Fiction Writer’s Toolshed | Practical Tools for Authors
Have you ever sat down to write, felt pressure almost immediately, and walked away without making anything?
Then comes the question: what’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m not feeling it today. Maybe I don’t have the discipline. Maybe I can’t do this.
Some of those things might need attention. But I think there’s another possibility worth checking: you’re asking yourself to cook while you’re still farming.
Coming up with ideas and turning them into writing ask different things of you. Confusing those tasks can create unnecessary friction, especially when you judge a seed by the standards of a finished meal.
This is my current best approach, based on what I’ve learned from finishing work so far. I call it fiction farming versus fiction cooking.
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Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
Fiction Farming vs. Fiction Cooking | ep 005
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Writing isn’t the same thing as coming up with ideas
Those two things often happen near each other. They can feel almost conjoined. But gathering possibilities and shaping a piece of writing aren’t the same task.
Here are three ways I can get myself into trouble:
- I try to cook while I’m still farming.
- I try to cook without meaningful ingredients or a direction.
- I judge a seed that could grow into something interesting by the standards of a finished meal.
Do that long enough, and writing can start to feel bad. I don’t mean the difficulty of stretching yourself or learning something hard. I mean the kind of pressure that sends you away from the page feeling like you’ve failed.
Once I began seeing this as a possible process mismatch, some of the shame around not finishing work fell away. I could ask what kind of work I was trying to do, instead of immediately making it a judgment about me.
Farming: gather and tend your ingredients
Idea gathering is farming. You’re cultivating possibilities and tending them as ingredients.
Farming can be slow. Seasonal. Sometimes almost invisible for a while.
You don’t force crops to grow. You don’t stand over the ground and yell at the seeds. And yet that’s sometimes what we’re doing when we stare at a blank page and will ourselves to have ingredients.
You prepare the soil. Scatter seeds. Protect the conditions. Check in, water, and give things what they need to grow.
That’s the comparison I want you to feel: gathering and tending material, rather than demanding that it become a finished piece on command.
Give yourself more than one seed
You can try to grow one seed. But if you want a more generous crop, putting everything into that one seed can be a difficult bet.
I know writers who have one novel idea, and that’s it. They think of the whole novel as one enormous seed, instead of all the different things they could cultivate within their creative work.
Sometimes a seed doesn’t grow into what you hoped it would, even when you’ve done everything you know to do. That can be okay. It can feel much more crippling when it’s the only seed you’ve put in the ground.
There can be room for more possibilities than the one thing you’re counting on to work.
Let the people at the party talk
In the episode, I describe gathering ideas as diffuse or associative thinking. I’m not a neuroscience expert; much of my understanding has come from Andrew Huberman videos.
The practical picture is loose connections: memories, emotions, things you’ve seen, things you’ve read, and patterns you’ve noticed all getting to talk at once. Like people at a party, unrelated things can bump into one another in interesting ways.
At this stage, an idea isn’t a draft. It isn’t a promise. It isn’t evidence of your talent.
It’s raw material. A seed.
Constantly demanding that it justify itself can make it harder to explore what it might become. “Is this smart enough? Is it original? Is this worth my time?” can arrive before you’ve given the thing much room to grow.
A tomato is a tomato
We don’t ask a tomato whether it’s original enough. We ask whether it’s ripe enough to use.
That’s a useful way to look at an ingredient. What you do with it, what you combine it with, and how you prepare it can become part of the work.
An idea doesn’t have to prove that it’s a good finished story the moment it appears. You can give it some room before asking it to meet the demands of a dish you haven’t made yet.
Cooking: choose, combine and shape the writing
Cooking is essential. Nothing gets served without it.
But it asks for different work. At some point, you choose ingredients. Decide what stays on the counter and what goes back in the pantry.
Then you combine things. Sequence them. Reduce them. Apply heat. As you do, the decisions begin to matter very quickly.
In writing, this is focused work: choosing language, maintaining tone, managing cause and effect, tracking continuity and noticing errors.
Who’s changed a character’s name and then had to check the whole document? Or noticed, “Oops, that person dropped the sword. I can’t have them grab it as though they were still holding it”?
Those are cooking problems. They call for attention and choices.
This work benefits from limits, structure and direction. You need some sense of what you’re building, rather than keeping every possibility open at once.
Judgment can be useful heat
When you’re cooking, “Is this working?” and “Does this belong?” are necessary questions.
Judgment isn’t bad. It’s situational.
In the farming comparison, harsh judgment can kill a crop before it has a chance. In cooking, a lack of judgment can ruin the meal. Heat helps when you apply it where it belongs.
You’re narrowing options and making choices. You’re turning selected possibilities into something another person can read, experience and feel.
You’re making one version, and it can change
When you draft, you aren’t exploring every possible version of every possible story. You’re choosing one version of one story.
A version that might change.
You’re saying, “I’m going to try to make this dish and see how it tastes.” Revision can mean cooking it another way, trying different spices or changing how the ingredients work together.
Making a choice doesn’t mean you have to keep it forever. It gives you a version you can work with.
And exploratory writing isn’t wrong. Ideas can develop while you write. The question is whether you’re asking for focused shaping while you still need to gather material -- or staying in possibilities whenever it’s time to choose.
Which kind of work fits right now?
If you’re farming, farm
Gather and tend the possibilities. Let raw material be raw material while you find out what it can become.
You don’t have to demand a finished meal from a seed. If you’re farming, then farm, baby.
If you’re cooking, cook
Use the ingredients you have to make the version you’re working on.
Don’t wander back into the field every five minutes wondering whether there’s a better tomato. Or decide you should probably grow a different vegetable because you aren’t feeling that tomato anymore.
Cook that tomato. Mix it with some other things. Have a finished dish.
Then you’ll know more about what ingredient you might want to gather next. Making something gives you information that endlessly looking for a better possibility can’t give you.
Projects and deadlines can require you to mix these tasks. I get it. This comparison is a way to notice what you’re doing and where the friction might be coming from, rather than another rule you have to follow perfectly.
Ask which mode you’re in before judging the writer
Here’s the practical shift that works for me.
Instead of starting with “Why can’t I write?”, ask: “Which mode am I in right now?”
Do you need to gather and tend ingredients? Or do you need to choose from what you have and shape the piece?
Give the work the kind of attention it needs. You may find that the problem becomes more specific -- and a little less personal.
This episode begins a three-part discussion about things that can quietly stop fiction writers from making work. In What Writers Lose on Accident, I look at how play can slip away when every move gets evaluated. 3 Nutrients of Finished Fiction explores what small finished pieces can give you along the way.
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.