Cooking from the menu

Right now, several menus are printed out, stapled, and gathered in a folder I can take with me wherever I decide to write. These are the “writing menus” I’ve been generating to push my repertoire beyond my usual sloppy writing. The usual writing process creates more work because the shape has to be invented each time, which explains why the material often spills over the edge of the plate.

So far I’ve created five different menus to see how the metaphor works in different situations.

• Medium articles: A variety of article types that match the reader’s appetite.
• A tightly defined series: I attempted to create range in a series of short posts I want to publish.
• Fiction: Structure didn’t work as a good recipe here, so I focused on process.
• Lifelog posts: This new menu attempts to be more useful to me, while also (hopefully) entertaining whoever reads my posts.
• The Pillow Book: I figured if this book lasted 1000 years, it could be a model for writing that lasts a millennium.

There’s a lot of variety in the recipes the instructions produce. I do see a few shapes that recur, but I feel like the process could ultimately generate a vast variety of formats.

Of course, the menus take time to learn and practice. That’s one reason I made a Lifelog menu since I write here every day. I need to test how the recipes work in the kitchen. At this moment I’m testing a recipe called “The Workbench” which is meant to replace my sprawling, overly-detailed posts about whatever I happen to be doing that day.

One thing I want to incorporate in this process is a way to break down the ingredients needed for each recipe. As it is, the menu sets the shape and I have to match my topic to the right format by feel. And maybe that feel will develop as I use it more, but I think it would help to start with the topic and follow that logically to a shape.

The process feels a bit stiff, but we’ll see if I develop what the chefs call “line speed”.