Cooking with Mr. Elbow

No offense to Peter Elbow, but I know that I cannot pretend that I have an audience and I only have a half hour to tell them what I wanted to say. To me, that is like saying that my paper is due tomorrow, even if it is not really due for two weeks. I cannot do that or I would be extremely on top of things. I do, however, get stuck with my writings sometimes. When I do I'm not sure that forcefully writing is always the best thing for me. I know myself and I know that sometimes I need to walk away and come back. Sometimes I need to go do something active or simply take a mental break, and then I will be ready to spit something out.

I liked Elbow’s idea of connecting the two ideas of writing and cooking together. I understand that writing and cooking have to be internal, in order to produce the optimal product. A chef is always putting internal emotion into his or her cooking. The chef might show emotion by drizzling dressing over a salad ever so carefully. Also, the more a person cooks the better they become at it. There is good cooking mixed with bad cooking, the same as writing. However, the key is practice, because the more a person cooks the better they will get. This chapter even made me think about audience awareness. If someone is cooking for a kid, then they would prepare something different, then they would for an adult. Plus, writing and cooking are both subjective, so the audience is crucial. This chapter made me realize that people might have a writing talent, but they are always cooking to get better. When an individual writes they have good writing intertwined with bad writing and that is the growing process of creating quality writing. A Chef might throw all kinds of random ingredients into a bowl, but it is the process of adding and taking away that makes the food nearly perfect.

Elbow says, "Allow your writing to fall into poetry and then back into prose; from informal to formal; from personal to impersonal; first-person to third person; fiction, nonfiction; empirical, a priori." This sounds kind of fun and I have done this before in my diary, but it seems like it is too much. I understand that this method will me with cooking up ideas, but the editing will be excruciating. I don't want to have first person and third person all intermingled or I'm going to confuse myself. Yes, my writing will be more personal, but I don't think I can find the fluency in my writing when I'm jumping around in so many different styles.

I’ve realized from Elbow that writing is very personal, and Elbow’s book will not work for anyone exclusively. The writing process truly is unique to everyone. Of course, I can pull ideas from Elbow, but I will never go about writing the same as him. I think it is important to learn how other people write, so you can know what does and doesn’t work for yourself. I was glancing at a couple other blogs, and I found this one kind of relevant and funny. http://strictlywriting.blogspot.com/2009/07/masterchef-putting-novel-in-mix.html