I’ve been thinking about hobbies lately—specifically about developing some. Recently I’ve been on a quest, as regular readers may know, to find a bit better work-life balance, and I’ve been realizing that not only do I not have hobbies outside of work, but I don’t really even know what they would be if I did.

But when a recent minor illness had me laid out on the couch for a while and I spent the time binging an entire season of The Great British Baking Show, I realized how much I love baking and cooking, and have since I was a kid when it was one of my assigned chores. When I’m happily puttering in the kitchen I can lose myself in that same state of absorption and flow that I love about my work.

In fact, I realized as I started thinking about how to nurture this hobby a bit more, cooking has a lot in common with my work. In both cases I’m trying to understand ingredients and how they best fit together to create the most effective and delicious final product.

But here’s the reason I think I’ve never really developed cooking and baking as significant hobbies, despite my enjoyment of these crafts: I’m mediocre at them. I can follow a recipe as well as anyone else, and enjoy using it as a starting point to improvise from (except with baking! baking is far less forgiving of aberration). But my creations are simple and uninspired.

The problem is that I don’t understand the theories of cooking techniques and flavors well enough to be able to really riff the way I want to, to be truly creative in the kitchen.

Over the years I have learned a handful of recipes that have become “signature dishes,” so to speak, and I’ve garnered enough knowledge and skill about cooking to know how to reliably if unimaginatively roast vegetables or sauté them, how to create a decent piece of meat in the oven or sous vide, throw together a soup or stew, produce a handful of enjoyable sweet treats by adhering to favorite recipes.

But it’s not inventive and original cooking. It’s not the kind of truly creative, unfettered improvisation I want to be capable of doing because I understand how food works: how flavors harmonize, how various cooking methods affect flavor and texture, and how to master technique.

I need to go back to basics and lay a solid foundation of knowledge so that I can do what I really want to do: go into the kitchen with a handful of ingredients and an idea and make something magical and unique—the way one of my best friends’ husband did in authoring a recipe for the most sophisticated and delicious chocolate-chip cookie I’ve ever had, which I make and share incessantly, to widespread agreement of my assessment. (With his permission I am sharing the recipe here. It’s a standout!)

For me cooking isn’t just about finishing up with something tasty. It’s also—in fact mostly—about the joy of creating that thing. Of sharing something I’ve created that hopefully delights others.

Not unlike what many of us want to do with our stories.

Learning your craft

I have been cooking for decades, but I’m going back to the basics. On my counter is a stack of books we own but I’ve never really studied properly: books by Alton Brown and Kenji López-Alt and Shirley Corriher and Samin Nosrat. These aren’t cookbooks in the traditional sense of presenting recipe after recipe; they teach cooking principles.

• From Brown I’m learning about how different types of heat affect cooking—I’ve heard the terms “convection” and “radiation” and “conduction” all my cooking life, of course, and I thought I understood what they meant. But I didn’t, really—at least not deeply enough to know how to yield a flavorful crust on the outside of a piece of meat while not cooking the inside to death, for instance, or how the size and shape of the meat affects how you cook it.
• López-Alt takes it even further, with scientific trial-and-error testing of different cooking methods and times and how they affect the food—not just meat and eggs but all sorts of vegetables too, my favorite food group.
• Nosrat explains the four main components of successful cooking: salt, fat, acid, and heat. Master those, she says, and you can walk into any kitchen, with any ingredients, and put together something delicious.
• Corriher’s book takes a similar approach to the art of baking—with its own particular nuances and challenges—so I can perhaps one day live my dream of baking like a GBBS contestant: intuitively and knowledgeably and adaptively.

Studying foundational principles of your craft is nerdy and pedantic as hell—but it’s also fun. And it lets you understand at a core level how your craft works, so you can master it.

This approach is rather time-consuming. It’s challenging to grasp all the many complicated principles and facets involved in the complex art of food creation. Studying these foundational principles is nerdy and pedantic as hell—but it’s also fun to (literally) figure out how the sausage is made. And it’s making me finally feel as if I understand how food and cooking works, so I can become better at the craft I want to master.

Again, not unlike our writing and stories.

Cooking up your own creations

My husband likes to tease me for the story I’ve told him of buying my first computer, when I hunted in the box for a manual so I could understand how it worked. To his amusement I almost always read user manuals before using a new product, because that’s how I lay a foundation to understand how to make it do what I want it to do. It’s important for me to understand why and how things work, not just follow instructions so that they do.

I used to think this methodic approach to learning anything was just a quirk of my personality. But as I’ve been educating myself about cooking and baking I’ve realized that it’s the basis of solid, foundational learning for anyone.

It’s not enough to follow instructions to get results, any more than memorizing test answers in school is a way to learn a subject. I made As that way throughout most of my education, but ask me the first practical question now about stoichiometry or standard deviation or quadratic equations and I’m going to stare blankly at you. It’s not that I don’t remember. It’s that I never truly learned it, despite acing test after test because I can memorize and follow a formula.

But I can answer most questions about my field, storytelling and writing, knowledgeably and thoroughly—or if I don’t know the answer I know how to find or develop it—because I’ve spent my entire career learning how story works. I get it on a fairly thorough, foundational, nuts-and-bolts level.

I’m not saying we need to develop expert-level knowledge in anything we want to attempt, but if we want to get good at something—and certainly if we want to compete on a professional level—then we damn skippy had better develop expert-level understanding of our craft, and not just become well-trained adherents of other people’s systems or techniques.

If we want to get good at something—and certainly if we want to compete on a professional level—then we damn skippy had better develop expert-level understanding of our craft, and not just become well-trained adherents of other people’s systems or techniques.

As anyone who has followed my books or classes knows, I exhort writers not to lean too hard on writing systems like that: Save the Cat, the Hero’s Journey, Six-stage Plot Structure, etc. It’s not that these systems aren’t well designed or don’t work—often they do, which is why they’ve become so popular. I like them, and think they can be valuable tools.

But these are recipes. Like recipes, these systems often evolve from many years of experience. Their creators have usually extensively studied story craft and theory, and they’ve used that deep, rich understanding to devise these distilled shortcuts for others to yield results.

Like recipes, they may allow you to produce a good version of what someone else has created, but to me that’s not what any creative art is. It’s truly understanding for yourself the theories and concepts these systems are based on that’s going to make you a real “cook,” not just an automaton faithfully following someone else’s formula.

It’s not sexy to study craft this way, from the ground up. It’s not quick. But to me it’s the difference between genuine creativity versus learning to generate competent product. It’s why I constantly exhort authors to deeply analyze other people’s stories, where you have objectivity you cannot attain with your own writing, and created an entire course on how to do it effectively: so you can figure out exactly how successful story works. Reading craft books is great, but nothing will teach you the core foundations of storytelling and writing like this kind of deep-dive analysis.

Read more: "Analyzing What Makes Story Work"

There’s no requirement that an author approach their craft this way—plenty of writers and screenwriters have made very successful careers out of knowing how to follow or adapt a formula effectively, and if that’s your goal, there’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you love this craft, if—like me with my new cooking resolution—you want to understand it comprehensively so you aren’t just able to follow instructions but to create your own unique, original, delicious stories, I encourage you to revisit the basics and lay a solid foundation of understanding of your craft and make your writing and your stories your own.

Over to you, authors. Are there pursuits you excel at (or want to) outside of writing, and if so how did you go about mastering the skill? Do you take the same approach to your writing? How, specifically? What are your thoughts about the most effective ways to learn our complex craft?