Eating Your Words: In Defense of Writing Without a Recipe

It’s a Tuesday, and I stand before the open doorway of my fridge, cooking in my mind. A package of chicken breasts is defrosting on a shelf, and I smash its contents thin with a heavy pan, dredge in a bath of mustard, water, and egg, then press seasoned breadcrumbs onto both sides. Fry, and we could be having schnitzel. Or lose the mustard, add garlic, Pecorino Romano, and parsley to the breadcrumbs, and make my mother-in-law’s Italian cutlets. Abandon the frying, and just grill it, lightly seasoned with salt and Emeril Lagasse’s Essence (yes, really), to serve over a crisp green salad. Or turn on the oven, spread it thick with mayonnaise, a slice of red onion, and bake, like my grandmother used to do. But then I see we have tortillas, and the wheels in my head turn in another direction.

This is how I cook—not by recipe, but by intuition. By feeling. By experimentation. I pretend at being a Chopped contestant on the daily. This isn’t to say that I’m going into it with only a Santoku knife and a prayer. It’s actually the opposite. Because I’ve spent many years—my whole life, in fact—obsessed with cooking.

In my childhood kitchen, where my Ukrainian parents and grandparents made everything (pickled cabbage, farmer’s cheese, cured salmon, you name it) from scratch, seasonal ingredients were king. Like many immigrant households, we revived and reinvented constantly, and food was never wasted. In my teens, I read cookbooks cover to cover, and tried my hand at renditions of the dishes I saw prepared on the Food Network. At one point, while working for a local TV station, I even filmed and edited an entire season of cooking shows hosted by a CIA grad (I still make a version of her rack of lamb). As I got older, I’d savor every bite of the meals I ate in restaurants, conscious of every flavor in my mouth.

All of which is to say, food has always been an anchor in my life, and I’ve long internalized the combinations of ingredients and techniques that taste good to me. I’ve learned the rules.

And by knowing the basics, I can trust myself to skirt them. To experiment in the kitchen the same way I do in other creative areas of my life—by letting instinct lead me toward something new.

But here’s the funny thing. When I tell people that I cook this way, they’re usually impressed. So you just, like, figure it out? Without a recipe? Amazing! But when I say that I write the same way, largely without an outline, using a big, high concept idea as my starting point and figuring the rest out as I go, the reaction falls somewhere between stunned horror and deep concern.

The term “pantser” has never sat exactly right with me; it feels goofy. Like we don’t know what we’re doing. Besides which, it’s misleading. This sort of writing is far more controlled than just flying by the seat of our pants. It’s more deliberate. Like being a chef, as opposed to, say, a line cook. We’re not just here to execute, making the same dish over and over with incredible consistency and precision to meet demand; we’re using a different skill set, leveraging our experience and creativity to design something new. We source ingredients, picking through the ideas that we’ve harvested to find the one that’s perfectly ripe. We find just the right seasonings, enhancing our concept with voice and pacing and diction. We determine technique—the structure of our plot, and point-of-view, and style.

This is the kind of creative sandbox where I’m most comfortable. Not lawless, exactly, but loose. Freeform. With an exploration-first approach. So much of the pleasure I get from storytelling happens through discovery and experimentation, the feeling that I’m saying yes to every idea, no matter how unlikely or bizarre, and following the parts of the narrative that pull my attention (something that I, personally, can never seem to do when an outline is staring me down, dictating a specific path to follow). Writing like this puts me into a “flow state,” that coveted thing coders and runners and musicians all talk about, where it feels like something extraordinary is moving through you, and you’re just the conduit. It lets me play—and I hope that playfulness is evident on the page.

This isn’t to say that this method is easy. Or even foolproof. It doesn’t always work, and it requires a high tolerance for failure, and deletion, and starting over. On the page, as in the kitchen, I make mistakes. I burn things. Overwork a scene until the metaphor falls apart (and not in that good way, like slow-roasted pork). I oversalt (too much angst),or make things saccharine (too much mush). Sometimes a story, like a meal, is salvageable with a few adjustments. But other times, I’ve gone too far, and all I can do is scrap it.

What I’ve learned is that embracing the failures is a kind of freedom. I’m free to observe the beauty of imperfection, and challenged to think differently about problem-solving. I’m free to walk away when something is truly beyond saving (and worth abandoning!). And I’m free to ascribe value to the process of discovery and play and having fun, instead of just an end result. It makes me a more effective storyteller.

So back in my kitchen, I do play. I mince garlic. Not rough chop or dice, but mince, because mincing releases the oils and helps the flavor permeate a sauce, the cloves crossed and recrossed by the blade of a knife. I never mince words, though—I leave these whole and deliberate, their mouthfeel just right on the sentence level, so the prose doesn’t snag. Some words just go together, pair like acid and fat, or winter and coat. But others blend into something new, to surprising effect—sweetbitter, like “blossom” and “bruise”, or caffeinated, like “heart” and “bomb,” and I choose them as carefully as I do my flavor base.

Every cuisine has its own version of this. There’s mire poix—onion, carrot, celery, small diced. The Holy Trinity—swap the carrots for bell peppers. Sofrito—onions, peppers, cilantro, garlic. The list goes on, and genres, I think, are just like this; they have staple ingredients, plot points or tropes that make your story lean toward one thing or another. And people will tell you genre matters—that you have to know if you’re writing horror or comedy—but just like food, when you learn the rules you can start to bend them—and that’s where the magic happens, in fusion, an alchemical reaction that bursts in the mouth. Happy accidents. On the plate—curry and chocolate, or chicken and cinnamon. On my laptop? Ghosts and food.

I heat oil in a pan, until it’s so hot a drop of water pirouettes across its stage. I add the garlic, and a squeeze from a tube of tomato paste. I stir in paprika, chili powder, and cinnamon. Heat changes the flavors, brings them to life, unlocks their secrets. I write with heat, too. The anxious heat of a thriller, searing, the tension thick as slabs of meat. The tender heat of a romance, bubbling over the length of a story. The warmth of coming-of-age. The rolling boil of revenge.

I add some water, toss in my chicken, and let it simmer away. I’ve been making these enchiladas for years; the recipe a little different every time, depending on what I have on hand. When I give out the recipe (I get asked a lot), I approximate it, simplify for replication, and that editing down feels like going through passes of a manuscript, until it’s finally in PDF form, close to final. But when I make it myself, I continue to revise. To play. To adjust.

Every time you tell a story, it comes out just a little differently. But if you put your stamp on it, you can always find the storyteller in it. Like the cinnamon, in this dish. Unexpectedly savory. A familiar ingredient used in a new way. A signature, like an author’s inimitable voice.

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Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle is available from Simon & Schuster.