Happy New Year!

January 2nd, 2012

Well a very happy 2012 to you all! I hope it has thus far been your best year yet.

I also wanted to apologise in a grovelly and not-my-fault fashion to those of you who had subscribed to my other blog, The Risk Taker’s Guide to Endorphins. It would appear that my domain subscription lapsed, and soon after sitemeter alerted me to some strange activity in distant lands a new site popped up at my old domain name, titled – rather imaginatively, don’t you think? – The Risk Taker’s Guide to Endorphins. I’m currently disputing the use of my old blog title but it would appear that this new site has binned my blog archives entirely. So I’m posting here one of the more memorable posts from that blog. Fare thee well, old blog!

Betty Crocker & Writing for your Reader

Here’s a little recipe I like to share with my creative writing students:

Forget homemade cake. Betty Crocker cake mix produces the best cake in the world. No need for a flour tornado and mounds of butter: just add an egg, splash of oil and water, give it a stir, and after half an hour in the oven, you’ve got Nirvana in a dish.

Interestingly enough, there’s no need for anyone to have to add more than water, but the Betty Crocker company found that early sales were bombing. Why? People wanted to contribute to the cake. Yeah, they wanted a short cut, but not too much of a short cut. They wanted the ‘I made this’ factor. Hence, the egg. Once people could start adding an egg or two to the mix, sales rocketed. And so, nearly a century since the company started, we still have Betty Crocker on our shelves at Tesco.

There’s an important analogy for writers here: let the reader add their egg. Let them get involved, contribute, work stuff out, make their own connections. Don’t tell them too much. Give them a way to put their hands around the dough of the plot, give it a good knead, feel its texture. Let them make shapes with it before rolling it out. Don’t roll it flat for them. Let the reader pummel the dough with their own life experience, emotions, interpretations. Allow the work to breathe, expand, cool, set.

As a writer, it’s important to think of the reader. Not necessarily in the commercial sense. That comes later. But good writing involves the reader; it gives the reader a way in, a chance to contribute, a feeling that they belong.

You might say that a good piece of writing is a soft, spongey cake. Not a burnt offering.

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