Gadgets and Gimmicks

 The Nexus of Writing and Cooking, Part 12

Way back in Part 2 ("The Tools of the Trade") I discussed some of the essential items you need in your cooking and writing arsenal if you want to be successful. Today, I want to look at some of the gimmicks and gadgets you can use to make your life easier in the kitchen and add some pizzazz to your writing.

Let's get right to it with a list of cool things I have in my kitchen that I simply couldn't do without anymore.

Kitchen Gadgets

Shot Glass Measuring Cup. You need a lot of measuring cups and spoons in your kitchen so you can add precise amounts of spices, flour, sugar, milk, wine, or broth at the exact moment called for in the recipe.A shot glass measuring cup helps you add small amounts of liquid (an ounce or teaspoon or tablespoon) precisely. I use mine for honey and brown sugar when I make my own teriyaki sauce.

High Wall Baking Sheet. We all have baking sheets that we use for baking cookies, heating up fries in the oven and placing under pie tins when we fear they may bubble over. But a high-walled baking sheet is the best way to cook large pieces of meat like a turkey or a ham or a couple racks of ribs. The high walls keep the juices in but are low enough to allow the heat to circulate around the meat for more even cooking.

Baking Rack. Add this to your high-wall baking sheet to raise your meat out of the juices and allow the heat circulate beneath as well as completely around as you bake.

Silicone Baking Mat. The last piece you need for your baking sheet. Silicone mats are amazing. Easy to clean AND keep your baking sheet shiny no matter how many times you use them.

Wooden Tongs. A good set of wooden tongs are a must if you are cooking in a high-temp, non-stick skillet that might melt your silicone-tipped tongs. I use mine for bacon or sausages mostly, but they come in handy any time you need to turn or flip meat in a skillet (steaks, chicken breasts, etc.).

Silicone Cast-Iron Skillet Handle. Speaking of high-heat, I love the silicone handle cover I got for my cast-iron skillet. Sometimes, you just can't beat an old-fashioned cast-iron skillet (absolutely necessary for Yorkshire pudding). Unlike modern skillets that use non-conducting materials for the handles, all the heat transfers to the handle on a cast-iron skillet. Thus the silicone sleeve.

Spatula Thermometer. I have a couple instant-read thermometers, which are absolutely necessary for getting meat heated through to the correct internal temperature. The spatula version of this essential tool is great for sauces, bread-making (to check the temp of the water you're adding to the yeast) and whenever you're deep-frying and need to keep a constant temperature in your oil. 

Writing Gimmicks

Unlike cooking gadgets, you can't just go out and buy these items (other than the thesaurus; although you still need skill to use one correctly). Instead, you must develop these techniques over time through practice and research. Here are a few of my favorites.

Simile and Metaphor. As a writer, the most important thing you do is to describe the world your characters travel through. For fantasy and science fiction writers, especially, those worlds can be so strange and alien that it can be tough to describe them in ways that readers can understand. That's where a good metaphor or simile comes in handy. These help you relate what the characters see to something the readers will understand. Just be careful not to break the illusion of the story. Saying a strange large rock formation looks like a football balancing on a golf tee won't make sense if your character lives in a world without those two sports.

Thesaurus. I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Choosing the strongest nouns and verbs you can find to describe actions and items in your world is far superior to stringing together a bunch of adjectives or adverbs. It makes your writing stronger, tighter, and less cluttered, which are all good things. A good thesaurus will help you find the best words to use whenever you get stuck in your writing. Most word processors come with one, but I find them to be too limited. I use Rhymezone, a website created for poets that you can use to find synonyms as well as rhymes. You can even go down the rabbit hole of  looking at related words "grouped by relation" which can be a lot of fun.

Foreshadowing. There is an old saying in murder mysteries: "Don't put a gun on the mantle in act one unless you plan to use it in act three." This is foreshadowing, and it is a tricky gimmick to use. You often want to give your readers a peak at what's to come later on so they don't feel completely blindsided by some major plot development. For example, if readers don't know a character is an astrophysicist when they first meet them, when that character starts spouting some quantum mechanics integral to the plot later on, it will feel odd and forced (and just a little too convenient). 

You have to be careful with foreshadowing, though. If you are too obvious when you mention it (or mention it too often), readers may see your plot twists coming a mile away. If you are too oblique (or don't mention it often enough), you risk losing some readers when the revelation becomes important. Make sure you integrate the foreshadowing into the narrative so it feels natural and not forced and then reinforce it once or twice again during the story to make sure all readers catch the reference.

Plot Structure. I have discussed this before, so I won't go into a lot of detail here, but having a plot structure in mind as you write can help keep you on the rails as you move through your story. I often use the three-act structure where action intensifies through act one as things fall apart, the characters try to find ways to combat the obstacles in act two, and then everything falls apart again at the end of the act, forcing the characters to change gears in act three to find a new solution to the main problem. This structure helps readers as well, because they understand where they are in the story, but the rising and falling action of this structure also maintains reader interest as the action builds toward multiple climaxes as reader move through the story.

Analogy and Allegory. Similar to simile and metaphor, analogies and allegories help writers convey information to the reader through comparison. These two gimmicks work at higher and larger levels, however — more at the plot structure level than the word, sentence, or paragraph level. An analogy is simply comparing one thing to another that makes people assume additional similarities in other aspects. So, you might write a story where two character who are going to fall in love must fight each other in a fencing match (or tennis or whatever). The sporting competition becomes analogous to the development of their relationship (turning it into a contest).

Allegories plot structures where the story being told is directly comparable to other stories that have deeper meanings. These are often used by science fiction writers (especially) to delve into topics that are tough to discuss straight on (religion, politics, race relations, etc.) without bringing all the baggage those sensitive topics carried by both writers and readers. The original series Star Trek episode "Let that Be Your Last Battlefield" was an allegory about race relations set on a planet where people were half-black and half-white, with right-half-white people hating left-half-white people and vice-versa. Silly? Today, maybe. But still insightful and depressing as we see what has happened in America since this episode first aired more than 50 years ago.

The Art of the Appetizer

The Nexus of Writing and Cooking, Part 10

This week, I want to write about small plates and short stories. Both serve similar audience niches in their respective settings. Small plates (or appetizers in most American restaurants) give you a taste of a particular dish or meal without filling you up. They also can provide a wonderful complement to the subsequent main dish. Likewise, good short stories give readers everything a novel provides — plots, perhaps a subplot or two, character growth, and a satisfying or thought-provoking conclusion.

Another similarity small plates and short stories share is that my skill in both suffers from an aggravatingly similar issue: I try to put too much into them, which makes them just a bit messier than I'd like.

A good appetizer is packed with flavor from some non-singular number of different elements but is bite-sized so all that flavor explodes in your mouth at once. Bacon-wrapped prawns and crab-stuffed mushrooms are good examples. For fancier gatherings, spring and summer rolls filled with all sorts of meats and herbs and mini tostadas topped with cheese and fruit or seasoned meats are wonderful and can literally explode in your mouth when done right. 

A good short story can weave an intricate tale with fully-developed characters that transports you to another world in just a few thousand words and makes you feel deep emotions when those characters ultimately succeed or fail. One of my favorite short stories of all time was 

Where I Go Wrong

I believe the problem I have with both small plates and short stories stems from how I learned to cook and to write. I started cooking on a regular basis when I became a stay-at-home dad and freelance writer. At the time, I was cooking for a family of five with three growing, school-age children. I cooked large, easy (often ready-to-make) meals at first, which eventually transformed into large, slightly more complicated (more often from scratch) meals as I became more skilled in my cooking. 

The common element in all of the meals I have made in the past 20 years was that they were large. I am well-known within our family for loading the table down with too much food, and not just on Thanksgiving day. Likewise, when I started writing fiction, early in my writing career, I was tasked with writing novels. Sure, I sought out and wrote short stories at the same time, but it was the novels that really sparked my interest.

A typical novel runs anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 words. I have written shorter novels (sometimes called novellas, but not always), and big-name authors have written numerous 300,000-word novels. The point here is that novels are large. The typical short story you find in magazines or anthologies, on the other hand, run between 3,000 and 7,000 words. I've seen great 1,500 word short stories and there is a category of shorts called "Flash Fiction" that run no more than about 500 words.

My short stories probably average somewhere around 9,000 words. The reason, I have often thought, is that I write short stories like I write novels. In a novel, you have time to explore the setting and the minor characters, and space to allow the plot to meander a bit as it works its way through the 3-act structure toward the culmination of the final conflict.

Short stories, like small plates, require the author/chef to be frugal with their elements/ingredients and maximize the impact from every piece added to the mix. A good hors d'oeuvre has a small piece of meat and/or cheese topped with a sprinkling of fresh herbs or a dollop of seasoned stuffing spooned into a perfectly cooked mushroom cap topped with a few shred of melted cheese.

I tend to be more of a dumper when I cook. I keep adding crab flakes or crumbled bacon to my stuffing mixture until I have too much to comfortably stuff into the available mushrooms. I cut my slices of meat or fish too large because I worry there won't be enough there to bring out the flavors. I over-stuff and I overfeed, again most likely because I am used to making large meals instead of small plate. I have never mastered the art of getting big flavor from finely-balanced combinations of smaller portions. 

Build Smaller or Cut Back

I long ago accepted my shortcomings with short stories and small plates and have a developed a few tricks to help me deal with my tendency to  cook and write big. For my small plates, I have learned to make my dollops smaller. I use a melon-baller or a small spoon to fill my mushrooms. I try to worry less about what to do with extra filling or meat and either put it away for another time or find some other small plate where I can incorporate the extras.

When it comes to short stories, I have a different tactic. Instead of forcing myself to write small, I allow my expansive nature to control the first draft. But, when I go back through that initial first draft, I try to trim a good ten percent of my words. I seek out overly complex passages and tighten the prose. I look for spots where the plot has gotten a little out of hand and see if I can get those plot points across in less space (or drop them entirely if they are not adding to the flavor of the whole). If I have two or three sentences of description, I cut back to just the best bits of all of them. 

When I am writing a first draft, I try to keep my scenes short so the story moves along more quickly. Where I like to write 1,000- or 1,500-word scenes in a novel, I try for 500 words max in a short story. This helps constrain my wordiness and give me enough scenes to fit in all the plot. 

The one piece I can still do better on is to not try to pack quite so much plot into my short stories. In my two most recent short stories (one in the Turning the Tied anthology and another that will appear in a Renegade Legion digital anthology from Budgie Smuggler games), I definitely created plots that were too intricate and expansive for the story-size requested. Even after trimming and tightening, both of these stories ran a bit long.

Don't get me wrong. I am proud of both of these stories. I think they are well-paced well and believe they read as easily and quickly as shorter efforts from other authors. I just have never mastered the skill of telling a deep, compelling story in a small space and maybe that's okay. I happen to like a little more meat in my meals and my stories.