Challenges, the art of baking and the House of Shattered Wings

Just in time for the Great British Bake Off, we are delighted to welcome Aliette de Bodard back to the Gollancz Blog for a brilliant bog post on baking and writing. Ever wonder what baking bread has to do with writing? Find out below. 

If you follow me at all on twitter or on social media, it will probably take you all of two minutes to realise I’m obsessed with cooking. It’s the rather important hobby I am, and I’ll quite happily spend time debating the merits of such and such a dish, or such and such a cookbook/approach.

And the thing is, with cooking? I tend to see it as a series of challenges. There are people who grew up learning to cook: I’m emphatically not one of them. I fled from the kitchen as a child; in my twenties I was a terrible cook with no idea of what made food taste good. The thought of actually learning to use those pots and pans and spices properly terrified me.

So I tackle my cooking like a series of projects: mixing a dipping sauce, learning knife skills seasoning a cast iron pan, … And I actually focus on the things I’m most scared of; because I’m the kind of person who gets annoyed by avoidance and by ignorance. It’s one thing, say, not to do pastry because I don’t have the time; but I feel I ought to at least have an idea of what is involved. If only so I can say it’s definitely not for me! I don’t want to spend my lifetime tiptoeing around something without having stared it full in the face. I’ll read everything I can on the thing I want to deal with, and then try my hand at it, repeatedly, until I get it right or semi-right. Recently, this involved baking bread (about which more later).

As it turns out, this is startlingly similar to how I approach writing. I don’t actually need to delineate writing projects, because they naturally fall on lines: a particular short story, a particular novel. But in many respects, I tackle writing by focusing on the things I’m scared of: I want to stretch my wings with most new projects, and have the feeling that I’m doing something ambitious and that will contribute to my growth as a writer. It’s not always that conscious, but I’ll pick a new structure or a new way of doing things, and run with it (and bang my head against the wall a lot, because that’s how these things work!).

When I was writing The House of Shattered Wings, it was my first novel in four years, and it was clearly… different. My previous novels had been first-person epic fantasy: this was third person, with a complex plot involving intertwined subplots and revelations (I’d written one of these before but had shelved it due to… well, it not being very good). The setting was also vastly more complex, merging elements of science fiction (dystopia, alternate history), fantasy (the Paris I described in the novel was based on the Belle Epoque, and the backstabbing intrigues between the different magical factions were classic elements of epic fantasy), and mystery (not a surprise. I do love me a good mystery). I had done all of these before, but never in this particular configuration, and definitely not with this level of complexity.

I was feeling so uncertain about how the whole thing was coming off that I emailed my agent twice with sample chapters and asked if he was really sure that was what he wanted (to which his answer was “I don’t know what you’re doing exactly, but for the love of God don’t stop”, because my agent is awesome). And even after I was done with the draft I was left really uncertain that I’d managed to pull of something halfway decent: I was convinced that, even if I did sell the thing, it would require extensive revisions that I wouldn’t be able to pull off. I visualised the novel (which I’d had a great deal of trouble putting together) as a fragile house of cards, and was scared that the least tinkering I did with it would bring it all tumbling down.

As it turns out, at around the time we sold the novel to Gollancz/Roc, I was also doing a cooking project that I’d been putting off for years. Namely, baking.

I have a holy terror of baking. There are few ingredients in a bread dough, and the few times I tried, I ended up with a sticky mess that was clinging to everything–hands, fingers, skin, and even hair when I brushed my face with said hands! But I needed something to take my mind off the novel sales (which I couldn’t announce for a while) and revisions (which were looming and were, as I said, starting to worry me). I picked up two books on baking (Paul Hollywood’s How to Bake and Daniel Stevens’s Bread: River Cottage Handbook), and read them cover to cover. I made sponges and kneaded dough for weeks–until we got from an unholy mess on the counter to a decent set of English muffins. The heady feeling I got when splitting said muffins and spreading a thin layer of butter on the warm surface, and then biting into it and feeling the warmth spreading into my mouth… well, there’s nothing really quite like it.

And you know what? If I could steel myself to finally tackle bread, I could revise that novel. I could buff and sharpen the story until it shone and cut and pierced the reader’s heart in the right places. I could take one card away from the whole castle of cards and have the whole thing hold together long enough to put it back. Better yet, I could subtly change the way the entire thing was built and still have it hold together.

So this is how baking saved my novel. And how cooking and writing are really the same thing, and how it was all a matter of getting myself together and finding enough confidence. I don’t know how it comes across in the final novel, of course; but I know that I’m as happy with it as I was happy with my muffins. Which, considering, is not bad!

PS: the another funny thing about baking? During revisions, I needed scenes where two characters were bonding together–I set them in the kitchens and had one of them give the other bread-making lessons. Talk about re-using experiences!

The House of Shattered Wings is out now in trade paperback, eBook and audio download. You can read the epic first chapter here.

Aliette de Bodard is one of the Writers of the Future, has won two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a BSFA Award. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards, making her one of our most-lauded contemporary fiction writers. A writer by night, by day she is a qualified engineer, specialising in Applied Mathematics. You can learn more at www.aliettedebodard.com or by following @aliettedb on Twitter.