Describe My Process

Nexus of Writing and Cooking, Part 13

Aaron LeMay, one of the most interesting people you will ever meet and probably my coolest friend in the world, recently asked me, "Tell me about your writing process." To put this in context, Aaron and I are working together to complete his book, "The Gamer's Way," which is a self-help philosophy based on treating life as a game that you are playing, complete with pause and save-game functions you can use to help you analyze your "game of life" as you play to make better decisions. 

This book and concept are very zen, which makes sense because Aaron has studied Buddhist teachings and many other Eastern philosophies. He also has worked on some of the biggest games you've ever heard of, including HALO and Saints Row. Did I mention that Aaron is one of the most interesting people you will ever meet? I had the honor to work with him at En Masse Entertainment, and not only is he a fascinating fellow, he is one of the best bosses I've ever worked for.

Now, you may be asking me, Will, what the hell does all this have to do with making Chili? I mean, that is a pot full of Chili up there in the corner, right?

Okay, let me get right down to it. When Aaron asked me about my process, I didn't have a great answer for him. You see, even though I am a strong proponent of outlines, when it comes to actually writing scenes and chapters and entire novels, I am more of a "seat of the pants" writer. To be totally honest, I don't fully understand my process. 

A few days after I tried my hardest to convey to Aaron how scenes form in my head and how inspiration for some small detail that occurs to me to place in one scene often burgeons into some huge plot or character point a few chapters later, I was making chili for the family. 

Now, I haven't made chili in months. It's just not a meal that most people want during the summer. So, when I started making the chili, I realized that my chili-making experience is very similar to my writing experience. 

Let me explain.

I've been making chili for a couple of decades now. The basics of it are mostly unchanged. I brown some meat, I add crushed tomatoes and diced tomatoes (for texture), tomato sauce, beans, maybe some onions, peppers, garlic, and/or mushrooms, and spices. Then I simmer for many hours, tasting periodically to determine what more it needs to get it right.

This is also the basics of my writing. I come up with an idea and write some level of outline (from a rough couple of paragraphs listing the main plot points to a multi-page, chapter-by-chapter, outline detailing all the rising and falling action over three acts. After that, I sit down to write. 

With the basics of the plot (like the basics of the chili recipe) in my head, I begin adding action and character moments and dialog that move from plot point to plot point, adding things in here and there as I realize it needs some spicing up here or there and go back to add something or take out something (which you can never do in cooking, so bear that difference in mind).

Now, over the years as I have gotten better at both cooking and writing, my recipes have changed and evolved. I now sear the onions, peppers and garlic in a pan and then add a little crushed tomato and oil and blend it all into a paste, which I add to the meat and beans (an idea I got by watching videos from Binging with Babish).

I still add diced tomatoes, onions (and sometimes mushrooms) to the pot (again for the added texture and flavor). But, where I once relied on chili powder, salt and garlic for most of my flavor, I now use much less to get the flavors right. This provides much more depth of flavor over my earlier, more amateur attempts.

In my writing, I now look for more character moments and delve deeper into their motivations instead of just driving my way through the plot like I once did. Again, this adds more depth of flavor, more depth to the characters and their connection to the plot, which one hopes helps draw readers in and provide some emotional connection to the story and the characters. 

But here's the thing. I still don't know ahead of time how it's all going to turn out. I have NEVER made a pot of chili that tasted exactly like any of my other pots of chili. I am not following a strict recipe of exactly this many ounces of onions to this many ounces of peppers to this many cans of tomato sauce, etc. That's why I taste as I go along. If it is too tame, I add more spice. If it is too spicy, I add more sauce (although that rarely happens). 

The same thing goes for my writing. Even when I have a full outline, I never know when I start a scene if it will go exactly the way I envision it will go. Sometimes the characters want to say or do things differently and I follow them along to see how it all turns out. Sometimes a piece of description will catch my eye and send a scene in a completely different direction than I had envisioned.

Let me give you an example from the new Kolchak novel I am writing. Kolchak is investigating a haunted hotel and needs to speak to the hotel manager. As I'm writing the scene, the manager accosts Kolchak verbally and he responds in kind. This initial meeting, which I had never envisioned when I began writing the scene, colored the entire conversation. It became even more adversarial than I had ever intended, but it provided some great insight into who the manager was and what she thought of Kolchak, which I will be able to use later on.

But I also know I have to hit the points in the plot that I have written down in my plot, so when scenes go in different directions (and sometimes take the plot in a different direction after more scenes continue down that new path, I know I must nudge the characters and the story back toward the plot. This is like adding a dash of salt or garlic to the chili. 

The interesting thing is that like the seasoning, I know the story needs something to get it where it needs to go, but I'm never certain which small bits of dialog or action or character moments will get it back on track, so I have to keep tasting and changing as I go until I get the result I desire. I can't push it too far too fast or it will leave a bitter taste in the readers' mouths, just like a pot of chili with too much salt in it.

The fun part of all this is when something unexpected happens and it turns out to be the exact thing I needed to really make the story come together. Here is a small example of what I mean. I was writing a short prequel to flesh out the back story of one of the characters in another short story I had written. Lobo is a young star ship pilot. When the ship runs into trouble, he ends up sprawled beneath the berth of a crew mate after everyone else has gone off to battle stations. 

For an extra bit of flavor, I added the name of the crew mate instead of leaving it vague. Now that this crew mate had a name, though, she became a character in my mind with a backstory of her own. She had just been promoted to lieutenant but still berthed with the ensigns (a bit of Lower Decks playing in my head at the time). 

Later, when I decided the emergency was going to cost the ship its entire bridge crew, this brand new character became the acting captain, and it turns out she knows Lobo's value far better than the now-dead officers because she had worked beside him (and even been saved by his piloting skills). This sets up the finale of the story (and the main plot point of this prequel) when this new character I had not even known existed until I named her, relies on Lobo to save the day. 

I often find these small tidbits of flavor in my writing that I have added to a scene come back later and become far more important than I originally intended. I don't claim I can see the future and know these will become important — that I am adding them as some sort of almost as prescient foreshadowing. I think it all comes down to taking the time to add bits of spice that I know will add to the overall flavor of the story and then as I am tasting it later on, seeing how I can use that spicy bit to add some extra depth to the story.

So, yes, my writing process is a lot like my chili-making process. I have a vague recipe I am following that has evolved over time into a more complex process, but in the end, it all comes down to playing with the flavors as I go and tasting it all the way along to make sure the flavors all meld together and provide some depth to the experience.

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.

 

Tools of the Trade

 Nexus of Writing and Cooking (Part 2)

When I started cooking, I knew nothing about knives or pots and pans (or even spices and seasoning). I had a basic set of nonstick pans, a few glass baking pans (just like my mom used), some plastic spatulas, and measuring cup. I honestly didn't really know how to use any of them correctly.

This was not how I started as a writer. Before my first published story, I had taken years of English classes in high school and college, edited and written professionally as a newsletter editor and then later as both a magazine and book editor, and read tons and tons of books. I was not yet really reading critically (by which I mean, dissecting a story as I read it to see the choices the author made on things like plot lines, characterization, rising and falling action, crises points, etc.), but that would come in time.

My point is that when I started cooking, I didn't really have the tools of the trade or know how to use them. Because of this, my cooking was amateurish. It was fine for my family and I could follow a recipe with the best of them, but it was definitely lacking something (butter, mostly, if you ask any professional chef) and my mistakes far outweighed my successes when I experimented.

Here now are some of the writing and cooking tools I have learned to use over the years and why it is important to learn them early.

Basic Writing Tools

Strong Grammar. It all starts here. You might think it's a bit pedantic (and, yes, some people do get pedantic about grammar), but clear writing requires clear grammar. Yes, you can abandon grammar in your writing, but you must do so purposefully and with good reason, not because you don't know better. For example, you can have a character who doesn't use good grammar when speaking, which makes a strong statement about that character.

Word Choice. This is the big one for me (almost bigger than "show, don't tell"). First and foremost, avoid using "is" and "are" as much as possible. The English language can be agonizingly frustrating in its complexity, but we have stolen some of the best words other languages ever created. Use them! Nouns and verbs are the lifeblood of writing. Finding the right ones for every situation not only makes your writing stronger, it makes it more concise. Strong nouns and verbs don't need modifiers. I'm not saying don't ever use adjectives and adverbs, but sparing use will make them stand out and be more impactful.

Sentence Length. This is a rule I learned late in life. I was definitely one of those writers in school who loved long, complex sentences that went on for entire paragraphs. When I discovered the power of short sentences, it transformed my writing. I still use long sentences, but I try to use them purposefully. Sentence length is a sign to your reader to either speed up or slow down. Short sentences will drive your plot forward and are great for action sequences. Long sentences slow readers down so are perfect for when you want the reader to pay close attention while you explain something they need to understand.

Show, Don't Tell. Anyone who has ever wanted to be a writer has heard this aphorism.On its face, it means you should use concrete details when describing scenes and action. Don't just say, "she hit him." Say, "She slapped his cheek the imprint of her fingers were visible in the red imprint left behind." But more than that, show don't tell should influence all of your writing. Show the emotion on a character's face instead of telling the reader he looked sad. Have a character, in their own words, tell the reader and the other character in the scene what she is thinking instead of just narrating that for us. Paint a picture. Don't write an essay.

Basic Cooking Tools

Chef Knife.This is the "word choice" of cooking tools. It is the most important thing to get right. For years, I had no idea how to use my chef knife. I held it wrong and used it for everything. It is the perfect tool for dicing and chopping vegetables, but isn't really all that good for meat. When you hold it correctly (see the picture above) and hold your veg with your fingers curled so your fingernails become a guide, you can chop faster and more precisely. This makes your work so much easier and your finished product more professional.

Kitchen Scale. More important for baking than cooking (where precision is critical because it's basically chemistry), a good kitchen scale can also help you with portion control and when following recipe directions. Until you have a frame of reference for how large  4-ounce or 8-ounce piece of meat is or how much flour you need to add 250 grams to your pie crust dough, you will want a kitchen scale to help.

Meat Thermometer. I refused to use thermometers for a long time, but now that I have a really good one that gives me a readout almost immediately, I never serve meat without checking it first. This is really important for smoked meats where you need to heat to a very specific internal temp and any time you want to leave some pink inside a thick steak without serving raw meat to your friends and family. 

Stainless Steel Pans. I will admit that I have always used nonstick-coated pots and pans for all my cooking. I was deathly afraid of scorching my food and ruining both the meal and the pan. But, I have learned that stainless steel pans are important because those bits of baked on food are pure flavor when it comes time to make a sauce. Sauces scared me just as much as stainless steel pans, so I guess that's why it took me so long to come around. But searing a piece of meat and leaving all that "fond" behind to be scraped into your sauce is what it's all about. (Note: I plan to write a future blog all about my fear of sauces, so stay tuned for that.)

Why Basics Are Important

There is an old saying that goes something like this: You have to learn the rules before you can learn how to break them. The famous example of this is Picasso, who had learned the rules of perspective, but chose to use flattened perspective for purpose.

This is basically true. I like to use "and" repetitively in lists instead of simple commas and a single, trailing "and" at the end. I do this to add emphasis and give the writing a certain cadence. I like to think it's artistic, and I probably do it too often (a sentiment my editors definitely embrace). But, here is the thing. I am doing this purposefully. I am choosing to break the rules and I have reasons in my mind for doing so. And I am always aware that if I choose to break the rules, I may sacrifice clarity, and if that lack of clarity leaves readers in the dark, I have failed as a writer.

But, more importantly, rules also provide a much more concrete benefits to both the writer and the cook: Speed and precision. Using strong verbs and nouns doesn't just make my writing stronger, it makes it shorter. Sure, I often spend time staring at the ceiling searching my brain for the right word (or going on rhymezone to find synonyms). But I can often use five words instead of 25 to get a point across. Knowing how to correctly hold my chef knife sped up my dicing (and made it more precise so the end result vastly improved). 

Taking the time to know the basics pays dividends over the entire course of the rest of your career. Look, I know I am not a professional chef. At best, I'm a semi-talented amateur. I wish I had learned how to use a chef knife correctly twenty years ago or taken more than a couple cooking classes. On the other hand, I am glad I learned to choose my words more carefully — and vary my sentence length, and show don't tell, and all the other little rules of writing I learned — way back when. Without putting in all that work to learn the basics, I wouldn't be a professional writer today.