Writing Cookbook

Writing Cookbook ©

By

Michael Casey

They say that too many cooks spoil the broth, and today has been a bit like that. My wife has been working from home and my daughter has a study day before a big exam in Maths and Biology. So I cannot walk around the house naked scratching my large imagination, and if you believe that then you have a bigger imagination than me, or is it hands?

So what is my writing cookbook and do I wash and strain all my words, before peeling them and gently adding virgin olive oil to them? How many pages from a dictionary do I dice and slice before tossing them on top of the melange? Do I roger my thesaurus to get just the right effect. Or do I never used a dictionary, because I want to feel the page, even if I get paper cuts. And is all this just one filthy metaphor, whatever a metaphor is, I assumed it was dating a weather forecaster.

I only use a dictionary as a prop to pose with for a pretentious writer photo, yes those photos. If a word is not in my vocabulary by now then I’m not going to waste my time looking for this or that nuance, which sounds like a cruel curse, calling a boy/man a nuance, or even a nuance of a man. So cruel.

You see after all my years of writing, ok, attempts at being an Artist, I am still a Young Man, I cannot strain, or maybe I don’t want to hurt myself by straining too much. So my words flow, and if I’ve learnt a new word from the DT or the Guardian then I might slip it in, just to pretend to own a dictionary. I casually add a word, like Andrew Pierce does but with name dropping. So I drop a word, or a nice metaphor and smile at my page a la Andrew Pierce. He’ll never read this so don’t go telling him,or he’ll name drop me next. Though his friend with the Mirror might just crack up laughing. The only Michael Casey they know is that Monk who writes all those books about cask ales, about reaching a higher spiritual level.

So you can see I have no cookbook, what I write as all a load of c*&*, nicely presented on the page, so you can hold a pint sorry a litre of cask ale, he is a Mirror man after all, and flick though my words. I don’t follow the Shakespeare recipe, eye of newt and tongue of journalist, and judge’s indigestion. I just go with Flo, no not Flo the cleaner but flow, the flow. I am dancing with words and sometimes if I’m wanton with sentences big and small, that go all the place till I’m breathless and panting. Which can just be my pain getting to me before I can slap on the Movelat, or it can be excitement brought on by a good workout on the page with some words.

Words have power, they can slip, and slide or they can scream and shout and let every single emotion out. And if your words are good then every single metaphor you may have assumed was mentioned previously in this piece become a new reality. Whatever that may or may not mean, its all in your head. I just lead you up the garden path, you may stumble and plant seeds in the flowerbed, or you may open the front door and fall to the floor on the carpet. And no I’m not going to mention that kind of carpet, what kind of writer do you think I am, I have more class. Besides it’s only just been vacuum cleaned.

So I started with a cooking metaphor and it’s morphed into a carpet cleaning salesman metaphor. Thankfully I did not mention shake and vac, that would have been beyond the pale. If you want milk, its in the pale in the milk cooler, if you want to flavour it, then I have some strawberries, to make a smoothie.

I hope you understand now how I work my fingers to the bone, to try and make you all laugh, if I had to flip through pages in a dictionary to get the exact word for this or that then the other words wouldn’t come to the page. I like to be spontaneous, like a Hippy Wordsmith, hey man lets use our vocabulary, lets get a sentence down, don’t frown man, you have to enjoy life, you could die in the night. So come here and use an adverb on me, that’s it and use a few adjectives too. Adverb and Adjectives and some good verbs, hey man I’m feeling Groovy now, why is the room spinning. Or is it that cask ales that Michael Casey the monk makes. Or is Michael Casey the fat silver haired writer is shades from Birmingham the one in England using his similes on us. He’ll go blind you know, too much use of the verbose, he’ll explode like a balloon with letters of the alphabet strewn everywhere.

Which brings us back to cooking, a recipe for a piece of writing is made up from individual letters of the alphabet. An a or a b or a c, put together to form words which are then mixed and occasionally tossed like pancakes to form something delicious an almost as good as chocolate. And if your writing is good it can end in sex, or you may just have to use a dictionary, which could be a metaphor.