The Ingredients List

Say you want to make a meal, so you pull out your cookbook. The first thing on the page is the list of ingredients. Nothing seems odd there, but one thought comes to mind: where do the ingredients come from?

Everything we use in cooking comes from somewhere. Meat comes from an animal, which needs to be born, raised, slaughtered, and butchered before you can cook its flesh. Corn needs to be planted, grown, harvested, and shucked before it can be eaten (and that's assuming you're eating it on the cob). So how come we list ingredients that have already had a certain preparation to them?

The simple answer is that listed ingredients are the ones you can find at the grocery store. It's a lot easier to find pork chops than it is to find live pigs. It's a lot easier to find apples than it is to find fruit-bearing apple trees.

But apples also present a strange example. The apple can be found in several stages of processing in the grocery store. We have whole apples, sliced apples, diced apples, and apple puree (apple sauce). So if I needed diced apples for a recipe, the ingredient list may call for whole apples (and the instructions tell you to dice them) or it could just say apple cubes (expecting you to buy them in that form) and either one would be correct.

Another funny thing about the ingredients list is that many do not list utensils. Oven and skillet are rarely on ingredient lists. Cookbooks just assume you have a fully-stocked kitchen.

So the question remains, what does this have to do with writing? Well, when writers are given advice, it usually reads like an ingredients list. Good writing needs: interesting and believable characters, concrete and vivid locations, intriguing story, etc. Good writers need: strong grasp of standard written English, large vocabulary, sense of rhythm, etc. The problem with these lists is that we don't have a writer's grocery store where we just pick up prepackaged vocabulary words that can be added to our internal lexicon.

But if you look at these ingredients and you learn about them, you can find out where they come from. You can cultivate your vocabulary, your understanding of characters, your ability to weave words melodiously.

If you need an ingredient and you have no store, you have to grow your own. If you need a utensil, you will need to fashion one for yourself. As a writer, it is a wonderful asset to have a naturally large vocabulary (or any other skill), but if you don't have it, you will still need it, and as long as you can find out where a skill comes from and do the work to grow it to what you need, you will be fine.