Transcript
Speaker: ACNFers, if you're looking to get in shape, have someone hold you accountable, you hire a personal trainer, right? Likewise, if your writing needs a spotter, consider letting me help you out. If you're working on a book, an essay, an inquiry, a book proposal maybe, and you're ready to level up, email me at brendan at brendanhomera .com.
Speaker: And we'll start a dialogue. I'd be honored to help you get where you want to go. And also we're dealing with a call for submissions right now for issue four of the audio magazine themed codes. Codes to live by, mantras, personal beliefs, rules, oppressive or liberating. I love people who are so principled they live by a code. Captain Fantastic and even the Mandalorian. This is the way.
Speaker: Give me your best 2000 words or fewer essays about codes. Email creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail .com with code in the subject lines. Simultaneous submissions are fine but if you have your piece accepted by another publication or maybe you're holding out for a more prestigious publication
Speaker: Let me know as soon as possible This way I don't read and edit your piece because I even give notes to rejected essays. What a guy So if it's gonna be taken elsewhere, I'd like to know so I don't waste my time deadline is October 31st This is the way
Speaker: Oh, and wouldn't you know it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the non -award -nominated podcast where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O 'Meara, how's it going? I want to remind you to keep the conversation going on Twitter, at CNF Pod, or Instagram, at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. You can also support the podcast by becoming a paid member at patreon .com slash CNF Pod.
Speaker: As I say, the show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Members get transcripts, chances to ask questions of future guests, special pods, I give away cool shiz. If my book proposal ends up landing a book deal, yep, you guessed it, I'll be sharing my proposal with you so you can see what a winning proposal looks like. A lot of people hold those pretty close to the chest, and I'm not 100 % sure why.
Speaker: But I'd like to share mine because sometimes it can be pretty foggy out there with how to do one. So if it happens to be successful, I'd like to at least give you something of a blueprint. But of course, if it doesn't sell, pie to the face and I'm not going to share it.
Speaker: this episode and for the next nine or so there's gonna be a mid -roll ad I know if you don't want to hear an ad in the middle of the show I'm dropping the audio file of this show ad free on the patreon page ha so yet another wickedly exciting perk to be a member and patreon
Speaker: But when the hat comes around and you don't feel like dropping a few bucks in that, there are free ways to support the show. You can always leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts or rating on Spotify. Written reviews for our little podcast that could go a long way towards validating it for the wayward CNF -er.
Speaker: No new reviews, but if you publish one, I'll be sure to read it right here, man. And be sure you're heading over to BrendaMarra .com for show notes and to sign up for my up to 11 rage against the algorithm, CNF, and monthly newsletter, first of the month, no spam, can't beat it.
Speaker: And I'm sure you realize at this point that this is the file that you're like, whoa, this is an awfully short episode. What's going on, BO? And fact is, no interview this week. Well, there was an interview that I conducted a couple of days ago. And then when we were done, the guest was like, oh, by the way, please don't publish this until after May 11th. And I was like,
Speaker: I said to him, oh no, no, no problem. No problem. But inside my head I was like fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Speaker: And so I was scrambling, I'm like, what should I do? I could go way into the backlog and maybe do a rerun and do a new intro and a new parting shot. And that was gonna be the plan. And then I thought, well, why don't I just maybe write a short little crafty essay. I wrote a very short version of this for the Rage Against the Algorithm up to 11 CNF in the monthly newsletter.
Speaker: And so I decided to just blow a little more air into it. And this is what we're gonna do. This little essay here about basically what chefs can teach us about writing, or at least how chefs have inspired me to become a better writer. So here we go. Listen, just discover Top Chef, don't judge, on account of Peacock. I've always been inspired by chefs and how they go about the work.
Speaker: When I was watching Chopped several years ago, I remember one chef talking about how he was on onion duty. Can you imagine cutting onions for hours? Anyway, onion duty for hours in the kitchen. And instead of lamenting it, he vowed he was going to be the best damn cutter of onions. And I love that. It's such a great attitude, something we can all heed, something to learn from.
Speaker: The parallels between high -level cooking and writing are very similar. We started watching season 18 instead of going all the way back.
Speaker: of Top Chef because it's in Portland, Oregon. Why will we live in Portland? So we jumped right into that. Spoilers of past winners be damned. And in the first episode, Richard Blaise, restaurateur, and one of the judges told the chefs to have, quote, authorship of their dishes. And another, Melissa King, said, you have to edit your plates and choose what to leave on the plate and what to leave off. Sound familiar?
Speaker: Let's first unpack authorship. Something I always found mildly grating is when judges often say, like, I need to see more of you on the plate, or I don't get a sense of who you are in this dish. And when a chef nails it, they'll often say, like, I see this dish. When I see this dish, I see Shoto, I see Don, or I see Gabe.
Speaker: And when I cook food, I mean, I'm putting together typically just a mosh pit of tofu, rice, and veggies. When I'm making my morning oatmeal, the highlight meal of my day, it doesn't exactly scream Brendan. So I'm always confused how a dish could be authored and how there's personality on it. But the more you think about it, the more it really makes sense. This gets to voice and style, doesn't it?
Speaker: Leah Flickinger who was recently on the show and she's a features editor for Runner's World, Popular Mechanics and Bicycling Magazine. She said something that voices a gift to the reader and I love that.
Speaker: There are any number of writers we identify with or admire, or both, and we immediately know, sometimes without even looking at a byline, that that was written by Rebecca Solnit, Bryn Jonathan Butler, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Mary Carr, Roxanne Gay, or Chuck Closterman.
Speaker: But that can be a double -edged sword, too. For instance, while watching Great British Bake Off, or at last count, the billionth time, Hank, Kevin, is that true? Yeah, it's true. Frances, from one of the earlier seasons, used one such baker where the judges kept saying, your style and no substance. Her work looked beautiful, but in the culinary arts, the food still gotta taste good.
Speaker: So these writers that I just mentioned, while they may wow us with how they compose their sentences and their thoughts, they still have to deliver a great story. And though we may imitate them and try to do that and try to elicit that feeling, it can be dangerous. Again, the food's got to taste good.
Speaker: And the only way you get there is by cooking a ton of food, reading a bunch of recipes, and then adding that little flourish that is wholly your invention. Same goes for writing, man. As Katya Safchok said in a recent episode 313, she copies the work of David Grant, word for word, to warm up her fingers when she's got a big writing session, to get the rhythm of Grant's words in her brain, like following a recipe.
Speaker: If we read, read, read, read, and imitate, and my God, play a little, geez, have some fun. What is fun? We might serve up a dish that is identifiably us.
Speaker: Oh, this episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Listen, you've probably heard of these guys, and I have yet to try this product, but what I dig about them is that they're plant -based, which is important to me. Otherwise, this would be a non -starter. With one delicious scoop, you get 75. Wow. That's a lot, right? Right, Hank?
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Speaker: Melissa King's note on editing was so great. I loved hearing her say you have to edit your plate. This gets at the heart of what matters to presentation, what to leave in, leave out. I'll put sun -dried tomatoes on every pizza I make, like to the point where it's obnoxious. But maybe it's best to kill some of my tomatoes. Are they in service of the pizza?
Speaker: Sometimes jamming too much into a piece is overwhelming. It's distracting. It takes away from the forward propulsion of a story. No matter how much effort and work or reporting you put into a piece, you might have to slash that shit and let it fall. From what I understand, the producers at This American Life kill so many decent stories and parts of stories that the floor is littered with golden nuggets that are just all there by the dust bunnies.
Speaker: What's in service of the story? The dish. One more lesson we can take from cooks that help our writing is this idea of like the mise en place. This is all the prep that goes, that takes place so a chef can simply cook when the rush comes. All the veggies are chopped, the broths are made, the water is simmering, the ovens are preheated, the food's weighed out, the cutting board's cleaned, the knives are lined up, sleeves rolled up, so on and so on.
Speaker: Order. That's the practice. This is the non -glorious stuff that frees you up to let it rip.
Speaker: On a good day, I end my day by turning off my monitors and stony going to my mouse and keyboard and putting out my analog toys for the morning. My regular journals, bullet journals, some other notebooks I might be writing in, and it's clean and ready to go. Pencils are sharpened. There'll be a hot beverage. Some tap water is there. If I'm feeling really frisky, some bubble water.
Speaker: If I eventually need to kick over to the computer, I know I can fire it up. The me's on pause is there, so when it's time to riff, we're ready to riff.
Speaker: Also, being a cook, it's a lot of grunt work out of the spotlight. We see cooking shows and we see celebrity chefs and we think this must be a glorious lifestyle. Glamorous. But it's brutal. A lot of drinking, drugs, long hours. It is not glamorous. Long, it's painful, it's draining, it's gutting work for very little pay. Sound familiar?
Speaker: As writers, we look on Twitter at the person who's touting this and that, and it's so obviously a flex that I'm often wondering, like, oh, you're basically boasting, like, so why tweet that?
Speaker: Who, besides you, does that even serve? Or the person whose work was just accepted by, I don't know, New York Times? Meanwhile, 99 % of the person's work is content marketing for universities that thankfully has no byline, but sure as hell pays a lot more than a prestigious New York Times essay.
Speaker: But it keeps the lights on. It's writing you don't tweet about, as Rachel Monroe and I once talked about. Or maybe you know someone who got a killer review and keeps getting features written about them, or they go on social and they say, wow, I can't believe how fast I got 2 ,000 email subscribers. And you're like, fuck, can we stop it with the damn pissing contest veiled as humble brags? You know, we never see the entire picture in social media fans of flames of our insecurities. So what can we do to come back from that?
Speaker: We bring our love and our hearts to the work that matters, just like chefs do, for nourishment and because it brings us joy, ultimately. We seek out our ideal audiences in the hopes that we can bridge that connection. All we can do is lean into the work and control what we can control. Bring our authorship to our work and let it speak loudest. My sister always told me when it came to sports, I shouldn't have to tout how good I was, that my performance would speak for itself. And I think that's mostly true.
Speaker: So let's face the work and find inspiration, whatever springs up. For me, it's often looking at chefs. And maybe for you, it's master gardeners, I don't know. Either way, personally, I can't wait to see what you come up with.
Speaker: And if this little crafty essay resonated with you in any way, feel free to email me or ping me on social, that's CNF pod. Next week, we'll hopefully have a new interview ready for you. And oh, hey, did you catch that new logo? Thanks to Jesse Springer here in Eugene, hashtag shop local for bringing the edge to the CNF pod logo. That lightning bolt is killer. So until next week, stay wild CNF -ers. And if you can't do interview,
Speaker: See ya.
