Betty Crocker & Writing for your Reader
Here's a little recipe I like to share with my creative writing students:
Forget homemade cake. Betty Crocker cake mix produces the best cake in the world. No need for a flour tornado and mounds of butter: just add an egg, splash of oil and water, give it a stir, and after half an hour in the oven, you've got Nirvana in a dish.
Interestingly enough, there's no need for anyone to have to add more than water, but the Betty Crocker company found that early sales were bombing. Why? People wanted to contribute to the cake. Yeah, they wanted a short cut, but not too much of a short cut. They wanted the 'I made this' factor. Hence, the egg. Once people could start adding an egg or two to the mix, sales rocketed. And so, nearly a century since the company started, we still have Betty Crocker on our shelves at Tesco.
There's an important analogy for writers here: let the reader add their egg. Let them get involved, contribute, work stuff out, make their own connections. Don't tell them too much. Give them a way to put their hands around the dough of the plot, give it a good knead, feel its texture. Let them make shapes with it before rolling it out. Don't roll it flat for them. Let the reader pummel the dough with their own life experience, emotions, interpretations. Allow the work to breathe, expand, cool, set.
As a writer, it's important to think of the reader. Not necessarily in the commercial sense. That comes later. But good writing involves the reader; it gives the reader a way in, a chance to contribute, a feeling that they belong.
You might say that a good piece of writing is a soft, spongey cake. Not a burnt offering.
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How very true. The tomes that are 700+ pages long and go into the infinite detail about how a "something" works just leaves me frustrated and I tend to skip over those parts.
Less is more in my view.
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Discover the beauty of pakistan. Learn the culture, heritage, traditions and landmarks of different parts of Pakistan especially sindh, Punjab, Baluchistan and N.W.F.P and far northern areas.
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I think writers' output frequently contributes to the cultural content of a society, and that society may value its writerly corpus – or literature – as an art much like the visual arts
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Yes, they wanted a short cut, but not too much of a connection. They wanted "I made this" factor. Thus, the egg. When people could start adding the mix of egg or two, sales rocketed. And so, almost a century after the company began, we still have a Betty Crocker on our shelves at Tesco.
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