Learning to Bake Bread Keeps Teaching Me about Writing
By: Gwenna Laithland
Tags: Writers On Writing, This Happened To Me, Writing, Baking, Food

A few weeks ago, I began teaching myself how to bake bread. A matter of preserving a family legacy and challenging myself in new ways, I had to start from scratch. While I spent hours covered in flour and finding dough stuck to weird things, the experience was shaping my understanding of my real job, writing.

The baking continued, and I found a new comfort in the smell of blooming yeast and baking bread. I opted not to make a set of loaves one day, and there was almost a family mutiny.

The work and the routine have become sources of comfort for me. I look forward to the release that comes with kneading dough, feeling it transform under my power. I’ve been able to replicate results with a workhorse French Loaf recipe. Promising experiments have begun on a brown molasses bread. I’m screwing up the courage to culture a starter for luscious sourdough.

As I’ve continued to improve, I’ve noticed more similarities between bread-baking and word-making.

Instincts develop quickly

Factors such as the relative humidity, how long you mess with the dough, even the ‘mood’ of the yeast can affect your final product. It is a precarious balance of exacting measurements and “until its enough.” This being the case, no one can tell you exactly how much flour or kneading time you’ll need on any given day. A regular line in bread recipe instructions is:

Add 5 to 6 cups flour until the dough begins to pull away from the bowl or it is just sticky to the touch. Knead until the dough is smooth and stretchy.

To a baker just learning the craft, that’s pretty annoying. Is it 5 or 6 cups? Is this considered smooth and stretchy? Make me guess, and there’s one more way for this to go wrong.

Luckily it doesn’t take long to begin to trust yourself. Within a few loaves, my senses developed, little by little. My fingers are learning when the gluten is developed. My nose can smell a well-bloomed yeast across the house.

Your writers’ instincts develop just as quickly. The more you write, the easier it becomes to construct a proper sentence the first time. We’re told to “Write without care, edit without mercy.” However, as you fall into your groove and develop those wordsmith instincts, those edits are less and less brutal. Still necessary, but you aren’t reworking whole passages every time. Just some of the time.

The only way to get those instincts to blossom is to practice. I make a batch of bread every other day. Even on days I don’t want to. I write every day. Especially on days I don’t want to.

Find the rhythm that works for you and commit to consistency. Its the only way you’ll improve. You can read all the books and articles; you can take the classes and talk to the experts. But until you sit down and do, those instincts won’t grow, and you won’t develop a feel for how to write well.

Appearances can be deceiving

While watching her mother wrestle a double batch of dough, my twelve-year-old took a break from staring at her phone. She watched as I pushed and pulled a lump of flour, yeast & water across the table, pausing every so often to unstick my fingers from the too-sticky ball.

“Mom,” she called out, “I don’t think that’s right. It’s…um…oozing.”

She was right. My dough should have been firm and stretchy by that point in the process. Instead, it was a gooey mess that couldn’t hold its shape. It was oozing across the table while we watched.

I’d never doubled a recipe before, and, clearly, I’d missed something important. It might have been too much water or not enough flour. Whatever it was, my dough was not working. It looked as if it was unrecoverable.

I might have given up, dumped the ooze in the trash, and started fresh.

Instead, I dumped another cup of flour on the mass and jammed my hands right back in the mess. I was determined to work this thing to my will. It would submit, I would win, and goddammit we would have bread that night.

In writing terms, I kept editing. Writers have a natural attraction to fresh starts. We get a new idea, it gets us incredibly excited, and we dive in. But once we get to the point wherein we need to push our sleeves up and work the concept; we tire, bore, burn out, or get distracted.

The story doesn’t look the way it did when we first had the idea. It is too sticky, too clunky, too dry, too weak, or too…something. We’ve missed a vital element of the story, but we can’t put our finger on what. Ultimately we give up and toss a once-great idea into the bones piles.

But in both bread and writing, appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes you can’t give up on a project that looks hopeless. Sometimes you have to keep working.

By the end, it might not look anything like what you had in mind, but it is a solid story, nonetheless.

If you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a dough before it bakes nor a story before it is finished. Keep working it at it.

Author’s note: Yes, occasionally, you have to kill your sweetheart. There are some projects worth walking away from; or at least shelving. Knowing which ones are worth the work and which ones need to fade away is a matter of instinct. (See above.)

At some point, you have to give it away

It didn’t take long for my bread habit to expand beyond what my family could consume. I have a family of five, and we are all huge fans of carbs, but my desire to master the craft exceeded even that demand.

I wanted to make more bread than my family could eat. I came to a crossroads. If I wanted to keep baking, I had to give the loaves away. Otherwise, I was wasting it.

I knew my bread was not professional by a long shot. It was homebaked and, in most cases, flawed. There were experiments in technique, ratios, washes, and bake times at every turn.

Why would my friends and neighbors want mine when they could run down to the bakery and grab their own?

Here’s the thing, though — even goofy looking bread, fresh out of the oven, is a delight. People love fresh-baked anything, but especially bread. My neighbors don’t care that no two loaves look the same right now. They are okay with my learning process. Free tasty food is still free tasty food.

In writing, there comes a point that you have to put your work out there for others to consume.

Technically putting words on paper and then hiding it away counts as writing. You are a writer if you’ve strung words together and documented that order somehow.

But that’s the best you’ll ever get until you can gather the courage to share your work.

Yes, your readers can go to the library and get a bright, shiny new story with professional edits and fancy covers. That doesn’t mean they don’t have room for your work.

Readers make writers better. We cannot exist without readers. Yes, they will critique. They will find every flaw, cut you with them, and rub salt in every wound they open. It will hurt. But you will heal. And you’ll be better next time.

Sharing, hopefully, it makes you want and need to be better.

Apostrophes and commas are the devil to me. But as I publish more and let readers see my work, I’m getting better. First, I don’t want to see their notes that I’m comma-impaired. Second, I owe them more than that. I want to improve for their sake, not just my own.