My opening moves today were to bake an angel food cake. I forgot how fiddly the process is, but the end result was pretty good… fresh strawberries and whipped cream forgive many sins.
It reminded me a little about writing, actually. Perhaps not a surprise… as I dive full-body into my exams I won’t be able to even think about occupational writing for at least the next few weeks, and so I am focusing on these moments of joy when and where I can. Anyway, writing is a little like baking: it’s less about rigorous precision, and more about knowing what will make a good finished product.
Sure, if I add any fat to the egg whites, they simply won’t whip up, which means they’re wasted. But other than that, everything is carefully variable… more sugar, less sugar. More salt, less vanilla, more lemon extract, swap lemon for orange, fold the flour or whisk… but critically, until you have baked a lot, you’ll never really know what you’re supposed to end up with, and therefore you won’t know exactly what to mess with.
Writing is the same sort of thing. There are expectations for any story when you, as a reader, pick up that book. You may expect the hero will survive, or that the hero has no hope of surviving, or that there is no hero. But all of that is determined very early, and often just by picking your genre. A horror novel that has the monster slain by a group of determined heroes may be a great story, but it’s probably not Horror, which has pretty specific rules. And yes, once you get very good with reader expectations you can start to subvert them… I think one of the many things that made Game of Thrones so appealing for a long time is how many of the genre expectations it subverted, just as a random example. But gosh you gotta bake a lot of cakes before you can expect to do that.
Just idle thoughts. And half-decent angel food cake.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!