Smell Your Tomatoes Before You Write
Or: Why You Need to Be Cooking With Better Ingredients
When a young Alice Waters was walking the streets of 1960s Paris, she noticed a local quirk: people shopped for groceries every single day.
The ingredients weren’t particularly revolutionary. Carrots, onions, seasonal tomatoes, fresh bread. But the quality. The quality! The city was bursting with good, simple food. Every ingredient seemed to have a story from some farm that was just down the road. Pick the tomato in the morning, sell it by noon.
Upon her return to California, Waters couldn’t shake the impact that farm-to-table had on her: local, fresh ingredients just made everything better. She became an advocate for uncomplicated food. A BLT can taste like a processed heap of swamp lettuce, or it can be the best tomato sandwich you ever had.
Go through chef Alice Waters’ recipe books today and you might be struck with how simple the recipes are. One of her books is even called The Art of Simple Food.
She’d absorbed a key lesson early on:
You can be a great chef—you can know every technique in the world—but there’s only so much you can do with a slimy tomato.
A good sandwich starts in the garden.
How I Discovered a Writing Habit That Already Existed
I was this close.
The year was 2020. Undeterred by COVID-19 due to the fact that I was a writer who was already a master of social distancing, I spent much of my free time indoors writing a book. And I was doing pretty well. This novel, whatever it was (suspense? sci-fi? I wasn’t particularly strong with genres yet), earned me some glowing praise from anonymous Internet beta readers.
In contrast with my attempts at epic fantasy (learn to show and not tell, bro), people were now saying over-the-top nice things (this reads like something I’d pick up in a book store).
Excellent. If a random Internet stranger liked my writing, I was as good as gold, right?
Time to write my query.
And…
Writing the query revealed a problem:
I couldn’t make the book sound cogent in just two paragraphs.
I’d written an unreliable narrator and hadn’t really woven that into the fabric of the book’s mystery. Trying to sell this thing that people told me they’d pick up in a bookstore turned out to be a completely different challenge than writing the dang thing.
Never one to stagnate, I did my best with the query. Send it out to at least 50 agents. Got more encouraging feedback than the last time around, and even one close call, but unfortunately…
…yep, the query-writing process was right.
There were manuscript problems.
Enter my next project, The Billionaire Book™.
This was a domestic suspense novel about a billionaire’s sudden apparently recovery from Alzheimer’s (!) and the deadly squabble over the fortune he was no longer leaving behind.
This got my first offer of representation from an agent.
Why? It was a little more marketable. Maybe you noticed how I can still pitch The Billionaire Book™ in one sentence.
That’s intentional.
This time around, I flipped my process:
Write the query first
Does it feel interesting?
If so, vet the idea by showing it to others
If people want to read it, you’re ready to start writing
In other words, I wrote the book summary before I even wrote the book’s dang outline. Smell the tomato before you buy it. Is it a tomato you want to cook with?
The experience with the previous book—tons of praise for the writing, crickets from agents—made me vow to work much harder on the story’s central idea before I did anything else.
And it worked.
I thought I had discovered a hidden writing hack:
Write your back-of-book summary first, just to see if it “sounds” like an idea with legs.
Then, one day, I came across an interview with bestselling author Jeneva Rose in which she said she does the exact same thing.
Welp.
I’m Pete Campbell: I invented direct marketing. Even if someone else got there first, I arrived at it independently.
Still, I think it’s a good idea. If writing is a concentrated form of thinking, then my fellow outliners/plotters should start from the seedling and work your way up.
Try to write something that makes people say: “Oh my goodness, I have to read this.”
Really. Sit down and do it. It’s much harder than you think, and I’ve seen really talented writers absolutely pull their hair out over their queries.
If you’re like me, you’re going to get to Paragraph Three and realize that you can’t explain why the book’s mystery is so interesting. You’re going to stumble on a missing element like stakes or character likeability or a sluggish second act.
It’s much better to discover these problems in paragraph three than in paragraph one-thousand-and-fifty-three.
Nowadays, it feels backwards to me that people will sit down and write “Chapter One” without growing first growing their tomatoes from seedlings. Don’t you want to know you have the ingredients for the 1,000-step process required to write a novel? Do you really want to leave your chances to phantom inspirations which may or may never strike you?
If you ask me, you’re better off vetting the idea first.
Be sure you’ve got a good tomato before you bother with the BLT.
🖋️Writing Tip: Save What You Cut
“Kill your darlings,” writes Stephen King.
The idea is that when you sit down to write a novel, you’re going to write a lot of stuff that belongs in the story…and a lot of stuff that doesn’t.
And, unfortunately, a lot of the stuff that doesn’t is going to be stuff that you like.
Cutting a scene I loved (but didn’t belong) was a major struggle for me, too, until I developed a neat psychological trick: if I saved my cut material, I could always rationalize that I could bring it back in.
No more “select all + cut.” No more deleting scenes wholecloth. Instead, I simply moved them to an “Unused” file, and pretended that I’d bring them back eventually.
The funny thing? I rarely bring these “darlings” back into the manuscript.
But because I know I’m not banishing that scene I loved into the garbage bin of massacred “darlings,” but merely keeping it on ice, cutting is much easier. And that’s my tip: cutting something should feel as easy as possible. Because if you can cut it without losing something load-bearing, you probably should. And speaking of which…
📖Book Update: Draft #2 Delivered!
Plenty was cut in Draft #2 of my next novel, DON’T LOOK AWAY, slated for publication next summer. But I was okay with that. Some cuts are necessary, and you have to find the little tricks that make you okay with those necessary cuts. One of my favorite edits was eliminating an entire side character and giving more of his responsibilities to the protagonist: suddenly she is more active, she is smarter, she is more involved in the developments of the novel.
You’ll get more updates as this book continues to evolve and gets closer to publication day.
Writing from Across the Internet
Here are a few things I checked out recently:
Nathan Baugh highlights the “but / therefore” approach to storytelling advocated by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Andy Newman’s highly personal article on his diagnosis of autism shows what you can do with LinkedIn’s longer-form platforms.
Alice Lemee’s “I Want to Be an Instagram Bali Girl” is a great example of how you can write a personal essay and still make it sound as rich and insightful as a novel.
The PureASOIAF community on Reddit sent George R.R. Martin some words of support, which is nice considering HOW MEAN EVERYONE IS ABOUT THE WINDS OF WINTER
Why aren’t you reading more fiction, fellas? (New York Times)
Until next time,
DK