Some of the best meals I’ve cooked at home have been when we’ve been down to bare-bones food in the fridge, pantry, and freezer. Seemingly disconnected ingredients like stale bread, some leftover stock, a tin of beans and a fried egg can come together to make something truly heartwarming and satisfying. It’s not that there is nothing around; it’s just that there’s no rule or pre-meditated idea that stitches it together. There is no recipe for this sort of cooking. No celebrity chef cookware you can buy to improve the taste or flavour. It’s a combination of serendipity and one of life’s most base urges – hunger.
I’ve also come to realise that not everyone has this ability out of the box, but it can be learned. The more you teach yourself to understand the relationship between salt, acid, fat, sugar, and heat, the more able you are to take a random bunch of ingredients and put them together to create something that most people will find pleasing; maybe not mind-blowing, but pleasing.
And so now I reflect on writing – inventing ideas, images, and storylines that capture our attention and lead an audience through an emotional beginning, middle and end. It’s very similar to the ‘cooking something from nothing’ process. Not everyone has the ability out-of-the-box but it too can be learned because they do have raw ingredients. A person they sat across from on the bus yesterday. The person who swims 50 laps of the pool at 9am every day. The chef who travels a 140km return trip every day so he can serve a restaurant of 8 people every night. The bird that pooed on their head that time. Or the time their friend was eating hot chips and a seagull swooped down and stole one.
The events, people, and places in which we live our lives are the raw ingredients. On the surface, they’re unrelated, but, like with salt, acid, fat, and heat in cooking; the more you understand the elements of good story telling – character, plot, story structure, conflict – the easier it becomes to take those every day events as inspiration and stitch them together to create something that wasn’t there before; something new.
So, if this is true for cooking and storytelling, it’s probably true for other forms of invention; we’re never really creating something from nothing. What we need to learn is to see that nothing is always something, and bringing them together well – whether it’s a good meal or a good yarn – just needs a little curiosity and a dash of knowledge. Bon Appetit.