The Em Dash #26

Apr 2

“Did you add salt to these?” Jack (my husband) was standing in the kitchen with the ziploc bag of chocolate chip cookies I made last weekend in one hand and a half-eaten cookie in the other.

I came out of the bedroom with a suspicious look on my face, because I couldn’t tell if he thought the salt was a good or bad choice.

“…Yes,” I said, with narrowed eyes.

“Genius!” he said, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

The chocolate chip cookies Jack was so impressed with were a result of the baking escapades Bestie and I got into this past weekend. (I drove to Pittsburgh and back solo and yes, I am exhausted.)

When Mariah showed me the recipe, she mentioned the cookies had come out really sweet the last time she made them. So I made the executive decision to add a little salt to the batter.

Now, I don’t know how much you know about baking, Friend, but I’m pretty sure little adjustments to the recipe like this can either be amazing or amazingly detrimental. It’s basically chemistry, right? There’s a literal science to baking, and I effectively know nothing of it.

But, my tweak paid off, and the cookies were the perfect amount of sweet with the occasional dash of saltiness to balance it out. Yum.

Writing your book can be just like this: You think (or know) that if you write Chapter 3 exactly as you have it outlined, it’s going to make the book too dense, and that’s not the vibe you’re going for.

So, you decide to chop up Chapter 3 into two smaller chapters, and you make sure to break up the dense research with a little bit of narrative that makes the research more interesting.

It wasn’t the original recipe—your outline is basically a recipe for your book, right?—but it’s what the book needed to accomplish your goal: getting your point across in a way that doesn’t overwhelm or confuse the reader.

It’s totally fine to do this! When I coach my clients, we work on the table of contents and a full, detailed outline of everything in their books. But sometimes after they start drafting, we realize things need to change.

And that doesn’t mean we did anything wrong before; it’s just the process.

Especially with discovery writers, there can be a bit of fear around outlining. Some people think if they outline everything, then there’s no room for creativity. But that’s so not true!

Your book is a living breathing thing all the way until it’s sent to the printer. Then, it’s no longer your living, breathing thing, it’s the readers’.

So be encouraged! Flexibility is allowed. Change is fun. Creativity and strategy can work together really well.

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