Food Writing or Food/ Writing or Food and Writing?

Today was my turn to post at the Southern Writers Blog: A Good Blog is Hard to Find. I'm in very good company over there, lots of familiar names and frequently published authors. So click on over and read my (tongue-in-cheek, slightly humorous?) post explaining where baking and writing intersect, kind of.

Or you can just skip that part and scroll down to a really easy but very tasty recipe for "Pear Purses."

Or you can just keep going and get to the link for my friend Lee Hilton's real Pear Purse, AKA Rustic Pear Galette recipe.

But this blog and that one are writing blogs. And the point, whether I made it or not, was that baking, like its distant cousin writing, has rules which need to be mastered before you branch out. It's just a random thought, something I wish I'd known and believed a long time ago about writing. Then again, there are all sorts of schools of thought about writing. There's the Pantster (fly by the seat of your pants- get it?) vs. the Plotter school. There are the outliners, the thinkers, the NaNoWriMo-sters. Whatever works for you when it comes to writing.

And I think somebody was trying to tell me something today when I stumbled across this from Darcy Pattison's FICTION NOTES blog.

IF you usually just start in writing, TRY planning each scene. IF you usually plan each scene, TRY just jumping into the writing. Every once in a while, it’s great to break your pattern of working and see what happens. Shake yourself up! (I suggested this once at a national conference and got several notes later that this was the best advice the writers had ever taken, the resulting novel was the best she had written – so try it!) If the results are disappointing, you can always go back to your original methods of writing your novel.

Kind of like a lot of life. You won't know if it works till you try it. And then, if it doesn't, try it another way.


Related posts: NaNoWriMo- Get Me ReWrite!
Revision: Darcy Pattison