Throughout the history of this blog, I have made numerous references to cooking in all its wondrous forms. Baking, sausage making, new recipes, old recipes, cookware, kitchen remodels, etc. However, I assure you, those comments are not analogies to the craft of writing. For me, there are but two primary modes of self-expression: cooking and writing. They go hand in hand in terms of ingredients (or writing tools), research, process, and the ultimate satisfaction.
What I find most unique is the comparison between genre and cuisine. Those are symbiotic concepts within the scope of each tradition. In my life, I have written short stories, poetry, screenplays, short plays, and fiction of all kinds. I have enjoyed a variety of food styles from Mexican to Asian, Mediterranean to Italian, and anything else that I could find that would be both flavorful and healthy.
I suppose you get to a point where you might have to make hard decisions. Do I continue within one genre? Do I gather a list of 25 or 50 recipes and stick to them? Do I read more of one genre? Do I purge kitchen implements used largely for one thing? Or, on the contrary, do I expand myself to a time when exploration was about learning and now it is about refining?
My wife will often reference a recipe that I hadn’t made in a long time. This is only because after nearly 30 years together, I have expanded my repertoire so now there is a lot more from the past. When I was in Boston from the early to mid-1990s, I could hardly consider any form of fiction as I was so ingratiated in the world of poetry. I absorbed Greek and Roman poetry, the early 20th century Europeans and the mid-century Americans. I haven’t written a poem in years.
Your mind might fall onto a notion out of the blue. An encounter with a friend at a writers conference encourages you to think about writing a one-act play because, well, you used to do that in your early 20s. Entering a contest for Flash Fiction is enough motivation to delve into that highly restrictive form to see what you’re capable of doing.
That winds up being nothing more than using the stand mixer versus the hand mixer, the saucepan instead of the double boiler. No, what we tend to avoid is a completely different genre. For the past nine years, I have been blessed to fall into writing historical crime fiction. It took some time to develop the sense of research and verbiage necessary in order to craft stories of significance, excitement, and entertainment. It’s like the ground chicken breakfast sausage patties I’ve been making for years. I have a strong feeling toward the process and simply focus on completion.
Perhaps I have no desire to write sci-fi, fantasy, or romance. What about literary fiction? What about a deep human story that involves morality and emotional conflict that does not include any crime? How about returning to poetry, short or epic, rhymed or free verse? Do I have the capacity to switch gears, so to speak, after being comfortable in one genre for so long?
The other side to the inquiry relates not to ability but to desire. Do I want to explore other genres, other cuisines? Is it necessary? The answer to that will come at a point in the journey of both when the processes seem to become rote, when the joy of creation becomes nothing more than a structured process and the end product is the same every single time without a single variance.
Until that time, as long as I find complete and utter joy in what I do, I will continue on my path. Curiosity or boredom will lead me into new dimensions. I can assure you if that were to happen, I will follow.
The Tikiman Says... 