This picture grabbed me and I purchased it (www.fotolia.com) as soon as I saw it. How could I not? It’s adorable. But what, exactly, was I going to do with a picture about baking? What possible blog post could I draft that had to do with eggs and writing? The picture sat in my downloads file for a, uh, long time. Every time I scrolled by it, I wanted to write something special to really put the picture into both perspective and fun use. I might have come up with a possible solution.

Writers are bakers and books are cake.

There it is. Brilliant, huh? Wait. You don’t get the correlation? What’s missing? How can you not see that the flour is the…oh. Right. It is sort of abstract. Let me explain so we can go back to discussing my brilliant comparison.

Every book is a recipe of sorts. You have to weigh the dry ingredients, measure the wet ingredients, account for eggs, add spices and flavorings, decide between real and artificial stuff, mix things in the right order, preheat the oven, prepare the pan, get the whole thing to come out of said pan without falling apart, cool it and frost the project. I can see the confusion marring your lovely features, so allow me to break this down. Snuggle in, dear reader, snuggle in.

Consider the author a professional baker, or literary chef. Every time the author decides to cook up another story, she has to first decide what to bake. Genres are like recipe classifications: torte, cake, pie, tart, etc. Choosing the right recipe for the chef’s skill and the audience’s expectation is critical. First hand experience tells me to buy creme brulee instead of making it from absolute scratch. Such is the truth about me and historical romance: I love it but will buy it before I try to write it. It doesn’t mean my skill won’t ever be ready to tackle it, but for now? I’m not there.

Back to baking. So the recipe is selected. Now it’s a matter of going through cupboards and pulling out recipe ingredients to make sure everything is there. This is the author’s outline. She’s setting up to ensure she has everything on hand when she begins to get to the construction phase. It’s not unheard of to come across a great recipe and find you don’t have all the ingredients. That’s when you reach out and put your critique partners to work helping you stock up on the goods you’ll need. Good cp’s are worth their weight in the finest chocolate. Trust me. You can’t easily replace the people who enrich your life. (And really, why would you?)

Once the ingredients are lined up, it’s a matter of weighing and measuring. Too much flour and your cake’s dry. Too many eggs and it won’t set up right. Baking soda instead of baking powder? Catastrophe. Each ingredient is an element of the literary chef’s creation: flour is plot, eggs are characters, the design is world, spices and flavorings are the author showing instead of telling, nuts and chocolate chips and toffee bits are character quirks — the little surprises that make the recipe both interesting and memorable. But these things have to be laid down in the right order or you can end up with a real mess. what good is it to dump the flour in the pan but put everything else in the mixing bowl? Sure, you can dump the mixed stuff over the flour. Good luck with that. Order exists for a reason, though, and is the mark of the skill of the author/chef.

Ingredients assembled, it’s time to put it in the pan. The pan should have been selected and prepared based on the type of recipe. Your pan is your agent (or publisher if you work directly with them).  You need to know you can’t just dump a cheesecake into a torte pan and call it good, just the same as you can’t mass query every agent in the world and hope for amazing results. Okay. You can, but it won’t be pretty. Agents, like pans, specialize in different types of projects. Like readers, they have likes and dislikes, so you need to research their preferences and find the strongest candidates for your work. Then you query. (For ease, let’s just consider the query the recipe card you want to exchange with someone.)  :)

Next comes removing the project from the pan — the scary part. For me, this was sending in requested materials. Can the cake hold together as it’s taken out? Is the middle, ironically and in particular, well done or does it fall apart? Is there enough flavor? Is it bland? Does it leave you satisfied? All the questions we’re dying to know and, undoubtedly, to which we fervently hope to find external answers and affirmations.

Letting it cool is ridiculously difficult for me. This is the part where the author/chef has to wait. This is such a critical part of the process and, undeniably, one of the hardest. You wait so that when it’s time to frost and decorate the cake, everything sticks the way it’s supposed to. You may find you need to trim the cake, add another layer, plug in a filling for extra flavor, or change the frosting and design plan. Translate this to mean agents and editors can, and will, be making changes to your manuscript — the same manuscript you thought you’d edited to within an inch of its life. In my experience, it’s always more like within a quarter of a mile of its life. But don’t be discouraged! Great agents and editors can put you on the right track, help you uncover a story’s potential by strengthening the points that need help and coaxing you into deleting the parts that really, truly shouldn’t be there. This can be hard, but it’s all worth it.

It seems like a lot of steps for me to compare a cake to an author to a baker and a book to a cake. It probably is. But the point is I got to use the picture I wanted to use, write in analogies and, just maybe, make sense of the why behind many of the steps that might seem ridiculous at times.  For authors, rejoice in the finished product and be proud. For readers, would you like another slice?