Recipe for Writing

They say that life imitates art.  Some also say art imitates life.  They say when you write to write what you know.  Clichés that are repeated so often they must lose legitimacy in the redundancy… and yet… the more I write, the more I know they are true.

There is also the philosophy that some stories have to wait for the right time and place – even if inspiration comes along 15 years too early.  I always resented being told I didn’t have enough experience in my twenties.  And now, I kind of get it.  I had to live through certain emotions and heartbreak and … experiences to make this novel a better story.

So I don’t know if it is the first sentence or the second that has shaped the reality of my November.  I spend my weekends at the house in which I spent the end of my childhood, fixing up some of the wear and tear and seeing it with a new set of eyes.  And… a whole lot of love.  It has become a sanctuary… a country retreat where I can write, sit in front of the fire, and sip coffee on a Saturday morning.  There is a sort of self discovery through the reacquaintance with this property and the quiet of the nature that surrounds it.  Not necessarily a piece of me that got lost… but that went to sleep for a few years while I lived closer to the city.

And I don’t know which opening sentence applies to the greatest influence of my current writing life.  I lost my grandmother this fall… something I expected to happen this year.  Something I knew was an inevitable sadness my life would have to face.  And yet the details of the last few months have inspired a more honest storytelling to my novel.  It also inspired me to start telling the story of my own life – my own heritage – and the woman who planted that seed of storytelling in my imagination long ago.

I just sorted through the recipe boxes that are the fodder for my blog, searching for a dessert bar to bring to a meeting tomorrow.  I am on the fifth recipe for this project of family history through cooking… and while looking for the famous peanut butter bar ingredients, I discovered the treasure hunt that my grandmother left me in these two boxes.

Almost every recipe is annotated with a source.  Some are impersonal like Good Housekeeping.  Some are familiar like my aunts and cousins.  Some are vaguely familiar like other older deceased relatives.  Some are… a mystery.  Names of people that are connected to my family, but I don’t recognize.  Or a descriptive word to an ingredient foreign to my 21^st century mega grocery shopping experience memory.  

My eyes welled up as I sorted through these cards – finding really great titles like Happy Day Cake or Tropical Gingerbread… and a whole lot of inspiration for my blog, Soup and Shells (which you should read and like on Facebook if you haven’t already).

But the other truly extraordinary gift of discovery is that… well, it isn’t a contrived storytelling gimmick to say that a modern thirtysomething woman can actually find something of herself through the story of her grandmother.  That it isn’t selling a woman who lived through the 20^th century short by telling her story through the kitchen.  These were major concerns I had about my novel.  Things that I thought made it unbelievable… or cliché.  Now I realize it is a chance to write what I know