Write Like You Cook

© Ugur Akinci

Do you cook everyday? I use the verb “cooking” in the sense of “eating.” Putting cereal in a bowl and pouring milk over it is "cooking" too in a way. I’m sure you cook everyday.

Do you get paid every time you cook? I’m certain 99.99% of us do not get paid for cooking but we still cook everyday, don’t we? Our life and existence depends on cooking nonstop, whether we get paid for it or not.

Do we get recognized, applauded and interviewed for cooking everyday? Again, I’m sure 99.99% of us cook in absolute anonymity. The news of all the cooking we ever do gets discarded straight into that infinite “Thrash Bin of History for Immediately Forgotten Acts.”

But we still cook because we have to, we need to, or otherwise we wouldn't survive.

Even though 99.99% of us are not professional chefs, 100% of us are amateur and life-time cooks. We prepare food without fail, every day, no matter if we are happy or depressed, no matter if we are employed or in between jobs. We cook when we are healthy. We cook (or someone do it for us) when we are sick. It’s a constant, like the speed of light and force of gravity.

That, my friends, is how I write, everyday. I write on my laptop. I write a sentence or two, a paragraph, a joke, or sometimes a whole short story that I later on don’t like and wonder how on earth I could create such a lousy piece.  I write how I feel on a particular day, talking to myself, and especially if I’m feeling blue.

I write on pieces of yellow stick-em papers and restaurant napkins. I write in small spiraled notebooks that fit into my back pocket. I write in school notebooks with ruling, without ruling, or notebooks made up of graph paper with small squares.

I write to survive, to breathe, to exist on this earth even though 99.99% of the time I’m not paid for it and no one knows that I’m writing, except perhaps my wife who from time to time finds one of my many notebooks lying out on the dinner table or some other inappropriate place, filled with my crazy urgent jumping handwriting and in different pen colors and line widths, and she asks: “What’s this? Do you need it?” Yes my love, yes and thousands times yesss! Not only I need it, I can’t survive without it! Please don't throw it away, yet.

And once in a great while, out of all that mass of totally private chopping and flipping and sauteing, as if a mountain of black coal crushing under its own weight and creating a tiny one carat diamond at the very bottom, after hundreds of pages, something really exquisite sparkles and floats in front of me, defying gravity!

Ahhh… what a magical moment that is because even though half of my brain knows that I did create it, the other half says: “No way! Who created this thing?” The results of daily writing is no less miraculous than daily cooking. It nourishes us, keeps us sane and keeps us growing, and once in a while it shoots up the magic that makes all this life worth living for.

Do it 5 minutes everyday. Write for 5 minutes. Like grabbing a handful of peanuts and wolfing it down with a glass of orange juice. If you can snack for 5 minutes, you can also write for 5 minutes.

If you don’t have access to paper, write in your palm like we used to do when we were children. Write an email. Send yourself a text message. Write inside the cover page of a printed book and tear that page to save it if you have to. Once I wrote a poem in the margins of a phone-book  But do it everyday, three times a day, just like you eat three times between sun up and sun down.

Write like you cook. Your life depends on them both.