Writing analogies

I've been banished from the kitchen. Flour, eggs, oil, sugar, honey, vanilla and chocolate are being transformed, as I type this, into delicious cakes and delicacies. My wife and children have the soundtrack to Rent blasting from the speaker, and they are busy - oh so busy - measuring and mixing and heating and checking and tasting and adjusting. If I'm lucky, I'll get to lick a spoon or get the misshapen mugwump bakes (if I plead).

Cooking is a magical process, and so too is writing. In which ways are they similar? Where do the differences lie? What lessons can be transferred from the processes of the one to the other?

The first observation I'd like to make is how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This seems patently obvious. There are so many aspects of our lives where this is true. So I'd like to expand on this a little, because it was probably not self-evident that this was going to be the case to the very first person who made a cake. It must have been either a happy accident or a more delicious continuation of their experimentation. I'm sure a stone tablet didn't plummet to the Earth with a perfect recipe for a moist sponge. It evolved over time and successive tries. The same is true of writing.

Using the recipe as a sub-analogy within our field of enquiry, writing, there are recipes to follow that more or less guarantee good results. I'm thinking of forms such as Save The Cat and The Hero's Journey. If one uses the prescribed formulae then the novel is - we're assured - likely to tick boxes which will lead the reader to a satisfying experience. And just like there are many types of scone (fat rascals, cheese and butter varieties to name few variations) so these formulae can be played about with. Within certain tolerances palatable results are inevitable.

So what are the elements that equate with the cake ingredients? I hear you ask.

Well, I must point out that analogies break down. Like friendships hot-housed by well meaning parents or marriages of convenience. So flour must be the constituent words and the egg turns them gloopily into sentences. Just as one must sift flour, so one must also grade the words so they knit together properly. One of my sins is that I do rather like polysyllabic words (words with many syllables) - these make sentences lumpy. I do so like them though. To compensate, I try to make my sentences shorter. And I surround the monster words with little attendant words. The sugar is the plot; the intrigue, and the tropes. The sweetness to be savoured, the high energy constituent (remember those long words?) which satisfies the reader's craving for action. The oil is the style - the smooth, slippery liquid that lets the words and sentences and phrases slip ever so nicely down the reader's gullet. The vanilla essence and chocolate act as the notes for the reader to reflect upon and to use to form a memory the taste experience. One would never say to friend, 'Oh that cake was so floury." It's much more likely that they'd wax lyrical about the 'deep, rich chocolatey flavour. Bits of stray egg shell could be typos.

A few words need to be said about the cooking process and that of writing. An underdone, raw cake is a first draft - the ingredients slung in a bowl by a baker with no real interest in communion with a recipe; no editing process, no revision for elements of cohesion, style, logic, plot or artfully navigating a narrative thread. A tough, burned cake is a piece of writing where one part of the novel has becomes too aware of itself and overworked (I'd be interested in anyone else's take on this idea). A moist, tasty cake, which is a joy to eat has the same qualities as a well constructed novel, either by design or as the result of revision and refinement.

There are some notable differences between a cake and a novel. A cake can be sliced in myriad ways and eaten with no ill-effects as to the overall experience. A novel, however, requires that one starts at the beginning and works to the end sequentially.

One final note. Novels have zero calories. No so cakes.