My Writing Corners...

How Making Dhokla Will Help You Get Published

By Rochelle Campbell

Making a cake, or learning how to layer flavors with exotic ingredients is very much like learning how to write publishable fiction.  Both the culinary arts and literary arts take time, dedication and above all patience.

Differences

They differ in that the culinary arts is physically more demanding than the literary arts; in a restaurant environment, you are on your feet 10-12 hours a day sweating in a fast-paced environment as you try to be as cool and creative as you can.  On the other hand, the literary arts is generally a solitary and sedentary business; the work almost entirely mental, yet no less strenuous.

What’s also very different between culinary and the literary arts is the amount of time needed to learn basic skills.  In cooking, you can learn in a matter of hours how to prepare a simple nutritious meal.  It may not be anything to write home about, but you will not starve.  However, in writing, even to learn the basics can take years for some people depending upon a number of factors.  The literary arts is not just one set of foundational knowledge, it is a conglomerate of subjects: English comprehension, vocabulary, pacing, harmonic cadence, grammar, punctuation, knowledge of various styles of writing, etc.

Similarities

In a recent Indian cooking class, I learned how to make dhokla, a snack food indigenous to Western India, which required 18 ingredients, and an hour’s prep time with an additional 75 minutes for cooking, cooling and plating time.  I learned that you have to measure your ingredients precisely by weight as opposed to by volume; it’s best to use the specific brand noted in the recipe and not use substitution, and that you have to have your wits about you and read through the recipe completely before beginning.  In this way, you have a clear picture of what you’re doing and where you’re going.

My cooking partner did read the entire recipe, but she mistakenly added an ingredient to one part of the recipe yet it was to go in another part.  By not focusing, she used the ingredients, but in the wrong place.  We managed to save the dish because she used only a small quantity of the wrong ingredient; I removed an equal portion of the misplaced ingredient from my section to compensate for the extra she put in her section.

That’s very similar to what can happen in learning the art of writing publishable fiction. 

For instance, you can write a full-story skeleton and break it up into sections (just like a recipe), and you put all of the writer’s tools in the outline – but, you put them in the wrong section making your story flat and without tension.  But here too, you can fix the problem by knowing what is wrong.

Rosetta Stone

The key to understanding both culinary and the literary arts is that there is a finite set of variables and once you know the basic foundation of what you are doing, you can train yourself into intuitively knowing how to compensate for a little too much here, or not enough over there.

The same could be said for culinary arts, however, if you look at it in simplistic terms – how long does it take one to learn how to cook food for survival as opposed to how long does it take one to learn how to write for survival – the answer is very clear.  Most people will learn to cook to live much faster than a struggling writer will publish his first book or short story.  And even then, try living off of that!

Conclusion

While on the surface writing and cooking are unlike in many basic ways, the motivating factor behind each activity is the same.  The same process has to be engaged in to teach the brain how to execute a particular function whether it be how to perfectly sear a steak, or how to make your story outline tightly plotted and have a continuous because-line.

By studying a totally dissimilar creative art, it allows the brain to expand and move in a different direction while utilizing the same neural pathways that are needed for writing.  In essence, studying another creative discipline helps to strengthen the skills you currently possess.

Last changed: 02/13/07