Chapter 131: The Writer’s Brain
I am a sucker for foodie movies. This explains why I spent a recent rainy Sunday afternoon sitting in a theater watching a four-hour documentary about seemingly every single starter, entree, amuse bouche, dessert, cheese course and wine pairing that define lunch and/or dinner at a three-star restaurant in the French countryside.
Granted, I did take a break to get a cookie – what can I say, the documentary, “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros” – made me hungry. Much as I enjoyed the talk about the ways flavors combine with one another to create something remarkable on the palate, I found myself far more caught up by watching how it was done.
The restaurant – the family-owned restaurant, Troisgros – is built around a kitchen that feels as open as a meadow. And as quiet too. No clanging pots and oven doors. And mercifully no screaming chefs hurling knives and invective.
Instead the vast room was a hive of chefs in whites and toques going about the meticulous business of slicing, sauteing, braising, stirring and tasting, again and again and again.
As I watched I somehow found myself imagining that what I was seeing was a visualization of what takes place inside a writer’s brain, albeit in an idealized state.
I had always pictured the writers’ mind – and here I include my own - as akin to a Gordon Ramsay kitchen. Loud. Raucous. Chaotic. Pots and pans hurled. Gratuitous cruelty. And a lot of cursing.
But clean, quiet, and orderly? The thought never occurred to me that a writer’s mind could ever function that way.
Writing does, after all, embrace a certain messiness, perhaps an overly idealized notion that while other professionals go about their work with deeply ingrained predictability, we writers, bless our hearts, are free spirits.
I certainly felt this way early on in my career – ah, those creative forces at work, the juices flowing, and with them the words and sentences and paragraphs that would emerge from all that artistic bedlam.
I wince at the memory. Because looking back I can see how chaos can, in fact, breed more chaos, that the busy-ness on the page reflected my own lack of ease with what I was trying to say, and how I was going to say it.
I tried to course correct, or more precisely over-correct: I remember reading how the great John McPhee arranged his notes in envelopes that he tacked to a bulletin board, so that he could approach his stories an envelope at a time. I tried this with one story and learned that a) I was not John McPhee because b) my mind did not work as his did. But that attempt did underscore for me the need to bring some order to my work, to slow myself down.
This was long before I discovered that it was possible for a writer’s mind to look, feel, sound and function like the kitchen at Troisgros.
My students now find themselves in just that state: caught between the excitement of knowing they possess the skill to write and the despair that they will somehow fall short.
As I have written in earlier chapters, over the years I changed the way I teach writing, focussing much more on what goes in the mind than what appears on the page. In a sense my goal is to “trick” students into writing without being self-conscious about their writing. I say trick because I do not hide my intent from them; I make it clear that my goal is to put them in a position where the anxiety and terror that accompanies all writing recedes enough to allow them to write unencumbered by doubt, hesitation, and fear.
I wish I could say I have devised a formula that does not fail. My students write the weekly reporting letters that I assign with the kind of ease and assurance that – as I tell them – serves as a powerful visual reminder that they are, in fact, seasoned pros who have been writing in all sorts of ways for 20 years. But then comes the moment to write and when the bell sounds, the inner voice that screams “you know you’re gonna screw this up, don’t you??” grows ever louder.
Much as I try to remind them that what they’ve already done is a precursor of what they can do, my argument is a rational one, and rationality always loses out to the power of the irrational.
So now, I have another tool. I can counter the voices of despair with an image of lightness and hope: the kitchen at Troisgros.
Think, I tell them, of the quiet. Think of the long rows of work stations, each chef at his or her task that when complete will join together to create a meal. Think of each task as discrete: searing, braising, flavoring, tasting, seasoning, poaching, tasting, seasoning again. Don’t try to see it all at once – the completed dish because that can feel overwhelming; how, you will surely ask yourself, can I ever do that?
The operative word here is quiet. It seems an idea at odds with what we like to believe is creative ferment – the noise, as it were, of the struggle to bring a story to life. Quiet, by comparison, feels sedate, measured – okay, a little old and stodgy. It certainly did when I was new to this.
But quiet, I’d argue, gives the creative mind the space it needs to make connections between ideas, to make adjustments when roadblocks appear, when things go wrong. Noise, on the other hand, can obscure things; the cacophony overwhelms the mind and the result, in a kitchen context, is a lot of thrown pots and angry voices.
There is no shame in quiet, no retreat from the excitement of creation. After all, those remarkable meals at Troisgros – just watch them come to life.
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With the holidays approaching we’ll be off for the next couple of weeks. See you again on January 5th. Until then, the best to you and those you love.