The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Why i’m a writer who cooks
Writers at rest
Everyone who knows me knows that I cook almost every night. When I cook, I focus on something other than my writing and, paradoxically, this helps my work. As Diane Johnson, author of The Shadow Knows (1974), has said, “How I think about my work is indistinguishable from the way I think about my … cooking: here is the project I’m involved in. It is play. In this sense, all my life is spent in play.”
I love good food, and the food offered by most takeout places and many restaurants (even expensive ones) doesn’t always satisfy me. So I cook because I hate to have a bad meal. And when I cook, I get drawn into its pleasures, even—perhaps especially—at the end of a day’s writing when I think I’m too tired.
The real reason I cook is that I need to cook because I spend part of the day writing, though several writers I know pride themselves on not cooking. Lots of writers say they have no interest in cooking, or have no time to cook—writing is so important and it takes so much time. And that may be fine for them, but it’s not for me.
Michael Chabon has described how he learned how to cook in his essay “Art of Cake.” When Chabon was ten, he read the recipe for velvet crumb cake on the back of a Bisquick box and set to work. “Cooking,” he learned, “was a magical act, a feat of transformation, a way of turning the homely and familiar into something finer.” Chabon had been helping his mother cook for several years by that time. After she became a lawyer and went to work full-time, he cooked for his family every night until he went to college, and he cooks for his wife and children now, too. During the years, he’s found an “enduring source of … pleasure … in the kitchen.”
“[W]riting is a lot like cooking,” Chabon says. It requires “stubbornness and a tolerance—maybe even a taste—for last-minute collapse.” Things can work out well when we cook; or they can go horribly wrong—just like when we write. “As a writer,” Chabon says, “I try to write books I think I would love to read. You cook the foods you’d love to eat, you write the books you’d love to read.”
I finished a chapter of the father book yesterday. Or, I should say, I finished it for now. You know how these things go. You think you’re finished. You put the thing down, you reread it, and you realize what else has to be done. You know there’s more to be done, but you can’t do it now. You send it out to a writing partner, and she agrees there’s more to be done. But every so often you have to tell yourself you’re finished, at least for now, because writing a book goes on and on and on, sometimes with no seeming end point, until one day the book is finished, and you can’t figure out how it happened. But in the meantime, you’re stuck in the never-never land of the process of writing a book. (And a succubus it sometimes seems to be.)
But last night, after a marathon revision session (unusual for me), I came into the kitchen, cut up some tiny tomatoes I’d bought from a farm, put them into a bowl together with some minced garlic, capers, olive oil, and goat cheese. I got out a package of artisan fusilli; threw them into boiling, salted water; cooked them until they were al dente; then tossed the pasta with the sauce and a touch of pasta water. For a vegetable, I’d boiled up some tiny green beans from that same farm and tossed them with some garlic oil I’d prepared. Within half an hour, there we were, my husband and I, on the porch, eating our meal and drinking a glass of lovely Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. It was twilight. The work I still need to do, forgotten, for a while. The meal was simple, but it gave us both enormous pleasure.
That’s why I’m a writer who cooks. A book can take three years, or five or ten or more. A chapter can take a few weeks, a few months, or more. The chapter I finished took months of research, a month and a half of writing, maybe more, and I know it’s not finished yet. A great meal takes me half an hour, an hour to cook. In that short space of time, I start something, finish it, and enjoy what I’ve created. Writing is so open-ended and takes so long that cooking provides me with an antidote to all the ongoingness of the writing process that sometimes feels like forever and ever, without end.
I never enjoy writing a book the way I enjoy cooking a meal. Howard Gardner has observed that when we’re creating, we’re dissatisfied much of the time—this urges us to find creative solutions to our challenges. We can spend years on a work, but the moments of satisfaction are few. Once it’s finished, we might feel a sense of satisfaction but no real pleasure, for we’re already thinking about the next project. Pleasure, we hope, is what a reader gets from our work.
I learned this even before I wrote my first book. My mentor, Mitchell A. Leaska, had just finished writing a book. “Aren’t you thrilled?” I asked. I imagined the completion of a book to be a rhapsodic time.
“I was,” he answered, “for a few minutes.”
The day my first book was published, I was taking out the garbage (a lot of it), and I opened the bin and thought, “Hmmm, life does go on pretty much as it did before.” But cooking provides both satisfaction and pleasure. There’s the big bang of satisfaction from cooking—you don’t have to wait long to realize the fruits of your efforts. And then you have the pleasure of eating.
When I shop for vegetables, say, or when I rummage around in the fridge or cupboards for what I need, or when I slice a carrot or a pepper or an onion, I have to pay careful attention. I can’t be thinking of my work, and so cooking pulls me out of that intense focus my work requires. On the days when I don’t cook, my writing brain has a hard time shutting off, and I’m not very good company; I don’t pay much attention to anyone or anything around me. I’m in that writing bubble every writer is familiar with.
My son Jason said that when he was a kid, and he came home from school, and I was writing, he’d stand in front of my desk and say, “Hi, Mom, I’m bleeding to death.” And I’d say, “That’s nice, dear. Get yourself a little snack. I’ll be with you in a minute.” Cooking forces me out of that interior space; it forces me into a relationship with something other than words and with the people I love. Which, after all, is what I need to do when I’m away from my desk.