“People fail forward to success.” – Mary Kay Ash

The first time I read this chapter, it did not make much sense to me. Perhaps I was tired, but I think the cooking metaphor was confusing for me to grasp. Or maybe I was hungry and thinking of writing as food wasn’t too appealing.

I read the chapter a second time, and then began to grasp some of Elbow’s concepts. I will say that I understood more once I read the conclusion than I did while in the midst of the chapter.

The point that hit home the most for me came late in the chapter, page 70 to be exact. Elbow says, “Of all the steps in the growth cycle, this one [mopping up or editorial stage] is the most obvious because it is the most conscious and manipulative. Thus people easily mistake it for the writing process itself.” We live in a society where, on so many levels, we strive for perfection. We look for the best in everything. We are told to never settle for second-best. So, in our writing, we are taught to always put our best on the page. Never are we taught, conventionally-speaking, to put your best, second-best, mediocre, and worst on the page. Yet this is exactly what Elbow prescribes for us all. Put it all out there…something will eventually come through. I know that I need to be able to be comfortable with the idea that there can be lots of chaos on the page, lots of “vomit on the page”, and that this is okay. I typically don’t fret about writing. It doesn’t bother me too much to have to write. But I have realized, in the past 3 days, that I do a lot of my verbal “vomiting”, my cooking, in my head. I think things through in my head first, and then start to put in on the page. It is as if I write my first drafts in my head, but the first draft anyone physically sees is really my second draft. So guess I do more editing than I should near the beginning of the writing process.

The ideas for writing when you get stuck are intriguing to me. The freewrite that is then dissected into ideas that are further cut apart and stitched together sounds to be a great way to work through writer’s block. It’s a great “test” recipe for writing: put your thoughts out there (the ingredients), sort out what works as ideas (weed out the rotten fruit or eggs first), start combining ideas and words (mix dry ingredients in one bowl, wet in another), get words and ideas to interact in more organized state (combine wet into dry ingredients), polish and edit the words and structure (put into the pan and cook it), and then make sure it is right for you (check for doneness). Sometimes test recipes result in really burned charcoal, and other times it is a dish worthy of the harshest food critic to enjoy. But you never know until you experiment and then taste what you’ve made. This is what (I think) Elbow is saying in terms of writing.

After mulling it over, I also really liked the ideas of cooking and energy. Writing is not easy for most people. But, Elbow constantly reminds us, you need to do it, to practice it over and over and over, and then it starts to become a little less painful. I had a band director in junior high school that used to tell us that practice never makes perfect if you don’t practice properly. Elbow gives some ideas in this chapter for ways to get close to proper practice. But he also talks about good and bad energy. Putting four hours of sweat, tears, and curse words into an assignment doesn’t make it better than someone who only spent 25 minutes on the same assignment, just because you expended more energy doing it. Very rarely is it about the time or tears put in to something; it is usually more about the quality of energy you put into something that makes it work or not. I tended to learn this the hard way while studying Chemistry in high school. No matter how much I cried, nothing was going to be absorbed in to my brain until I finally found a study method that worked for me. So, for a struggling writer, this is a way to get out the bad ideas and the good, but he must be willing to put in the proper energy to find it.

So, while I got lost in the muddle of Elbow’s cooking, by the end I could make sense of his multi-course meal, and I really savored dessert (his conclusion). If only I had had dessert first (like I wish I could eat every meal), I think I would have had less of a hard time with this chapter.