little girl in my pre-kindergarten class walked in one day, waving a Little Golden book like it was a fan. During show-and-tell she read aloud to the class. The teachers all went nuts. How smart she was, how sweet she was and wasn’t she wonderful to entertain the other children? Phooey. A show-off in a pinafore is what she was and I wasn’t interested in being her audience. I buckled down to understanding the Little Bear books Mom had been reading aloud and soon there were two readers in my Pre-Kindergarten. With a little help from Dr. Seuss, I left Blondie behind in the dust. Since then, I’ve read most things with ease. The thing is, even a talent for reading won’t make every book easy and some worthwhile works require effort. I found that out in high school when we were assigned Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and all those Russian characters were confusing me. That is also where I learned the single greatest reading trick. When you sit down to read a challenging work, have something close you can write on. Let me go back to “The Cherry Orchard” This play may be instantly comprehensible…
Picasso’s Don Quixote If there’s a central bit of advice I’ve heard or can give, it’s “Don’t Give Up.” Don’t give up working, don’t give up trying, and don’t give up on anything if it gnaws at your soul. If you want to put something new into the world, you have forget giving up. Successful people know, first hand, how hard it is to succeed. The process involves a lot of failure and mistakes and they developed the fortitude to keep trying until they got it right. Once, I was disheartened to read F. Scott Fitzgerald rewrote some pages twenty times; now I wonder how he made his prose that good after only nineteen revisions. To make something of quality takes a kind of tenacity comparable to OCD. If you want to make something good, get used to the work it involves. Don’t Give Up. It takes another type of resilience to find the people interested in publishing your work. There are all kinds of venues looking for creative people but few of them will be interested in you. Your precious creation will be too long, too short, too old-fashioned, too avant-garde and mostly not what they’re looking for. Your…
Everyone, from my college advisor on down, will tell you I love tales with orphan heroes. You name them: Oliver Twist, Harry Potter, Tensy Farlow, the Baudelaire children, I fell in love with each and every one of those books. (Well, I hated the ending of the Baudelaire series, but that’s another story.) The thing is, there are orphans and then there are orphans and they aren’t really alike. To explain what I mean, look at one of the most famous kid books to come out of the 19th century: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You can’t get past the first page without learning Tom’s parental status. Aunt Polly’s first soliloquy says, “he’s my own sister’s boy, poor thing, and I ain’t got the heart to lash him.” So, Tom is an orphan but he doesn’t really fit the mold. Orphan heroes are usually vulnerable kids who miss the love and security of a stable home. They tend to grow up fast because they have to and any tendency toward mischief has been knocked right out of them. Can you think of anyone less like that than Tom Sawyer? Tom and his siblings may be orphans but they’ve never lacked…
Printed text is like the wheel in some ways. It’s one of the first basic inventions, one that millions of others benefit from. Before printed text, reading was reserved for the few who, through luck or wealth, could get their hands on the labor-intensive, hand-printed texts. After Gutenberg, books became accessible to larger and larger pockets of people and more and more information became available because it was printed. Knowledge wasn’t lost after a sheepskin or papyrus disintegrated. Even the internet exists because we were able to amass and share knowledge through printed text. Reading has allowed us to transmit knowledge for a long time but, partly because it works so well, we didn’t really monkey around with the basic delivery system for years. We have now. As a kid, I heard about audiobooks but only as substitute for blind people who hadn’t mastered Braille. It was the 1990’s before I used them. We rented them for long car trips as an alternative to recorded music and conversation. Don’t ask me why but books about ocean disasters always seemed to accompany us on trips to the beach. (It’s probably a mistake to listen to A Perfect Storm or Jaws when…