Making Chicken Stock

~ by Amanda Smith
“Writing is like making chicken stock,” Kelly remarked the other evening while we were discussing the revision process. “You throw away the vegetables. It almost seems like a waste, all that washing and peeling and cutting and cooking, to just throw them away. But they are completely tasteless. Their essence is in the stock.”

Which reminded me of the first time I made stock. All that washing and peeling and carcass cooking and house smelling like cold-ridding chicken soup. I picked up my pot, after it had simmered for hours all day, and poured the stock through the colander. Down the drain. I had forgotten the bowl to catch my lovely, flavorful stock!

And right there, between these two thoughts, we find the secret of revising.
We have to strain out those tasteless, soggy, vegetables. That might mean:
·         Cutting the first 50 pages of your novel
·         Dropping a character
·         Scratching a sub plot
·         Questioning internal structure
·         Deleting that phenomenal sentence that you labored over for days, but is not relevant to your story anymore
·         Nixing an idea after hours of research because what you found was not your story to write

You might feel that the whole thing was futile, a complete waste of your time. You might even be tempted to throw out the entire pot of stock. DON’T! The thing is, those vegetables seasoned the stock. Their essence is still subtly interwoven in your story and provides richness and flavor.

Ann Lamott describes this stock-making in writing like this: “…you don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that until you got to it…you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you find what you are writing” (Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor, 1995. 9. Print.)

As you revise, be brave enough to throw out the vegetables. And smart enough to keep the stock.