Writers have often expressed the view that Life is a continuous melting pot of free material; it’s just a matter of soaking it all up and discerning which parts are the most likely to yield commercial success when you put them to paper. To someone like myself who is as much an enthusiast of good writing as I am of good food, the journey to success doesn’t even have to start with taking a step outside one’s front door. If you want your plots to really get cooking, there's no better place for your education to begin than in your own kitchen.
When I was growing up, kitchens were a place of great mystery to me, largely because I was repeatedly told by my mother to stay out of them. “Bad things can happen if you don’t know what you’re doing,” she warned. That she didn’t know what she was doing, either, accounted for why she and my father paid someone else to oversee that portion of the house. Plates of gourmet meals – prepared by unseen hands – would be brought to the dining room at the appointed hour and discreetly removed when the meal was done. Being too young to have any say-so in the menu planning meant that I never knew what was coming next, much less whether I’d like it and want to see it again sometime.
Such culinary adventures, of course, served the purpose of allowing me to acquire a discerning sense of taste. What I enjoyed, I was always excited to devour as much of as possible and ask for seconds. What I thought was singularly awful (Brussels sprouts, for instance) went to the top of the list of things I vowed never to go near as soon as I was old enough to get a job and move out.
It was somewhere around elementary school that I first began realizing there was a correlation between cooking and my favorite hobby – reading. I couldn’t really have told you who was bringing all these wonderful tomes to the neighborhood bookmobile every week. Like meals at our house, they simply appeared when needed. Nonetheless, I knew early on which ones I couldn’t get enough of and which ones left me feeling about as enthused as – well, encountering a dish of Brussels sprouts. Just like consuming a meal, there was a finite amount of time allocated to get through each one before you could have another. It was considered cheating to skip ahead to the end (like eating dessert first), tempted as one might be. Likewise, a first chapter (or first bite) that you had to chew on for way too long or had a hard time swallowing didn’t portend well for the rest of the story.
By the time I’d graduated from community college and was preparing to move to my first studio apartment, my career leanings were torn between writing and acting. My mother, a resident naysayer, tried to dissuade me from pursuing either one. “Bad things can happen if you don’t know what you’re doing,” she said. Hmm…Hadn’t she said the same thing about my staying out of the kitchen? From where I stood, the worst case scenario was that I’d get burned by rejection. Getting rejected, however, required taking a bold chance in the first place - something that she herself hadn’t tried either behind a stove or a keyboard. She also predicted I’d move back home once I discovered that full-blown meals did not spring forth like Botticelli's Venus without some form of outside assistance.
My assistance, it turned out, came in the form of my fellow actors in the theater company I’d joined. That I was the only one who was neither still living at home nor sharing a flat with roommates made my address the destination of choice after evening and weekend rehearsals. Struggling performers, musicians and writers that we were, we agreed that my alcove kitchen could be used to refuel our energy as long as everyone pitched in on the grocery bill.
“So what’s the script tonight?” I remember one of them asking, a remark that not only became our group’s favorite catchphrase but which also set in motion my future theories about the craft of writing. Clearly you can’t send a bunch of actors out onstage without any clue about what play they’re supposed to be doing. Actors – like individual ingredients – have unique talents to bring to the table but it takes a playwright and director to orchestrate their appearances and relationships. Just as a meal needs a three-course menu, a story needs a three-act structure to hold it together. The first third is to whet the appetite, the second is to spice it up, and the third is to achieve the push-back-from-the-table satisfaction that comes from the delivery of an enjoyable evening. If, for example, your soup is stone cold and your salad is limp, how much excitement do you really think you’ll be able to muster for your signature rack of lamb?
An enjoyable evening, of course, is predicated on bringing the right combination of egos together on the same stage (or page). In the course of 16 years that I trod the boards as an actress and director, I came to appreciate that certain personalities generate a combustible – and sometimes not altogether pleasant – result. Some are born to the ranks of stardom because of their overpowering presence; others – because of their ability to amicably blend in - are meant to be the supportive side dishes. And believe me, nothing spells disaster faster than a side dish that suddenly decides to hog center stage. I recall one particular evening in which my costume designer whipped up an ambitious platter of mashed potatoes so reminiscent of the scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind that nobody even remembered my main dish. I was tempted not to invite him back except that he would have taken all of our costumes with him.
The same applies to the creative fusion of genres. What a reader or audience experiences in the opening chapters or scenes is what they’ll expect to see maintained for the rest of the tale. If you start out with Chinese appetizers and suddenly shift to Hungarian goulash, your guests will react with alarm. Having supplied them with chopsticks, blue and white porcelain plates and thimbles of sake, their anticipation - and rightfully so - is that the meal will remain Asian from start to finish. Time and again, I've read screenplays that open with doofy and unabashed hilarity and then segue to bioterrorism and graphic violence. I'm never sure whether the writer got bored with the original tone or simply reverted to the unsophisticated tastebuds of childhood and made himself a sandwich of peanut butter, tuna fish and spaghetti.
That's not to say you can't be experimental if you're only entertaining yourself. Just as beginning cooks need to try different cuisines and methods in order to perfect their best dishes, writers need to dabble in a variety of genres and styles in order to define their best voice. If I hadn't surrounded myself with actors, for instance, I envision I might have built a lot of my bachelorette diet around salami, cheese and champagne. Instead, I had to take into consideration the preferences of my guests. Ron was a vegetarian, Melynn hated fish, Jim favored meat and potatoes, etc. When you think about the plots that become bestsellers or blockbuster movies, it's because their components appeal to the broadest spectrum of the population. University presses and art house films, in contrast, may have a smaller draw but it's a segment that passionately loves whatever custom fare is being served because they can personally relate to it.
Trying to appease multiple tastes, alas, usually doesn’t work beyond ordering a pizza with fractional toppings. Only in the hands of a professional can divergent styles be skillfully blended into something with “wow” power. Indian and Mexican recipes, for example, share a similar heat that makes them compatible. When one of my fellow actors decided to concoct Pork Vendaloo and serve it up in soft tacos, we were as awestruck as if he had delivered a sizzling Romantic Suspense. On the other hand, “Jerk Tofu” is something too scary to even fathom.
Let us not forget the issue of timing. Timing, as they say, is everything. I often found myself onstage with actors who either rushed into the scene prematurely or else missed their cue and left the rest of us awkwardly ad-libbing until they showed up. When I began cooking, the biggest challenge was to get everything to come out at the same time. Writing proved to be even harder. Either I'd introduce a character too soon and then not have anything for him to do for long stretches or I'd realize I needed to quickly invent someone new to impart information none of the existing characters already had. It all gets back to the kitchen and having your ingredients assembled at the outset to make sure you have everything you need before things start heating up. Imagine what dolts we all felt like at our opening night beef stroganoff party when we found out that our leading man – swept up in the promise of great reviews for his performance – forgot to pick up the beef.
Even as starving artists, we were not without our standards when it came to presentation. Yes, we could have done what a lot of starving artists did and served up our creations on paper plates supplemented with plastic cutlery. While it would have meant easy cleanup (did I mention my first kitchen had no dishwasher?), why should the labor and patience that goes into a soufflé be diminished by slopping it onto picnic ware? Even a mediocre soufflé, I discovered, was approached differently by the recipient if its staging was attractive. Subconsciously, this viewpoint carried over into the plays and short stories I started sending out to editors to pad my meager salary as an actress. And though I didn’t know way back then that I’d one day be reviewing screenplays for the movie industry, a part of me cringes whenever I see a promising soufflé that the author didn’t care enough about to invest in a stylish serving plate. Suffice it to say, it makes it all the easier to throw out without a second thought.
Although my days on the stage were eventually supplanted by the realization that my real love was writing, there remained a final lesson to be learned. The profession in which I chose to spend my life shares a kinship with anyone who seeks to please the demanding palate of others. There will be times when they demand a taste of everything you know how to do. There will be times when they keep ordering the same thing over and over because it’s the functional equivalent of “comfort food”. There will also be times when they send your creations back to the kitchen, say “Bleah!” and refuse to pay you.
The bottom line? If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.