Again, no deeper significance, cha’girl just a lil bit salty today.
Revising is the worst. Take it from someone who’s written too many plays and other assorted works of fiction. It sucks.
The Great British Bake Off is a fantastic choice for someone trying to chill out and keep themselves from punting a manuscript out a window. I’ve made use of it myself a number of times. It’s nothing like American reality tv, especially not a show like Chopped. It’s cheerfully colorful, gentle, and interspersed with two comedians cracking light jokes and cheering up the bakers, and the occasional b-roll shot of a lamb or a duck or something. Nobody is screaming around at each other, nobody’s fighting over utensils or having useless love quadrangles or whatever, everyone’s just making cute little cakes and pies and complementing each other. It’s fun to see how people use different spices and whatnot in their baking. The drama lies entirely in skill. Do those flavors actually work together? Will they have enough time to get this meringue done? Can the baker pull off this ambitious bake?
Writing is like baking. Things get messy, you may end up scrapping the whole thing if you screw it up badly enough. You may end up with egg in your hair and flour under your nails and chocolate smeared halfway down your chin, but all the reader sees is the finished product. It takes one to know one, and before you do something like it, you may never actually have any idea how much work goes into making it. If you’ve never made sushi, you don’t know how much of a pain in the butt rolling it up can be. If you’ve never written something for publishing, you don’t really know how grueling the editing process can be.
I think that at some point in your life as a creator, everyone’s been that self-deprecating kid who’s got their work close to their chest. I’ve been there, it took a creative writing course with a prof who may be legitimately off his rocker to shake that loose (and it still hits me from time to time.) We all just need to be a little more willing to put ourselves out there. Our puddings may slump or our sentences may fall flat, but there’s no way of knowing how it’ll taste until we try it ourselves.
Will Write for Food 