Petty quibbles

My wife and I are restructuring our lives around our baby (forthcoming). One thing this means is learning to better meal plan. So, we checked out a book from the local library, Cook Once Eat All Week, and worked through recipes.

We didn’t like the first recipe. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good as any of the recipes we tried in The Step-By-Step Instant Pot Cookbook (which had an unexpected amount of flavor and variety of seasoning with each dish). Cook Once Eat All Week, was relatively dull in flavor. My wife, after a few bites of Chicken Casserole, said, “We should try a different book.”

I said, “We can learn the method, then adapt it for something like Tu Casa Mi Casa.”

That’s the thing about learning to cook. You don’t read a cookbook because it makes you a chef. You read it because it gives you an occasion to cook. After working through a few recipes you have something you can walk away with. For example, one of the worse cookbooks I've read is The Bob’s Burgers Burger Book. It often lacked the quantity of ingredients or cook time, but it did teach us to play with a common dish. Every cookbook I've read has given me something, but I didn't learn to cook from them. I learned by cooking with my mom, experimenting with my wife, and being a line cook at a restaurant before I started grad school. I'm still learning.

Cooking is something I do, mostly, out of necessity. Sometimes I do it for fun. I’m not great, but with my wife and a few books, I get a little bit better every time I try.

However, writing is now how I make my living. In writing, there exists this dirty little word: “craft.” I’m generally a potty mouth, but “craft” is one of those dirty words I can’t stop using, thinking about, writing about. What’s funny is how many people dislike that word and books about it. Friends have told me, “I don’t think craft can actually make you into a good writer. You need something else.” I’ve heard, “The Iowa Writers’ Workshop seems strict about craft,” which is funny because 1) it’s not true, and 2) for some of the faculty, “craft,” is also a dirty word. All of these criticisms of craft are petty quibbles.

But those petty quibbles didn’t provoke this musing/rant. What provoked it was a funny little article: “Why the Save the Cat! Novel Beat Sheet Won’t Help You.” Now, I’m not a big fan of the book Save The Cat! Writes A Novel, and this essay will not be a defense of that book. If someone didn’t find the book helpful to their writing, that’s fine. I didn’t find it all too helpful for my writing either (but for different reasons than those expressed in Oren’s article). I admit, I found a lot of things wrong with Oren’s argument, but I'll try not to engage in any specifics. I’m writing about something more general: the phrase, “Won’t Help You.”

Imagine an article, “Bob’s Burgers Burger Book Won’t Help You.” That’s silly, right? It begs the question: won’t help you do what? Develop a recipe for a gourmet restaurant? Maybe it won’t, but it sounds like a fun date idea.

We have this intuitive notion with cooking that there’s always something to be learned from experience, even with a bad recipe. For some reason, writing and books about writing are different. We like to turn around and say, “Oh, but the artist…” and, “There are things about good art that can’t be planned.” Sure. I agree with these statements. My own writing process tends toward the mystical, the prayerful, the inexplicable. But let’s bring things down to earth.

E.M. Forster is one of those wonderful novelists who’s aware of the writer’s mysticism but still believes in solid ground. He writes in Aspects of the Novel, “This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from trying to discover its meaning.”

When I read this, it reminded me of several conversations about literature I had at Thomas Aquinas College—a place where discussions about craft did not exist. Every artistic choice was the muses, the genius, the artist’s je ne sais quoi. Maybe things have changed. I hope they have. Dr. Decaen published an essay in The Aquinas Review where he discussed the POV of Don Quixote. The discussion of literature, hopefully, is shifting away from “genius” and toward the inner workings of literature.

That’s exactly Forster’s point. Let’s not talk about “genius” in a vague sense. Let’s get our hands dirty and figure out what “genius” means. After that introduction, he sets out to lay down what he calls the “aspects of the novel.”

One of those aspects is “plot” which he says is a cause-and-effect chain of actions. When he brings in the “triumph” of characters in plot, he analyzes “mistaken triumphs” in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. His example reminded me of what Brody says in Save The Cat! Writes A Novel about false victories and false defeats. Oren's article called false victories and false defeats: “…so broad that any instance of the hero winning or losing something near the middle of the story would qualify.”

I don’t deny that Save The Cat! and Aspects of the Novel are two different calibers of books written for two different kinds of writers. My good friend Klaas Berkley explained it to me this way: “Save The Cat! is for people who want to write a novel; Aspects of a Novel is for novelists.” That said, Klaas also encouraged me to read both. “Keep what’s helpful, throw out what’s not.”

I don’t expect cookbooks to make me a better chef. I don’t expect craft books to make me a better writer. I don’t pretend that my experience working through cookbooks is better for my sazón than cooking with my wife or working at a restaurant. I don’t pretend that reading craft books is better for my writing than writing stories, sending them out to publish, getting work rejected, taking notes from editors, editing, sending again.

To be a better chef, cook more. To be a better writer, write more. But you don’t have to go in blind. In attempting to understand genius, better writers and better chefs have laid out instructions long before I started writing/cooking. It would be ignorant (or pseudo-intellectual) for me to pretend like a book doesn’t have something it can teach me; to pretend like what I’m doing is “inexplicable” or "genius".

My experience reading Oren’s unfortunate article reminded me of being in seminar at Thomas Aquinas College with the person who always said, “I don’t understand this….” Seminar was unable to advance in the text because the person refused to move forward until their petty quibbles were resolved. Sure, those sorts of students were sometimes helpful to me because I’m a bit too happy moving forward without understanding. But, often, those students made it impossible to progress.

“Keep what’s helpful, throw out what’s not.” I’m sorry Oren didn’t find Save The Cat! helpful. Although I don't agree that “beat sheet” is as vague as he argues it is, I concede that it wasn’t applicable to the novel I’m writing. However, that doesn't mean it “didn’t help me.”

It helped me the way Bob’s Burgers Burger Book helped me. It gave me ideas and a few good tips. It helped me think through my plot in a way I hadn’t before. It didn’t turn me into a novelist, no more than the Burger Book made me a chef, but make me think.

Returning to the larger discussion of craft: you can't expect too much from it. Craft won't make you a writer. It won't write your novel for you. It won't even teach you to write. These are things the writer learns on their own.

Consider looking at craft books as recipe books. Maybe you’ll love the dishes you make, but the recipe requires a lot of work and is a bit vague so you’ll need to change the method. Maybe you’ll love the method and change the recipe. Either way, you’ve never read a cookbook expecting anything more than a few dishes.

Likewise, you shouldn’t read a craft book expecting anything more than a revision of your current work. It won’t give you “genius” but it at least won’t hide behind the word “genius” either (if it’s any good). It’ll try to explain, but it won’t make you a writer. If you rely on the craft book, it will fall short. But writing is human. Falling short, not “genius”, is the norm.