This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on January 27th, 2023. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.
My daughter is an aspiring chef and baker. Perhaps more accurately, she is an aspiring competitor on a reality cooking/baking show.
She's currently very into a trio of family-friendly cooking shows on Disney+: "Be Our Chef," in which five families go head-to-head in Disney-themed cooking challenges; "Disney's Magic Bake-Off," in which teams of kids and tweens make fancy Disney-themed cakes; and "Foodtastic," in which professional pastry chefs, ice/pumpkin carvers, and food artists must make elaborate (you guessed it) Disney-themed foodscapes.
These shows have sparked her interest in helping out in the kitchen. She and I have baked together for a couple years, but now she really wants to be involved. As a toddler, her primary jobs were mixing, making a mess, and snacking. Now, she wants to chop veggies and crack eggs. She wants to add seasoning. She wants to zest lemons. And with desserts, above all, she wants to DECORATE.
What she doesn't want to do—ever—is wait.
"I'm not very good at being patient," she tells me repeatedly, every single time we cook together.
Granted, she's five and a half, and five-and-a-half-year-olds are not typically known for their skill at waiting patiently. But I don't think her age is the only factor at play. When she watches those cooking and baking shows, she is seeing a highly edited, fast-paced version of working in a kitchen. She watches ingredients getting thrown into a mixer and then, moments later, sees the cake come out of the oven—and she never has to wait long for the decorations (oh, those wonderful decorations!) to go on.
Cooking in real life isn't like that. In real life, there is waiting involved. It's just part of the process. The pasta has to boil. The meat has to sear. The cupcakes have to cool. Sweet-pea, you have to be patient.
I don't think this is just a five-and-a-half-year-old problem.
In the email header, I asked, "What's the hardest thing to cultivate?" I propose that for many of us, it's patience.
I was thinking about patience earlier this week, as I was struggling to dive into drafting the write-for-hire project I'll be focused on for the next few months. My outline and character sketches were approved with only a few minor tweaks—yay!! The next step is to submit three chapters, just to make sure I'm on the right track, voice-wise, before I write the whole book.
I'm really excited about this project, and yet, on Monday, I was having a hard time getting words on the page. I didn't like the words I did manage to type. I felt blocked. I wanted to do something, anything else. I wished, desperately, that I could skip ahead to the part of the drafting process where it starts to flow, where it feels almost effortless. Or even to revisions, where you get to dig in and polish all the nonsense you wrote before until it properly shines.
I wanted the highly edited, fast-paced TV competition show version of writing a book. Instead, I was in the real world, and there was no way forward except one step—one word—at a time.
Sweet-pea, you have to be patient.
Cooking with my daughter is an exercise in patience. (For both of us...) Writing a book is an exercise in patience. I can't simply skip the hard parts or the boring parts and end up with a delicious finished product. The only way out is through.
Do you struggle with patience? Or is there another skill that you find it really hard to cultivate in your life/work?
~Kathryn
What I'm:
Reading: Short stories! I am a huge fan of Rainbow Rowell's books, and this week, I grabbed her short story collection, Scattered Showers, from the library. It did not disappoint! Featuring a mix of new characters and callbacks to her beloved novels, Scattered Showers is like a snapshot of what Rowell does best: build big feelings. While it was great to see more from characters I knew and loved, I think my favorite story in the collection was the last one, "In Waiting," a meta tale about two characters meeting in the author's imagination, some time before they're ready to emerge into stories of their own.
Baking: Chocolate whoopie-pies with pink marshmallow buttercream.
Loving: Kiddo lost her first tooth this past week! We're officially entering "big kid" land...