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.
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