The Day the Books Arrived

I want to tell you what it felt like to hold a copy of Eat This Poem in my hands. I wanted to tell you sooner, right when the box of books arrived at my door, but I needed to think. Process. Absorb. Gather my thoughts.

So, let’s start at the beginning.

The books were scheduled to arrive at my publisher’s warehouse in Colorado on February 17, so you can imagine my excitement to receive an email a week early saying the books were here (!!) and UPS would be picking them up in a few hours (!!).

It was Friday, and I was expecting them Monday, so all weekend I tried to distract myself. I bought champagne and chilled it in the refrigerator. I brought my dog to work on Monday to help the time pass more quickly. But when I got home from work, both my dog and my son in tow, the books were not there.

Of course, I was disappointed.

I made soup for dinner, and every time I opened the fridge to pull out stock or half an onion I’d saved, I saw the champagne bottle, reminding me of the occasion I was waiting for to pop the cork.

The next day, I realized something.

As excruciating as it was to wait (also, for two nights in a row, I woke up at 3 am and tossed and turned before falling back to sleep, plus, I had a perpetual knot in my stomach), I found tremendous peace in one small and obvious detail.

The book exists.

Even though I don’t have my box filled with the proof of my years of work, the book exists. I told myself this over and over as I walked after lunch. The book exists. It will be published. It is published. You made this. It exists.

It’s worth noting I’m not the most patient person.

I’ve softened over the years, but usually when I want something or I’m ready for something, contentment is not always my first instinct.

Waiting the extra 24 hours was excruciating and anxiety producing, but it forced me into learning yet another lesson about creativity, which is, everything in its timing.

So even though I couldn’t hold it (yet), I knew it was out there in the world.

And on Tuesday, the book did come. A small package rested against my front door when I came home, again, with Henry in my arms. I still had to wait for Andrew to get home from work before opening it. I couldn’t have this experience without him, so again, I busied myself, first playing with Henry for a few minutes in his room, then scooping a pile of food into Emma’s bowl, then starting to pull leaves off the chard I was planning to saute with garlic and oil before swirling with spaghetti.

I pulled out the champagne glasses.

As soon as the keys turned in the door I screamed “Ok, let’s go let’s go!!” and started tearing into the package. Andrew came over and picked up Henry, holding his phone with one hand to try and take a few pictures.

Slowly, I pulled out two copies of Eat This Poem, then ran my finger over the raised cover. I pulled open the flap, looked at the photo and bio I had submitted months earlier. I flipped the pages, smelled them, and saw the words I’d nearly memorized after years of writing recipe after recipe, story after story.

One day I was sitting in Starbucks, writing notes next to a poem, and now I was holding the book I hoped for so long I would get to write. I want you to curl up on the couch with it, underline it, dog-ear it, use it.

Strangely, the publication of a book is both an end and a beginning.

The end of one writing journey, but the beginning of a relationship between my words and everyone who might read them.

So as much as this book is mine, soon it will be yours, too.

A Big Writing Mistake—Or, the Most Overused Word in My Manuscript

A few days after Thanksgiving, I received a note from my editor that the book was going to print very soon. Next week! That meant in early December, Eat This Poem was off to the press. I wrote back, exactly: “Eeek! (And also, pretty exciting!)”

Getting to this point was roughly a seven month process that included several rounds of revisions—from my editor, me, and a team of copyeditors trained to find inconsistencies like “Can we say yellow onion instead of brown onion?” or “Pepper is listed in the ingredients, but not in the directions.” There was also a line that said “bring out the earthy beer flavor,” which should have read “earthy beet flavor.” Thank heavens for them.

Way before this happened, though, I noticed a big writing mistake.

As I sipped my tea and read each chapter, words began rising up from the page. Familiar words. I decided to run a search in my Word doc, and discovered one particular word was used throughout the manuscript exactly 20 times!

Nudge

Once I realized the oversight, I went back and found a new way to say whatever it was I was trying to say. I left a few nudges, of course. I do love the word, after all, but decided three or four mentions was far better than several dozen.

That’s what happens when you read and re-read—you notice things you never noticed before.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, this kind of writing mistake is a relatively easy one to fix. A quick use of the search feature let me know exactly how many times the word appeared, and from there, it was just a matter of working through all the mentions and deciding which to keep and which to change.

Want more lessons from my book-writing journey? Catch up on past posts!

When You Must Kill Your Darlings

Kill your darlings.

Remove what you are most in love with. Remove any words the story no longer needs. It can be the most heart-wrenching thing to do, which is why editing is best left to the daylight hours, after you’ve spent some significant time away from the page.

The phrase “kill your darlings” is most widely attributed to William Faulkner (although there’s evidence to the contrary). Regardless, it’s sage writing advice. While working on the manuscript for Eat This Poem, I killed many, many darlings. It’s all part of the process, but I never thought I’d cut the very first thing I ever wrote.

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Winter 2013.

Having already eaten lunch at my desk, I tucked my laptop under my arm and drove a few miles down the road to Starbucks. Surrounded by teenagers and business meetings, I took out my photocopied page of “The Orange,” a poem by Campbell McGrath, and scribbled notes in the margins.

Then I wrote one sentence that was followed by more sentences, that became an entire manuscript.

“This poem is not about an orange, not really. It’s about every moment you’ve ever been blindsided by happiness.”

I didn’t know where the poem would fit just then. I didn’t know it would open the second chapter, or which stories I would tell for the recipe pairings. I only knew what the poem made me feel in that moment.

This was in 2013, early enough to know the road ahead would be long. It was the first poem of 40 others I would include in my book proposal, that was eventually cut down to 25 poems. There would be many more lunch breaks spent underlining words, taking notes, and drafting, but this is one of the first moments I can remember of really knowing this would happen. A book would be born. I just felt it. And it wasn’t a light caffeine rush from my tea, either. I simply knew it to be true.

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The story behind the story.

As is the custom, we begin with a first draft that must be refined. The original commentary I had for this poem was much longer, and told the story of a Habitat for Humanity trip I took to Poland. It was the summer after studying abroad in London, and I was itching to travel. I convinced a friend to join me, and we found ourselves on a flight filled with Polish grandmothers making their way back to the mother country from Chicago. The plane erupted with applause when we landed.

Every morning we ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, then filed into a bus that drove us to the construction site across town, in a quiet suburban village. One morning, I looked across the square, and at the edge of the park was a red, London bus. It had no business being there, as far as I could tell. What was a double decker bus from the streets of London doing in downtown Wrocław. I never did find out.

But what was even more curious was the number: 38. It was the same bus I took to school every day when I was living in Clerkenwell and studying at King’s College. The very same bus number! No one else seemed to notice the bus, and if they did, I’m certain it meant nothing to them.

I never forgot this. It was some sort of strange sign, something I alone was meant to witness.

An illustration from inside the pages of Eat This Poem, drawn by Cat Grishaver.

So when I read “The Orange,” where the speaker discovers an object where it is not meant to be—in this case, a heavy piece of citrus fallen far from its tree—I immediately thought of my London bus in Poland.

I wrote the story out and kept it there for a very long time. Years later, I realized it needed to be removed. The story simply didn’t fit, and wasn’t intimately tied into the recipes.

But it’s a special story, so I’m telling you. It’s a story behind a story. A layer. A fragment. Writing is full of these. When I’m editing, there’s a string, followed by a pause. I’ll come back here, I reason. I hope when I return, I’ll have figured out a way to keep what my gut knows should go.

Kill your darlings.

Writing is like this. A push and pull. An instinctual process, a grief in letting go of the words we may have fought hard to put down in the first place. A carving out.

Keep what you remove. Don’t discard it. You may find a new home for the words, the story, as I have here.

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3 tips for editing your writing, when you're ready

1  Let it rest

When you pull a beautiful, seared steak off the grill, the first thing you should do is let it rest. Covered loosely with foil, juices redistribute and ensure they don’t run all over your cutting board. You also slice the steak against the grain. It’s like editing. First, give your words some time. Close your computer, put the pages in a drawer. When you’re ready to begin, you’ll be in a new state of mind, brimming with clarity. Have your red pen ready, and go against the grain.

2 You are not your words

Yes, you wrote them. Yes, the words are part of you. But once they’re on the page, detach yourself. Look for flaws. Look for repeated words… Look closely, as you would with someone else’s work. Try as best you can to leave emotion behind and focus on what you’re really looking at, seeing if it flows, where you have gaps, and what needs to be reworked.

Kill your darlings, if you must.

3 Read aloud

After you’ve done a round or two of editing, read your work aloud. You’ll catch things you didn’t notice before, and see how natural the words sound when strung together with the inflections in your voice.

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Writing and editing are two distinct aspects of the creative process, and you’ll do well to separate them. Write first, edit later.

What are some of your favorite editing tips?