Pinstrosity, Noveltrocious

Okay, writers, have you ever had this brilliant theme that you set to work in your prose, something that you want to tease out as you work?

Theme is tricky. You don’t want to be so obvious about it that utilizing the theme in the plot bores the reader, but you also don’t want the theme to be so slight that the reader wonders what the story was about (beyond the actions of the character, of course). So how, then, do you know how heavy or light to write and blend the theme?

We’ve just passed the biggest baking season of the year (thank you, Yavapai College, for having a gym), and like many people I found most of my recipes on Pinterest. (If you don’t know what Pinterest is, Google it. It will revolutionize the way you collect recipes. And craft ideas. And pretty pictures. And time-wasting.) I decided to make sugar cookies only because they were fashioned to look like owls -and I have a weakness for owls. Upon reading the recipe, I lost enthusiasm: if I followed the ingredients precisely, it would be the gritty kind of sugar cookies, the kind that scratch the roof of your mouth, the kind that you can leave uncovered on your kitchen counter for a week and a half and they have the same consistency as they did when they were removed from the oven. I like my cookies to be soft, so I continued looking for recipes and found one for the pillowy kind of sugar cookies that you buy in holiday colors at Wal-mart.

I am a recipe-follower. I always have been, because my improvisational skills lack any kind of adept cleverness whatsoever, but now I have a new fear of not following the recipe: Pinstrosity. While the word doesn’t exist in the dictionary (or, as of yet, in Urban Dictionary), it accounts for the growing population of amateur crafters and bakers who are inspired by Pinterest (Pinspired, as they call it), have some erroneous perception of simplicity, and then devastatingly fail. So now social networking is full of these epic fail pictures and forced axioms about how it’s better to have tried yada yada yada.

You’re clever enough to ascertain for yourself where I am going with this in regards to crafting theme: baking and writing are similar in that there’s time and creativity to craft. But I was thinking this especially last week as I finished East of Eden by John Steinbeck and considered his 600 page epic that unfolds the story of Cain and Abel through multiple generations. Any reader –much less writer- can appreciate the devotion and craft it took for Steinbeck to have created such a thematic piece, not distracting from the action to give forced parallelisms, and still molding a compelling story that deep and beautiful meaning can come from.

My owl cookies were a success. Recipe or not and disregarding the fear of a potential Pinstrosity, I crafted some really cute cookies. The first few looked like Muppets so I pressed the fork into the side emulating wings and they turned out even better. The truth is that it’s not “do it” or not, it’s not “follow-the-recipe” or “don’t-follow-the-recipe”, but a matter of do and revise. That’s how truly great novels are written: not in a recipe-following fear of Noveltrosity, but the ability to create something and then to look at it with fresh eyes and rewrite the parts that don’t work.  There’s no way that Steinbeck wrote a well-crafted, epic, 600 page novel in one sitting, and no one will. Worse, I promise you, dear reader, that you will write a Noveltrosity –but I also promise you that if you are devoted to your craft, you will revise and it will get better. 

Okay, so maybe baking and writing are different, because in the oven you only get one shot. Maybe writing is more like stew, something added to and simmered over a long period of time with little heat. But if there’s no protein –no theme- all you have is thin soup.  

Here's some more Pinstrosity pictures. Just because they're funny.