So, wandering off-topic for a moment, the lovely Peter Clines over at The Ranty Blog has a simile he's brought up once or thrice about how writing is a lot like cooking. To paraphrase, most people can cook to a greater or lesser degree, but not everyone is good enough to open their own restaurant--and the people who do are those who put in the untold hours of practice and toil and painful scaldings. Same with writing. The writers who succeed are those willing to suffer the hours and the (hopefully metaphorical) scaldings.
Mr Clines has also pointed out that, in both writing and cooking, you need to know the basics. A cook needs to know the difference between salt and sugar, say, or how to tell when a chicken is cooked. A writer needs to be able to use grammar, and spell without relying on spill-chick. It's pretty much essential.
I was reminded of this the other night while watching The Great British Bake-Off. If you're unfamiliar with this show... hell, the information's right there in the title. It's a bunch of people in a baking competition. And I love it. For a start, it's about cakes, and it also has that daft British charm that tends to be absent from so many talent contests. (In contrast, I also watch Hell's Kitchen (and make no apologies for the fact); it's very difficult to imagine the contestants on British Bake-Off bitching about each other or sneaking out the back to smoke and kick punch-bags.)
This week's Bake-Off episode featured Toby, who was so delightfully cack-handed you couldn't help but fall in love with him. He had the wide-eyed, bewildered look of an inebriated Bernard Black attempting to do his tax return. By the end of the episode, he had more blue sticky-plasters covering nicks on his fingers than he did actual fingers. His defining moment (aside from announcing at the end that he planned to become "some kind of anti-baking monk") was when, five minutes before taking an angel cake out of the oven, he realised he'd used salt instead of sugar in the recipe. At least the poor boy laughed about it.
So there's lesson number one--knowing the basics. No one likes salty angel cake.
Lesson number two is something I've noticed time and again over the past few series of this show. Essentially, the second of the three tasks each week is for the contestants to bake something from a (deliberately vague) recipe. What surprises me is how, every week, there will be at least one or two contestants who will admit at the start of the challenge, "I've never baked an angel cake/donuts/sourdough/strudel/whatever". Okay, fair enough--neither have I. But then, I'm not a baker. I'm certainly not planning to go on national TV and try to win a competition with my baking (although I do make a mean cheese scone).
These people are bakers, and they're trying to win a national competition with their baking. Furthermore, after three series, they must know that one of the challenges each week will be the recipe challenge. More often than not they're using specific recipes written by Mary Berry, one of the judges. So, if say you were planning to go on this show, would you not maybe perhaps take the time and effort to research types of cake? Possibly go online, read a bunch of recipes and familiarise yourself with cooking times and whatnot for flapjacks and breadsticks and shortcake? Or even make time to try out various recipes at least once in the comfort of your own home, just so you're prepared for whatever the judges throw at you?
This would involve a lot of hard work, yes, and a lot of practice and potential failures. But that I feel is my point--if you want to succeed, at some point you're going to have to put the hours in. Whether it's at home where no one but your cat can mock you for the soggy bottom on your fruit cake, or whether it's on national TV with Paul Hollywood spitting out a mouthful of cake in horror... well, that's kinda up to you.
So then. Two lessons learned from The Great British Bake-Off. One: know your stuff. You can't get away with mistaking salt for sugar, or your for you're. And two: go practice. Go make cakes, or go write. Whatever you want to succeed at, go practice at it.
And, see, that brings me back to my original point. Writing synopses is part and parcel of being a writer, unfortunately. Do I want to be a writer? Then I have to sit down and write--including writing things I don't like, or that I'm no good at. Otherwise I run the risk of ending up like Toby.
God love you, Toby. I would've voted to keep you on the show just to brighten my Tuesday evenings.
