This blog journey I begin today is an experiment. My late grandmother, Florence O. Hestand (I still believe the ‘O’ stood for oleo) – lived in her kitchen. That is, except when she was showing me how to dig new potatoes out of the ground or chasing supper ( a robust mother hen) around the farm. She experimented too. And her experiments involved a subject near and dear to most folk I know … food.
To this day, I would give one or more of my toes, my appendix, my tonsils, [I already gave my hair at the office] my left arm (let’s not be ridiculous – I am right-handed after all & do plan to author a book at some point, Lord willing) … all that sacrifice, to somehow, some way, recover the recipe for grandma’s banana cake. No one. Absolutely no one in this space time continuum has been able to duplicate it. That’s because grandma did her best cooking … from scratch.
There was something endearing and utterly genuine about her tossing various ingredients together to create mouth-watering and immensely satisfying works of culinary delight. And she was a “scratchter” – I figured since this is my blog I can invoke creative license and coin a new word on a whim. But when I say “scratchter” I refer to her practice of leaving recipes in the recipe box when she cooked and baked.
I’m a cook too. I cook up stories. My ingredients are words. And, like grandma, I’m a literary “scratchter” – but in writing circles we like to refer to this as being a “pantster”. Translation? A seat of the pants writer. It seems to be the way I’m wired. I absolutely love having the story unfold along the way and go directions I never anticipated. I want my characters to pull me down the rabbit hole kicking and screaming. The joy is in the journey – discovery and surprise!
AND, I don’t mind cleaning up afterwards. I have fond memories of being in the kitchen with grandma after meals helping her with the dishes. We had some wonderful conversations then. The cleanup in the writer’s realm is the rewriting and the editing. Bring it on! That’s like putting the icing on the cake. What a pleasure and a blessing it would be to serve up a satisfying dessert of the mind to an audience of readers.
So here I am, taking my blog plunge. (that almost sounds like the name of an amusement park ride) This is an opportunity for me to taste test my writing voice. I took the first step in my voice experiment earlier this year when I entered the ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writer’s) Genesis Contest. I’ll be blogging on that experience shortly and sharing snippets of my writing in that regard so you can get a taste of where I’m coming from and going.
And so I begin this journey of discovery … from scratch. And while my five delightful offspring tell me I make some mean fried bologna, I think I’ll stick to writing for now.
I want to thank God for blessing me with grandma ‘oleo’ – she not only fed me physically, she fed me spiritually, and for that alone I’m profoundly grateful.
I also want to thank some encouraging ACFW’ers who said it was okay if I didn’t follow the recipe book verbatim in my writing. They challenged me to find and follow my voice, to write my passion – which will stoke the fires of my dream again and get me back in the skillet. Now my protagonists? Sorry, it’s out of the pan and into the dire for them.
I’ll be back from scratch momentarily …
