Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Disturbing Parallels


I have often read or heard of writers giving advice on writing. I have also often heard lots of advise on cooking. I'm beginning to think my failings, and successes in both areas may originate somewhere around the same part of the brain.

You should let stories or novels marinate. Give them time to breathe, or develop flavour, or cook. Then go back to them fresh, after a few weeks of this slow baking, and you'll be better equipped to retackle it, finish it off or whatever.

I'm not that kind of person. I can't leave well alone, can't wait for things to develop. I'm a fiddler, a nervous ticky kind of interferer who must be allowed to mess with things while still in progress. This is why, if you are invited to my house for dinner, and there is something that takes ages to cook, it will be accompanied by a hundred side dishes, that I'll have been doing in the meantime. They mightn't work with the main dish, they might not have been planned, but they happened because the stuff that went into them happened to be there, and I happened to think of them at the time. This spirit of experimentation and restlessness down through the years has led to such wondrous meals as Tayto cheese and onion crisps in spag bol, italian coddle, and pizza flavoured ice pops (more impatience really on that one), as well as many a crunchy centred potato, or potato flavoured hot water with bacon on one memorable (and not at all hilarious)example of particularly poor timing.

In writing, and especially with the aforementioned shaky novel, I didn't sit down and do out a plan, didn't properly do a list of the ingredients I'd need, and now that the time has come where it is generally recommended that it should be put in a drawer and forgotten for a few months, I can't help leaving it there, on the table all the time. Turning up and down the heat, adding scenes, scraping burnt characters off the bottom, frantically trying to take out the bits that really taste awful, frying up a bit of garlic and hastily chopping snippets of memories and dreams to scatter in at the end, messy business this. But I always did like getting my hands dirty.

2 comments:

swiss said...

you get this in painting. you fiddle with a thing until the paint is 'overworked'. or in the common parlance, looks like shit, more often than not literally

writerly advice is more often than not useful simply because someone else has gone thru it all. of course no-one listens because everyone 'wants to find their own way'. which they usually do. to shit. and if they don't they end up giving writerly advice

tell the story
finish it
move on

Niamh B said...

I get it in soft pastels too, where I end up rubbing through the page - that's what you get for using cheap materials.
Can't blame the cheap materials in writing tho - or can I? If I had a really nice gold plated laptap, and if I could hire a PA to rub my shoulders and point out really obvious faults as we go - or even better - get them to do it for me....
Ok maybe not - you're right - Just Do It - is the only way, and not in the nike way either - no sweat involved, at least not regularly.