by Writing Workshops Org Admin
6 years ago
We tend to think of cooking as how you work a stove. Don’t let the chicken dry out. Don’t burn the garlic. Don’t overwork the pie dough.
What happens in the pan matters, of course, but it’s not the only thing that matters. You don’t have to watch many cooking shows before you hear a chef opine about the importance of working with quality ingredients. This refrain is as uniform in the culinary world as any piece of writing advice is in our literary world. And not for nothing: what could be more important to a dish than what it’s made out of?
To my mind, we often have a similar blindspot in the writing community. We focus on how to write this sentence, where to end the story, how to manage the pace. Only rarely do we speak of the other half of the process. As much art fails at the level of conception as it does at the level of execution. Stories are sometimes boring or overwrought because of the writing, but just as often the problem stems from an insufficient or poorly developed premise.
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