Cooking as Release

When I'm in the throes of work, that is, the writing is going well, or as well as it can ever go, I like to finish each work day by cooking. There's a tremendous release in doing something tactile. It's not as if my brain has shut down because I've walked away from the computer, au contraire! No, the work never ends, but gets subsumed by the physical actions that cooking requires. There is something quite meditative about working with one's hands. The repetitive act of chopping, dicing, slicing helps unwind the brain, almost as if my mind's been given free reign to venture, to roam. It was while cooking that the idea, the genesis of my book, came to me. Yes, the process of getting from that one moment to the actual writing is as arduous as climbing Mr. Everest, without the Sherpas for help. But one can't sit or be prompted to sit for hours, days, months, years on end without that flash of something, whether an idea, a story, a word, an image, a line.

The creative release, purely physical compared to the writing, that cooking enables is also a wonderful contrast to doing something so cerebral. Of course, the most obvious benefits are the smells, the tastes of a finished product. Perhaps it is this, the physical product that can be created in an hours time, compared to the feeling of never finishing in my real work, that I find so satisfying. Every writer I know suffers from the same feeling that the work can always be improved. Toni Morrison once said that after "The Bluest Eye" came out, she found herself with a copy of her book in a library, rereading, but really reediting as she read her words, standing in an aisle of the library.

When I was writing the first draft of my novel, I would finish each work day of writing--usually 5, 6 hours on a really good day--by going into the kitchen and cooking. There were days when I'd make two entrees because I found the release so enervating. The frenzied cooking is to squelch the free fall that one feels when working on a book. Each chapter, its blank pages taunting you, can be incredibly suffocating, and at times, debilitating. The threat of failure, ever present, is worse when staring you in the face, the cursor blinking.

I am back on a final round of revisions on my novel, this time under deadline, of sorts. The work is going slowly, but I can feel it building. At the end of each day, hours now reduced to 4, I go into the kitchen, crank up the Ipod, and start cooking. Yesterday's menu comprised of a spinach pie and an apple cake.

Before the child, I used to finish work by reading for a few hours before heading into the kitchen. This part of my day has been replaced by swim lessons, now school interviews, and Tae Kwon Do classes. Someday, hopefully not in the distant future, I will reclaim those hours when I could sit and read. That fantasy is right up there with being marooned on an island with Daniel Day Lewis--before he became crazy, but during the period when he shot 'My Beautiful Laundrette'.

Today's work will bring what it will bring as I try and sort out some big issues, and not so big issues with the book. At day's end, the kitchen may emanate smells reminiscent of a Roman Trattoria as I go in and whip up a large bowl of spaghetti carbonara for my family.