piling peas

A first draft is a pile of peas.

Stick with me on this.

If you've never shelled peas, you should try it. Befriend someone with an allotment, get a whole bunch of peas in pods, sit and shell them out. It's therapeutic. Also peas smell and taste amazing straight from the pods.

So you start shelling the peas, digging your nails into the pods and emptying the cute little peas into a bowl. At first you're delighted by your progress--look at the peas in this bowl that was formerly empty! Observe me creating! And gradually the pea pile begins to grow. Some pods pop open easily; some are resistant little bastards. Some pods are crammed with perfectly formed peas; some have only a couple of withered little things. They all go on the pile. And as you work, you notice that appearances are deceptive--sometimes the big, bright peas have that dry chalky texture, while the teeniest, most unassuming ones can have the sweetest flavour. They all go on the pile.

At some point you'll wonder why you ever started this stupid repetitive task. The pile doesn't look like it's growing. You still have half a tub of peas to shell. You have weird green stuff under your nails. There's a bag of frozen peas in the freezer you could easily have used instead.

Keep adding peas to the pile.

Eventually you'll reach the end. Now you have a pile of peas. Impressive, isn't it? Take a moment to appreciate it. You did that, you produced that whole pile of peas, with your own two hands.

But, as you're probably aware, a pile of peas is not a finished dish. You could eat them as they are, sure, but that's not necessarily the tastiest way to enjoy peas.

So you start refining your pile. You take out all the manky peas, plus the bits of pods and leaves and stems that always seem to sneak in. You cook the peas. How you cook them depends what you want to end up with--mushy peas are different to minted peas are different to that strange pea-foam they make on cooking shows, obviously. Plus everyone's cooking styles are different. One person boils, another blanches, another steams. There is no definitive way of cooking peas.

But every finished pea-based dish starts off with a pile of peas.

And, to round off this tortuous metaphor, a first draft is nothing more or less than a pile of words you've had to dig out of your head and dump onto paper.

Keep piling those peas.