Feeding the starter

On bread baking and book writing

I love bread. And I’m not like “oh, I love it in all forms.” No. I love it in its expensive, fancy, crusty, artisanal form. There is a bakery in my town that used to sell a loaf called the Whole Nine which was enormous and amazing, perfectly sour and wheaty. It was so big they’d sell it in quarter loaves and half loaves, but there are a lot of bread lovers in my house and sometimes I’d buy a whole loaf. I think it cost $16 for the whole thing. Which is honestly a decent price to pay for an enormous loaf of amazing bread, BUT ALSO, we’d go through it really quickly. I was spending a lot of money on bread.

So in January of 2020 (in what was perhaps also a witch move of seeing the future) I started a sourdough starter on my kitchen counter. I was going to make my own Whole Nine! 

But the thing with a sourdough starter is that it’s not ready right away. All of the how-to articles I read said it might take two or three weeks before it would be ready. 

Two or three weeks! But I wanted bread. Come on. Bread.

And yes, within a few weeks, I was making loaves of bread, and they were pretty good. 

You know I’m going to make this a metaphor about writing, right? 

It took about nine months until I was making bread that was reliably decent. Nine months isn’t that long, really. When I started regularly writing – really finally committing to getting stories down – it took at least eighteen months before I was writing things that were reliably decent. Regular baking, regular sourdough feeding, regular writing, regularly writing a beginning-middle-end. If you’re lucky, that will lead to things that are reliably decent.

In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport talks about using whether or not someone will pay you as a measure of whether you’re doing a good job or not. It’s perhaps an overly simple metric (for one thing, I don’t have any desire to sell my bread), but it does say something: are you doing work that’s good enough to get paid for it? Are you doing great work, or are you doing reliably decent work? Or are you doing relatively mediocre work, but completing your projects, and that counts for something? (I lived in that last space for a long time, in both bread baking and writing, and it’s a place that’s both frustrating and giddy. Your work isn’t very good, but you’re making it, and finishing things, and that’s fun.)