Writing Well is Like Cooking Well

 Let's say that you are a more than adequate cook. By more than adequate I mean that you cook several times a week and, when you serve your cooking to family or friends, it is rare that anyone leaves much, if any, on their plate. Perhaps you go to a pot luck dinner, now and then, where there is rarely anything left of the dish you brought for your to take home. Maybe people will ask you specifically to bring a particular dish. You are confident in your abilities and nobody is ever worried when they are asked to come over to your place for dinner.

Based on your reputation and proven performance a friend, who has limited experience with cooking, approaches you saying that they want to learn how to cook and thought you would be a good place to start. You are deeply flattered and suggest that they begin with some simple recipes such as macaroni and cheese or pot roast and gradually work their way up to more difficult dishes. At this point your friend apologizes for being unclear and says they were not really interested in basic cooking. They have after all, invested a lot of money in high end cooking equipment and just want to know how to use it.

But, wait! It gets worse! They want to develop some great new recipes so they can open their own restaurant. What do you tell them? Personally, I would say "well good luck with that", and walk away. But most people are a little nicer than I am. However, the question remains - what do you tell them?

The problem here is that there is no easy answer. What they want to do requires a lot of knowledge and experience most of which will be acquired slowly over time and as the result of endless mistakes. High quality cooking does not come about easily and quickly through some sort of magic. You have to work hard and build up to it. 

I use this cooking example because, in many ways, cooking is like writing but the experience of cooking is much more concrete. Having to scrape a burnt roux out of the bottom of an expensive cast iron skillet so that you don't have to throw it away is an experience one is not likely to forget. However, throwing away a story that just wasn't working is an experience that one might very well forget.  

All too often people will start with the objective of writing and publishing the Great American Novel. This does happen from time to time. Just recently, Delia Owens wrote and published Where the Crawdads Sing, a wonderful coming of age novel, which became a best seller. It was her first book and she worked on it for ten years. And, she is not only talented but very lucky as having a success like that is very rare. 

Back in the early 1960's Harper Lee wrote and published To Kill a Mockingbird which not only became a massive best seller, but won a Pulitzer Prize as well. She didn't publish another book for 45 years. Yes, it does happen that somebody gets lucky and hits a home run out of the park on their first pitch. But, it doesn't happen very often. And when it does happen, it is very common that it is their last success. There are numerous authors who had an amazing success with marginal successors. I could list several off the top of my head. But, that would be unkind.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the runaway bestseller Eat, Pray, Love has written about, and even done a TED talk on, the challenges of writing after a huge success. You have to admire her spirit because, as hard as it may be to pay your dues of daily writing practice when you don't know if it will ever mount up to anything, it is a thousand times harder to go back to paying dues once you have had a major success. Yet Gilbert says that you must just keep writing. I agree with that and admire her for saying it, because it is something writers need to hear.

We'll go back to the cooking analogy for an example. Let's say you find a great recipe and try it out for your friends. Let's say further that it turned out perfectly, your friends raved, and everybody thinks you are a talented chef. But, then they come back, another night, for burnt roast and watery soup, and your reputation evaporates. What do you do? Well, if you want to learn how to cook, you keep cooking, try to figure out what you did wrong, and work on correcting it.

We can carry this analogy to other pursuits. If you want to learn how to play a musical instrument, it takes endless practice before you can play anything that anyone else can stand to listen to. But, it isn't just lofty pursuits. If you want to replace the faucet in your kitchen sink, and you have never done it before, it is very likely that you will land up calling a plumber and then try to clean up all the water before the plumber gets there.

Back to cooking and writing. What is the writing equivalent of scrambled eggs?  Scrambled eggs are easy to make and you can easily make them more interesting by adding some grated cheese or diced ham. If you make scrambled eggs every day and tinker with them, over time you will get really good at it. A parallel to scrambled eggs in writing is sending email to friends. Start sending more email to your friends and try to make each email a little more interesting. If something interesting happened that you wish to tell someone about, try using more descriptive language to convey how you felt about or reacted to the event. See if you can convey not just the events but the experience. If a series of events occurred, turn it into a story. And don't make it like a newspaper story. Make it something they can experience. Add some humor and perhaps a moral. Some people may not care for this and might comment about it. For them you should cut back to just the facts. Others might comment that your emails are getting more interesting. For them you can push the boundaries a bit. 

This is only the first step in a very long journey. But, as Confucius said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Don't wait to be teleported to your destination. Take that first step. It may be way short of your expectations and your final goal. But do you want to get there by dumb luck or through hard work? If you balk at this question consider this - dumb luck is almost impossible to repeat, but hard work is not.

Why We Read Fiction

 I seem to be on a roll here with the fourth book on the foundations of storytelling. This was not intentional. And, I hope to give you a break after this one. But, I stumbled onto a book entitled Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. The author is Lisa Zunshine. In the previous post I made a distinction between scholarship and research. This book is an instance of scholarship, using that dichotomy, and falls within a general area called critical studies. Personally, I prefer research to scholarship and should also mention along the way that I am not a fan of critical studies. So, this book is very much at the end of the spectrum that I prefer to avoid. It can be considered a part of critical studies, literary studies, literary criticism and perhaps other similarly titled areas of study. Yet, there was something about the book that caught my attention. I have read some good stuff from this end of end of the spectrum and I do try to be fair. So, I thought I would give it a shot.

In order to explain what this book is about, I have to introduce two terms - mind reading and theory of mind - which are real phenomena in the field of psychology. First "In psychology, mind-reading is when we try to infer what is going on in someone’s mind without asking them to clarify." [1]

We do this all the time. For example, perhaps your significant other is acting oddly and you try to ascertain what the problem is without actually asking them.  Or, alternatively, a home service provider (such as a plumber or repair person) is claiming that you need something expensive and you try to determine their motives. Are they acting in your best interests or are they just trying to earn a juicy fee or commission? The better your mind reading skills, the better you can function socially. So, developing good mind reading skills is in your best interest. The term "mind reading" is unfortunate as it conjures up a charlatan in a turban with an Eastern European accent who is mysteriously reading your thoughts.

As you attempt to read a person's mind, you employ numerous rules and heuristics that you have learned over the years. Some people lie. People often behave in their self interest. When your significant other is quiet, they are usually withholding information from you. If they are being nice as well, they are withholding something really big. And so on.  You may have dozens, if not hundreds, of these little rules of thumb that help guide you in the mind reading process. The collection of these rules is your theory of mind and it helps you read minds more effectively. So, when your significant other is uncharacteristically dressed up with cologne and claiming to be going to the library to do some research on property taxes, you may not take it at face value.

The more refined your theory of mind, the better your mind reading will be. Unfortunately, you cannot tell the people around you that you are trying to refine your theory of mind so you would appreciate it if they would be completely honest with you about their feelings and motives so that you can evaluate the accuracy of your determinations. That would certainly inhibit your ability to function socially, not to mention decrease the number of friends you have on Facebook. So, what is one to do?

According to Zunshine (and I agree) this is one of the reasons why people read fiction. We attempt to mind read fictional characters and, in doing so, refine our theory of mind. I would point out that this is far from the only reason that we read fiction. We also read fiction to learn values and vicariously experience situations. The same way that puppies play fight to prepare themselves for the real thing, should it actually arise, we experience conflicts in stories to prepare ourselves for those conflicts should they actually arise. And, if you were to list of all the dozens of reasons why people read fiction, refining their theories of mind and hence their mind reading would easily be in the top ten, if not in the top five.

To be fair to Zunshine, I should also mention one of the central cognitive phenomena that she explores in great depth in the book. Consider the following example. Sally tells Martha that she thinks her (Sally's) boyfriend (Bob) is cheating on her. Martha tells me that Bob cannot be trusted. I ask Bob what is going on between him and Sally. Bob says nothing is going on and everything is fine but now is worried because he thinks Sally may be unhappy in the relationship. What is going on here? Who do we believe? How do we unpack this? Your theory of mind has lots of tentative information complicated even further by recursive assertions. This is why you need to develop and refine your theory of mind. And this is one of the things that fiction can help you with. 

Here is an example that I came across recently. Many fans of the TV series LOST believe that the island was purgatory. One of the pieces of evidence that they provide is the episode(s) where characters are saying "We are all dead".  If you take that at face value, then it is pretty strong evidence for the purgatory claim. However, what if this claim is not a statement of fact? What if this is a fear about the future? Or, better yet, what if the writers are intentionally misdirecting the audience? This is not such a far fetched idea, as writers of mystery and detective stories misdirect the readers all the time. Zunshine used examples from Mrs. Dalloway. But, I felt the more people saw LOST than read Mrs. Dalloway.

In real life you may never figure out what is going on. Maybe Sally had a fling with Walter and is feeling guilty so she blames Bob in order to provide some justification for her behavior. Maybe Walter told Sally that Bob was having an affair in order to make his seduction of Sally a little easier. Maybe there is no Walter but Sally's girlfriend Janet told Sally that Bob was having an affair in order to hurt her because Janet's boyfriend flirted with Sally. Maybe Bob is disappearing a couple of nights a week taking cooking classes which he has not told Sally about because he wants to surprise her with a candle light dinner and some dishes neither of them can pronounce. We could go on and on with possibilities. But, you will probably never know the whole story. One might even say that the essence of the human condition is never knowing the whole story.

But, in fiction, we often do get the whole story. And in those cases where the story ends without revealing the whole story we still get way more of the story than we ever get in real life. For those loose ends we can always join a book club and hash out the possibilities with other readers. So, fiction helps us improve our mind reading and helps us refine our theory of mind. While those may not be the only reasons that we read fiction. They are certainly near the top of the list.