Flour, Sugar and Lots of Passion: Learn To Love the Writing Process
By Beth Morrow

Central Ohio Fiction Writers'Write from the Heart
July 2004Vol. XVI, Issue 7 RWA Chapter 48

One of the few pleasures my mother indulged in when I was young was to take a cake decorating class at the local vocational school. She was a quick and creative student, and it wasn’t long before her circle of friends and family began asking her to make cakes for a variety of occasions: birthdays, anniversaries, children’s parties, retirements. Her passion translated to bringing in extra money for her growing family thanks to her beautiful, edible compositions.

That short course introduced her to a passion that has lasted most of her life. Through hours of practice and patience, mounds of flour, and pounds of shortening, she perfected her craft to the point of being able to create exquisite roses and elaborate stars of sugar with a flick of her wrist. Never once, while my sister and I licked icing from our fingertips as we sat at the counter with her did she complain that her roses weren’t as elegant as the local bakery’s or that her cake batter was too thin for her to work with. She never stopped her mixer because of ‘baker’s block.’ She found joy in immersing herself in the process, not wasting her energy worrying about the product, and that pleasure made her final creations all the more delicious.

After many years, arthritis made cake decorating far more painful than pleasurable, and mom limited her cakes to family birthdays. Once, while looking through old scrapbooks, a photo of a birthday cake she’d made for my brother brought to mind how much joy her cakes had given those around her. I asked if she would teach me her craft so I could do the same.

She agreed but warned me that succeeding would take equal amounts of failure and patience—and that I needed to learn to enjoy making the cakes as much as decorating them. I failed to take her warning seriously and dove in to my new hobby. Though I followed her directions exactly, the quality of my cakes never quite matched hers. Where the texture of her cakes had been light and delicate, mine were uneven and tough. The pink in my roses was too bright, my icing leaves more squashed than elegant. I continued to work toward cake nirvana, but as life crept in with more demands on my time, I chose to leave cake decorating in favor of new pursuits. I wanted the quick, easy guarantee of fortune and fame—without the dirty wooden spoons and food color stained fingers.

Not long ago I had a conversation with someone enamored with the writing life. Like countless others, her notions of writing were lofty and misguided, believing that publication must certainly bring with it the trappings of wealth and infinite happiness. She believed good writing magically appears at will for writers. Her driving desire, I discovered, was to be a published children’s author. I inquired as to how many stories she’s written and for how long she’d been writing. None and never, she informed me, but she did assure me of how easy it would be once she found the right publisher. I laughed.

Goals in themselves are wonderful things. Common sense tells us that having a goal and taking legitimate, active steps toward fulfilling it will bring us much more success than simply wishing for it to appear. But to put the book or publication contract before the writing, or the cake before the recipe guarantees success in only one thing: failure. To write with the sole purpose of publication does not make you a writer. A hobbyist? Perhaps. A dreamer, certainly. Ask any writer—one you admire, published or not—and you’ll discover that while they may derive pleasure from holding that book with their name on the cover or framing that page with their byline at the bottom, what fuels their ambition has more to do with the path they’ve chosen in life than the final destination. If you don’t love words, don’t love slaving over sentences and immersing yourself in the craft every spare moment you have, chances are your passion for writing will wane—and that will come to pass in your writing. Write for the pleasure, the sheer happiness of seeing words dance across your screen or beneath your pen. Write to fill your soul with the song that a well-constructed paragraph plays. Do so and your writing will begin to sparkle with your inner passion. Don’t become so consumed with the product that you forget how much you love the process. The happiness you feel in writing— and in your life—will then be but icing on the cake.

(Beth Morrow has been writing since the fifth grade. Her paranormal placed 2nd in the 2004 OVRWA Enchanted Words contest and her first nationally-published non-fiction educational article is slated to come out in the next few months. She is a member of RWA, COFW and OVRWA and bakes everything but cakes from scratch.)

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Flour, Sugar and Lots of Passion: Learning to Love the Writing Process
Originally published in Central Ohio Fiction Writers' Write From the Heart, July 2004