You got to share the cookies

Lauren Koshere
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read

I do a lot of thinking about baking — not just about the recipes and ingredients, but the meaning of baking and baked goods. Until now I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about how baking and dating can, and should (and, in some cases, should not), go together.

But today I’m thinking about the relationship between cookies and writing.

Making cookies and doing writing are similar processes. At the most basic level, both require you to intentionally set aside some time to make a thing. Both require you to exercise discipline. To reach an enjoyable and digestible final product, you need to get your proportions right and follow some basic rules (though it’s also important to break the rules — experimentally and strategically — to challenge yourself and others). Baking and writing both take a certain amount of time to complete. Underbaked cookies = dough (which, delicious, but if you’re after cookies, dough ain’t cookies). Underpolished writing = a perfectly respectable, but likely not-ready-to-be-shared-at-a-potluck, rough draft.

Over the weekend I reread a chapter from one of the books that has made a huge difference in many aspects of my life in the last two years, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The chapter I focused on is about breaking through all the dings and scars an artist acquires from past rejection, lingering disappointment, and continued insecurities. The ideas are framed in terms of the creative process, but I’m guessing we can all — artist or not — relate to rejection, disappointment, and insecurity.

I would highly recommend the book, for many reasons, but am also happy to report that the message of this fine chapter boils down to the one thing Nike’s been telling us for years: just do it.

The answer to so many emotional blockages — creative or otherwise — is to just do a thing.

Let’s repeat. Just do a thing.

As a writer, I’m always writing. Every day, since I was 13, I’ve been writing. This means that, for a long time, I’ve had some confidence that I’m fulfilling the maxim to just do a thing. I’m doing a thing every morning when I sit down at my notebook for a half-page or a full page, or three pages or seven. The regularity of my process keeps me comfortable. Every day that I write, I can say, check!, I did a thing today.

Which is good. You do need to write, ideally every day, to be a writer. But returning to The Artist’s Way this weekend made me realize I’ve been ignoring something just as important as doing a thing: sharing a thing.

As a baker, it’s no good for me to make cookies and not share them. In the first place, it feels kind of selfish and gluttonous to let a batch of cookies be just for me. Also, it isn’t too good for the health to eat a batch of cookies, even if one rationalizes by freezing most of them and eating only one or two a day for a few weeks (as this baker is wont to do).

Still, whenever I bake cookies, I know they should be shared. Invite friends over to eat them. Leave a tub on a friend’s doorstep. Set a bag of them on the free-for-all counter at work.

The baker in me has no trouble honoring this unstated rule of cookie-baking. The cookies gotta be shared. Same goes for garden abundance (especially this time of year): don’t be the jerk who doesn’t share some tomatoes or at least a couple of zucchinis.

So I’m still trying to understand why the writer in me has a hard time applying the same idea to my creative work. At a fundamental level, I believe creative gifts are supposed to be shared. I’m so grateful my favorite writers didn’t just let their work sit unseen in notebooks on a shelf for years on end!

While doing a thing is 95% of the battle, it’s not quite enough. Baking a batch of cookies, tending a garden all summer, filling another notebook with messy handwritten reflections — they are all at their best when they culminate in sharing.

So you’ll see me do more to share. Not all of my daily writing, of course — many notebook pages are just sandbox spaces for testing how to structure new forms, build different kinds of foundations, and see what patterns and textures seem pleasing. But some of that sandbox work might have value for someone else. I don’t want or expect a billion eyeballs on every last piece of writing I share, but maybe a handful of people might care to check it out, and maybe they’ll glean a little value from it.

Creative work is a gift in the doing, but I need to make it similarly a gift in the sharing. I’d be quite the asshole if every morning, just after my writing routine, I baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies only to let them pile up on my bookshelf for five years. Not to mention — with all those cookies around all the time, I’d probably start to suffer some serious health problems.

Not sharing the creative work = not fulfilling the full cycle that the creative process wants to take. Ideas are out there. They land on us, ask us to work with them. But not so they can just languish in my notebooks! I think that ideas sincerely want to be channeled, hopefully for some good, for whatever size group of people might experience some good as a result of the sharing.

So: you’ll start to see something new from me at least once a week. Sometimes my posts will be a little underbaked, sometimes too brown. Sometimes they’ll have spread too wide in the baking, sometimes they’ll be lumpy. But whatever their imperfections, I’ll do my best to make sure they always have some value in the flavor.

Whatever process you work at every day, there’s a good chance someone else could benefit from the results. As the wide advice goes, don’t hide your light under a bushel.

In other words: you got to share the cookies.

Lauren Koshere

Written by

Writer, baker, butter evangelist. Thoughts on love, life, nature, baking, Wisconsin.

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