Why writing is like making meringues...
"Stiff peaks! Stiff peaks!"
I love a metaphor. This morning, for some bizarre reason, I started thinking about meringues. Not a Lemon Meringue Pie or an Eton Mess - though I love both! - but meringues as a metaphor for creative writing.
On the face of it meringues are easy to make: take just two ingredients (for the uninitiated: egg whites and caster sugar), mix them together, and then bake. Simple.
Yet each step has its pitfalls. You can add the egg and sugar too quickly or in the wrong qualtities; you may not whisk the mix sufficiently well; and you may not bake the meringues for long enough. The traditional test for step 2 is to hold the bowl containing the whisked mix over your head — and hope nothing falls out!
And the metaphor?
Writing has two ingredients: the words and the form into which we desire to shape them. Whisking is akin to the drafting. And the baking is a reflection as to how much time we invest in our work — most importantly the editing process.
You can see how we might fail at each stage.
The ingredients.
We choose the wrong words (!) and/or we pick a form which either those words do not suit or which is inappropriate for our subject or the message we desire to get across. For example, we decide to write a sonnet to convey a theme which is so involved and complex that it really needs to be rendered in prose. Or we have an idea for a narrative and immediately assume it must be a novel when it is, in fact, better suited to being a piece of short fiction.
And in the case of the wrong ‘measure’ of ingredients, perhaps when we sacrifice words to adhere to form — most notably with ‘gimmickry’ in poetry…
The mixing.
Here haste is likely to be the problem. We throw our two ingredients together too quickly and with undue care; we gallop through the drafting process in order to finish…
No ‘stiff peaks’ here! When we lift the metaphorical bowl over our head, we get covered in a gloopy mess!
The baking.
Our desire to complete something — or eat the meringue — can mean we rush the final process i.e. the oven is too hot, or we don’t set the timer for long enough.
Even if we have the correct ingredients and have mixed them well, the end-product may still be a disaster if we don’t ensure that we spend sufficient time editing our work. Great words in the right form, well-mixed, can still read disastrously if we have not taken our time in this final stage: soft on the outside, collapsed, ‘soggy’.
I suspect that it’s in the baking where most metaphorical meringues fail.
And as with any piece of creative writing, it’s easy to tell an inadequate meringue…
So, there you have it. When working on something, think meringue. What could possibly go wrong..?
I'd love to this! Can I steal it to use for a writing workshop?
This goes along with how I often tell my students that you want your poems to taste “good” when you speak them aloud.