My grandmother was a wretched cook. She was so bad that my father and his siblings wondered how they survived the meals she prepared for them during their growing years. Despite the fact that her offerings were less than gourmet, her culinary style profoundly influenced my own style of writing.
She never used a recipe that I can remember. Instead she threw handfuls of flour and sugar into a bowl with abandon – along with eggs, a splash of milk, a lump of butter and pinches of salt and baking soda. After she’d stirred it for a while, she pulled out her test pan, a mayonnaise jar lid from which she’d peeled the cardboard liner. When she’d greased this improvised cake pan, she filled it half full with batter and put it in the oven.
Sometimes, the results were passable. About every tenth time , the test cake was amazingly tasty. On the former occasions, while I consumed her experiment, Grandma poured her batter into her real cake pans. Sometimes her test cake was so bad, I couldn’t eat it despite the fact that I adored her.
“No problem,” my grandmother would tell me with a grin when she’d baked what she called a flop. “I’ll fertilize the flowers with the batter and make more. We’ll freeze the test cake. It’ll make bread pudding.”
And it always did. As a matter of fact, one taste of the bread pudding that she made from her store of frozen failed cakes would make you think you’d died and gone to heaven. It amazed me that a test cake that had fallen in the middle and tasted terrible could be transformed into a wonderful dessert.
Today as I write, I think of my grandmother and her kitchen alchemy. Those memories set me straight when my inner critic insists that I get a piece of writing right the first time. “I’m making a test cake,” I reply. “No big deal if it flops. A false start is better than no beginning at all.” In my heart I know I can always save the “failures” and “scraps” for bread pudding. I know that I can always make another test cake.
I dump my rejects into a special file on my computer along with the wonderful lines and phrases that made what I was writing at the time fall flat.
Every few months, I read through the documents in that file. Some of them have no redeeming value in themselves, but they serve as the fertilizer from which new ideas spring, as vibrant as Grandma’s crimson poppies that were nourished with bad cake batter.
Other scraps have promise. I combine them with new ingredients and manage to cook up batches of amazing new articles and essays. Editors neither know nor care how something came to be written, only that it’s good. My grandma would be proud of me.
Creative Write:
Pull out some of the manuscripts that you’ve set aside as “failures.” Pretend that they are test writings. Use a colored pen to circle passages, phrases, metaphors and images that still grab you. Mix crumbs from two or three pieces of writing together. Now do a series of ten minute free writes in order to generate more ingredients that will bind your test writings together. Stir it and edit well. Now see what you have. Don’t be surprised if an article shapes itself into a poem or a poem turns into an essay as you work. That’s the way of bread pudding.