DIANNE JACOB IS A speaker, teacher, and author of the multi-award winning book Will Write for Food, just out in its fourth edition. In fact, Will Write for Food has won three international awards for excellence. Dianne has written and published for The Washington Post, Lucky Peach, and a bunch of other places. In 1996, she became a full-time writing coach, author, and freelance editor. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to find our writer’s voice.
Marion: Welcome, Dianne.
Dianne: Hey, Marion. Thanks so much for having me on.
Marion: Oh, I’m delighted to have you here. This is going to be fun, because I love when a book that seems to be highly focused on one thing is actually broad enough to be read widely. And this is one of those. Your subtitle commands us to pursue our passion and bring home the dough, writing recipes, cookbooks, blogs, and more. This book is for everyone who aspires to a writing life. For instance, you jump right in, in chapter two and write about how we find our writer’s voice.
Let’s kick this conversation off with voice. I think it’s the most frightening of topics for writers. In addressing that fear, you write that many writers are afraid to sound anything but generic. Tell me what you mean.
Dianne: Well, what happens is I guess the more you take yourself seriously, the flatter your voice gets. I’ve struggled with that in my own writing, that you’re not putting any personality in there because I think you’re afraid it sounds amateurish or something, but it’s actually the opposite. It’s what gives your writing some personality and makes you different from everybody else.
Marion: Yeah. That’s the important thing, isn’t it? And you really dig into that idea of different. I think because food is literally on the table, literally and figuratively on the table, that we can really kind of gather around this topic. I’ve read an awful lot of books on writing and somehow having this common text of food I think gives us a lot of permission.
You have this beautiful section where you literally write, “Thousands of food writers write about the same food all year long, especially when it comes to comfort food, recipes for spaghetti, roast chicken, pies, meatloaf, and mac and cheese abound. The web doesn’t need anymore. But if you feel compelled to add another one, what do you have to offer that makes yours different?” This is the critical question you write.
Even if you want to write a meatloaf recipe, voice will customize the recipe’s title, head note, and method, making it easier for readers to identify you. And you go on to say, “When you project a strong voice, readers will understand your motives and your way of viewing the world and they will relate to you. If you make it easy for them to identify your writing as consistently yours, they will feel as they know you.” Let’s dig into that.
Let us get people past their fear of being known. What do you think allowed you to feel the confidence as let’s say a young writer to be known to other people?
Dianne: Well, in the beginning, I wasn’t because I was a journalist and journalists are trained to not make it about themselves. It’s about the story, and it’s about the people you quote. You’re kind of supposed to be invisible. The first time I wrote a personal essay, which wasn’t until 1995. I started my journalism career in the ’70s. It was really a shock to me to… People contacted me after I wrote it. It was really a shock to put I in the story and be personal. I had to get used to it.
I felt kind of naked. I wasn’t comfortable with it at all. I mean, now it just seems like the whole world is turned upside down and now everything is about yourself and no story is too personal. We’ve kind of gone full circle with that, but it is something you have to get used to. But I think that people get confused about that too and they think, “Do I have to divulge my deepest, darkest secrets?” No. It’s really not about that. I mean, if you’re a huge Star Wars fan, maybe somehow that ends up in your work.
It’s just simple, or it’s based on which words you use. Like I was telling someone the other day I was reading a blog post about chocolate chip cookies, because, my God, there are over a million recipes online for chocolate chip cookies, right? No one needs to ever write another one. I went to some top bloggers to see how they addressed it. It was just a word choice for one blogger that I liked. She talked about how they chocolate chips were “exploding” out of the cookie.
Wow! I just got such a sensuous visual sense of a warm cookie and warm chocolate on my fingers and how it was smeared all over the place. I got very involved just from that one word. It’s not about secrets. It’s just about being yourself and using careful word choices even.
Marion: I love that, “exploding.” I totally get that, and I feel it as well. You quote the writer Judith Jones who says that voice describes how you actually feel. You can feel those chocolate chips. You can see them. They’re sort of akimbo. They’re kind of flying out of the dough. They’re everywhere, but they’re warm and they’re moist, and it’s just exactly the right word, “exploding.” It reveals the writer a bit, but, as you said, it’s not about revealing secrets.
It’s about revealing who you are. You use that word exploding as opposed to placed. The chocolate chips are placed in the cookie. It doesn’t make me want to eat the cookie. But “exploding?” Give me that cookie, right?
Dianne: Well, I mean, even if you said “melting,” I would love that too. I mean, it was the choice of the writer to include that little detail and that’s what really got me and hooked me in.
Marion: Absolutely. I love the fact that we can tell that tale on the head of one word, because that is it. I work as a memoir coach. I read writing all the time and people go to great lengths. They think to describe themselves. And I always say to them you can define yourself in one word. You can define yourself by the word you place on the page, and we go, “She’s interesting, or she’s mysterious, or she is deep, or she’s fun with exploding.” Right? That’s exactly it.
We have a mutual friend in David Leite of Leite’s Culinaria. I love David, and I worked with him on his memoir. You report in your book what he says is that voice is the sound, rhythm, and point of view that evokes the writer. And you include in the book a wonderful section in which writers describe their own voices. I want everyone, even all of you non-food writers, to purchase this book and read it because it’s a manifesto of sorts, of 11 wonderful food writers describing themselves.
My favorite of which is the great Calvin Trillin who describes his voice as “genial glutton.” I laugh right out loud because it’s spot on. I mean, I would go anywhere and eat anything with that man. How do you describe your own voice?
Dianne: Well, food writers have two voices, because one voice is the teacher voice. If you’re going to tell somebody how to make yellow curry, you have to be authoritative. The reader has to trust you. You have to be friendly and somehow get all those things going together. And then on top of that, there’s your own voice that you layer on that could be quirky or sarcastic. I like to be a little mischievous. Sometimes I can be sarcastic. I try to be funny. And it’s fun.
It’s fun to figure out how to be like that. It’s a practice. I once won a contest in San Francisco to become a restaurant reviewer, which is silly because I’d already been a restaurant reviewer somewhere else. I don’t even know why they had a contest. But anyway, when I was talking to the editor, I asked her what she wanted and she said, “I want something edgy.” I really didn’t know what that meant, but I decided that it meant bitchy.
What I did is I gathered up all the bitchy writing I could find and I printed it out and I put it in a folder. And then whenever it was time to write something, I would read the bitchy writing and get in the mood. That was all I needed.
Marion: That’s gorgeous. It’s like creating a bitchy runway. I got my bitchy runway on.
Dianne: Yeah, it was a fun assignment. A friend of mine told me how he and his wife would read my restaurant reviews to each other just because they were fun and had nothing to do with whether they were ever going to go.
Marion: What a compliment. That’s fabulous. I think I would have to retire after someone said that. I guess I would just keep writing. I just get the bitchy back out. That’s gorgeous. Read them to one another. That is a lovely, lovely compliment.
Dianne: It was really nice. Yeah.
Marion: Yeah. Well, you make a wonderful point. Your book, Will Write for Food, has everything any writer needs. It goes from literally soup to nuts, about every aspect of the writing life, including how to get yourself out there and about the book proposal. It’s really wonderful, and I’m not a bit surprised that Hachette brought it back out in a fourth edition. But amid this, I found there was just so many nuggets of such great help. For instance, you make a wonderful point about research and writing.
And that many people in the food writing community fall in love with the research and not surprisingly, like yum, there are a few other kinds of writing that has that kind of delicious, immediate payback. But you make the point that what’s really at work here is a fear of writing. Let’s talk about that. How do you diagnose that and get under it and get to the actual writing? What do you tell the people you coach and the writers you work with how to get over that fear of writing?
Dianne: It’s tough. I mean, I’ve had that own hesitation myself especially… When I was a journalist, we had deadlines. I mean, I fired people for not making their deadlines and driving everyone else crazy. I always thought writer’s block was ridiculous because I was paid to produce writing and that’s what I did from one week to the next. I don’t understand why anybody could have writer’s block. But it’s different when you’re at home in front of your computer and you can write or not write.
No one cares whether you do. It’s something you have to push yourself to do. I think what it ends up being is that… Agents used to say this to me, “I want someone who has something to say and they feel compelled to say it.” I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what that meant, because it seemed very vague to me. But just the impulse to get a story out, that’s what has to get onto the page. You have to allow it to happen. Make space for it to happen.
You also have to understand that maybe when it first comes out, it’s not going to be very good. One time I was teaching a class and this woman came up to me in the break and she said, “Oh, I really hate my writing.” And I said, “Why? How many drafts do you do?” And she said one. I just laughed because the first draft is not going to be very good. I f that’s only as far as you go, you’re not going to get anywhere.
You have to allow it. It’s hard for me because I’m an editor. I spend most of my career being an editor. And it’s really hard for me to allow it to be crummy at first. I keep erasing sentences and starting over, instead of just allowing a draft to form, then you can fix it and lengthen it and strengthen it.
Marion: It seems to be you’re getting at is that fear of it not being very good. I refer to the first draft as a vomit draft. Just keeping with that food metaphor. I find that to be incredibly helpful. I tell my students that when I set my sights on writing a piece for NPR’s All Things Considered all those years ago when they had those wonderful quirky essays, it was draft 47 that went to NPR. It took me two weeks to write that essay. It’s an essay that I got paid $150 for.
But it changed the entire arc of my career to be a commentator for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. I mean, I worked on it full-time for two weeks. I think there’s that fear of not getting it right the first time. It’s never right the first time. My first draft doesn’t in any way resemble what I turned into NPR ultimately. Not at all. Make a mess. Go on, break some eggs, to keep this in the food world.
I think that that’s the beginning of it, is that fear, right? That I’m going to make a mess. Yeah, you are, right?
Dianne: Exactly, and it’s okay. It’s okay. You have to give yourself permission. I can procrastinate forever. I really can and I never even knew that about myself all those years ago when I had jobs producing writing. I mean, I do with my students, I do make them set deadlines. Otherwise, they wouldn’t get anything done.
Marion: Oh, absolutely.
Dianne: And they’re accountable to me helps.
Marion: Yes. Accountability is enormous. I too was raised at a newspaper, and I too don’t believe in writer’s block, and I too know that you got to go with what you’ve got. Because when I worked in newspapers, there was no digital world. At three o’clock, that was it. What have you got? Here it goes. It’s going in the paper. You learn to be sort of fearless on some level.
But you also make this lovely point about how important it is for the writer to be able to discern what is compelling and necessary. I think I deal with that every day with memoir writers. Much like in food, there’s this love of the smorgasbord of their lives and a limited ability to discern what’s of essential interest in the tale. I think of the important scenes as being like beads on an abacus and they’ve got to add up to your argument, to what you’re trying to say.
When you are looking at your own work and you’ve got that vomit draft, by my term or whatever term you use, can you give us some tips on how you find what’s compelling and necessary in that mess that that first draft is? Those shiny objects, however you refer to them. How do you figure that out what the piece is actually trying to do or say or where it’s trying to go?
Dianne: It is a process that takes quite a long time. I’m working on a personal essay right now. The first time I thought it was about my family’s old recipes, which I have in a file that are all written by hand and yellowed. I started writing about that. And then somehow I pivoted to a cousin who I was very close to, who was a great cook and loved to write down family recipes and ended up dying of cancer at age 49. I started writing about him because that was really what was on my mind.
Food still got in there. And then I guess I’m on the third draft right now and I realized that there isn’t enough about my own thoughts in it and it’s too much about him. So now I’m working on that. It’s fun. It’s kind of like a puzzle to keep reshaping it and focusing it and deepening it. I really enjoy that part just to see how it’s changed over the draft.
Marion: Isn’t that fascinating when you think you’re writing about something and something else elbows its way in? I always think of that as the sort of roll away the stone moment. There’s something that needs to be written about and it shows up. I find that beginning writers are very uncomfortable with that. They say, “Something else keeps getting in the way.” And I say, “Let it in. Let it in. Let’s see what your cousin has to inform you about.” But it is a discomfort. The brain is so busy annotating.
It’s so busy drawing up things. Ultimately that piece, do you think your cousin’s going to win out here? Are you going to be able to meld the food and your cousin? Guide us through a little bit about your comfort level on letting this thing take its own lead?
Dianne: Well, it’s going to be about grief, because he was like my little brother and we were very close and he died. I have let a friend of mine who’s also a writer read it and she and her wife cried reading it. I thought that was good. Because usually food writing is just part of it and it’s not interesting if it’s just about the cake he made it. It’s just a way to get into the story.
Marion: Yeah, it is, isn’t it?
Dianne: I’m okay with it being about grief. I started crying again writing this and thinking about him, and I hadn’t cried for a couple of years. And I thought, well, okay. I was willing to go there and it’s turning out well.
Marion: I’m so glad. I have to say, I read your beautiful essay again today, The Meaning of Mangoes.
Dianne: Oh, thank you.
Marion: You’ve got such power in this piece, and I’ll put a link into the transcript of this interview so everyone can go read it. And then maybe they can really look at that text and let’s use it as a shared text. Maybe we can just take it apart a bit here and let the listeners go read it with some comments from you in their heads as they do. I think it’s a piece about identity. For me, it just was so powerful.
But what was it about for you when you first sat down to write it? I said identity, but what was your intention? What do you think it’s about?
Dianne: At first, I thought it was just about my father wanting to eat mangoes and ordering a case of mangoes and then them ripening in the basement and him inviting his brother and sister-in-law over. My mother’s spreading newspaper on the table and how we all just gorged on these mangoes and the juice of them drip down our arms. And then all the adults leaned back and had a cigarette. It was kind of like sex.
Marion: There’s the plot. Yep. There’s the action.
Dianne: I just thought, well, this would be a nice store because it’s about food, but really it was just… That was part of the story, but it was for them being refugees, leaving their country and coming to Canada and not being able to get the things that reminded them of home and not fitting in anywhere and not being able to recreate their old lives. That’s really what it was about. It wasn’t really about the mangoes.
Marion: No. Well, I’d say it’s no more about mangoes than Moby Dick is about fishing. I mean, it’s so not about the mangoes. You have a line in there… I’m going to misquote it, I bet, but it says, “They are the wrong kind of Chinese.” They find themselves to be the wrong kind of whatever they define themselves to be previously. It made me just sort of sit down in the good seats and hold my heart because that’s got to be so… It’s just going to throw off your compass completely.
And yet over this box of mangoes that we can smell and we can taste as you sit down as a family and consume them, we find there’s just a coordinating, a consuming a convergent definition of self. You just come together as you. It’s a beautiful piece of work.
Dianne: Thank you.
Marion: How many thank drafts…You’re welcome.
Dianne: Oh man.
Marion: Give us some permission to make a mess. How many drafts do you think you wrote before you were ready to push send on that piece?
Dianne: The first time I wrote it was years ago. I went to a conference and I happened to sit next to a woman who had started a website and needed material. I just happened to tell her a few stories just to amuse her. And the next day she said, “Can you please write down a story every day and put it on our website?” I was like, oh my God, no, I can’t. I could do it once a week, but not every day. So then I had to come up with a story every day. One week I thought, well, the story about mangoes might be nice.
I wrote that draft and it went on the website years ago and then I just kind of forgot about it. And then I dredged it up one day and thought, I need to deepen this. I need to add more context to it. I want to work on it again, so I did another draft. I was in a writing group at the time with two other professional writers and they said, “This seems more finished than some of your other work.” I’ll never forget that.
Marion: That’s like how my Midwestern in-laws speak, that sort of really passive seriously aggressive thing. Yeah.
Dianne: I guess because it had all been on my mind and I wanted to get it down. And because a previous draft existed, I didn’t have to spend that much time on it, maybe four or five drafts and that was it.
Marion: Oh, I’m so glad you did. I’m so glad you went back and deepened it. I don’t think that anything could be more important for people to hear than that things literally can ripen, that there can be more there. And yet you didn’t get mired in the nostalgia, which is a really fascinating thing that you do in the book. You give us this list in Will Write for Food of… You ask us to check in with this list to determine how many of these things we are.
Here’s the list: single minded, enthusiastic about research, skeptical, energetic, focused, fearless, inquisitive, persistent, knowledgeable about the subject, professional, good at telling stories, not stuck in nostalgic, ethical, and careful with language. I was fascinated by not stuck in nostalgia.
Dianne: Oh sure. As a memoir coach, you would be.
Marion: Right. It is a pothole that people break their legs in, right? It is that so deep and so treacherous. Talk to me about that one. That is unique and wonderful on that list. And I think you could help us all by talking about and elaborate just on what you mean by not stuck in nostalgia.
Dianne: Well, especially in food writing, people think that they’re the first person to say, “Oh, I grew up with my grandma cooking in the kitchen, and I was at her knee as a young kid. She taught me everything. We always gathered at her table.” I’ll never forget an editor once said to me, “If I get one more book proposal for how they grew up with their grandma’s cooking, I’m going to kill myself.”
Marion: Yeah. I bet they come in fast and furiously, don’t they? Yeah.
Dianne: I mean, that is really one of the stereotypes and people don’t realize it that… They’re so connected to that memory and it’s comforting for them and they don’t realize that so many other people have the same memory. Okay, It’s different food and, of course, their grandma’s different than yours, but just that feeling of comfort of being in the kitchen and the familiarity of it and cementing a certain time and place that doesn’t exist anymore.
Marion: It’s true. I suspect that all of us can agree that family can pretty much be defined in the kitchen. If you’re a kid who grew up with your grandma teaching her how to ice cupcakes and the icing was the precise shade of her eyes, chocolatey, and you can write that piece. But a lot of us grew up learning only to mix martinis at age 10. There’s a very different family there.
Dianne: That’s a good story.
Marion: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can’t tell you how many cocktail onions I had for dinner, if you know what I’m saying. And that’s it. And being told, “Oh, you had cheese and crackers and I saw you had some olives. You’re fine.” Whoa! We’ve got these stories, and we have to, as you say, put some enthusiasm into our research. I think you write beautifully about intensity and obsession for one’s topic.
But talk to us about getting in there with enthusiasm if, for instance, your family just taught you to make martinis as a kid, or you did just get neglected with. The food is a topic, but it’s about how you weren’t nourished. It’s hard to be enthusiastic and passionate when there’s pain. How do you do that, do you think, the big emotional response we have to bring, as you say? What if it’s about neglect?
Dianne: Food memoir particularly has been mired in nostalgia. One time I met with an agent and I had written about being beaten at the dinner table. And she said, “No one wants to read this. They want good things. They want to feel like they’re at the table with your family. No one wants any of that pain.” It has changed somewhat, but food memoir particularly is really stuck there.
But yes, of course, I would love to read a story about a kid whose parents wanted to drink when they came home and who thought that dinner could just be cheese and crackers and olives and how the kid felt and what neglect feels like and how it affected the kid growing up, how the parents were clueless. I want all that. I’m interested in that.
Marion: Yeah, me too. I tell people, you don’t have to reanimate it. You don’t have to like completely relive the experience, but you’ve got to get a little enthusiasm in there for that pain. You’ve got to see it for what it is. If your parents said, “Ah, you’re okay. You ate,” and you didn’t eat, where I guess my enthusiasm that I’m trying to inspire in the people listening is, as you said earlier, get us that word exploding.
Get us that word that allows us to feel that we’re holding that chocolate chip cookie or in the case that I’m referring to, not holding that chocolate chip cookie. Put some enthusiasm into the pain without necessarily reliving it. I think there’s a big difference between relieving it…
Dianne: I’ve never heard those two words going together, “enthusiasm” and “pain.”
Marion: Yeah. Yeah.
Dianne: I do know what you mean. I mean, you don’t want to drown yourself in it and traumatize yourself.
Marion: No, but you want to choose the right language, and I think that’s what you’re getting at, is the enthusiasm for the language, right?
Dianne: Yes, and interest in using different words, along with all the other things writers have to remember, the rhythm of sentences. Those things never go style, do they?
Marion: They never go out of style. I speak a lot about rhythm and internal rhyming to my students. You can have rhythm. I send them to a paragraph in William Kennedy’s novel about a murderous bootlegger named Legs Diamond where he’s got legs dancing in a bar with his mistress. Honest to God, Kennedy gets the language syncopating, like you kind of feel Legs Diamond dancing, the rhythm. It’s kind of remarkable.
When you talk about rhythm, what do you mean? Let’s people a little more familiar with the concept of rhythm. What do you mean by rhythm?
Dianne: Well, just as an editor, I notice when a writer sends me some work and there’s a paragraph where all the sentences are long and they’re all lists. They don’t know how to reshape it in a way that makes it more interesting for me to read. Because first of all, it’s fatiguing to read long sentences. And second, it’s fatiguing to read sentences that are all lists just set off with commas. You’re going to nod off probably by the end of the second one.
That’s just a matter of editing, just a matter of cutting things up and varying sentence length and not giving the reader any opportunity to drift off.
Marion: Yeah. Well, as we start to wrap this up, I think one of the many things we have in common is the idea of trying to create some support for writers. Throughout the book, and I do love this book, you use the device of boxing in special insider sections, which I really, really liked. One of them of the food writers and their voice descriptions. But you also let well established writers describe in a few sentences how they got started.
I’ve read that you got started as a writer when your father, an amateur poet and songwriter, gave you writing assignments. Kind of lead us out and talk to us about the need for support and community in a writer’s life.
Dianne: Oh, it’s so lonely to just be at your desk with the computer. I wrote an entire manuscript as a result of being in a writing group. I also send my essays to a friend and she sends her writing to me and we help each other strengthen our work. It’s just great to know that you’re not alone with your work, that you can reach out to people and get support and encouragement.
Marion: Yeah. I always say nobody should try this alone. And yet it’s, of course, performed alone in a room. Now at this age, my friends are writers. I married an editor. Thank God. My sister’s a writer and my best friend is a writer. I work with writers all the time.
But I think that community is something that people don’t understand at the beginning of their careers, that you’ve got to get into a place where you can be comfortable talking about how messy that vomit draft is, or how lonely you feel, or how you’d like to use the word “exploding” when it comes to a chocolate chip and a cookie, but you don’t have the confidence yet.
I think thank you for talking somebody into having that kind of confidence. The book is delightful. And congratulations on a fourth edition. Just take us off by telling us what it feels like to be asked by your publisher to go at it again. Fourth is amazing to me.
Dianne: Thank you.
Marion: How does that feel? Feel good?
Dianne: It feels really good. There’s always so much more to say and things change. We didn’t have to understand how to be a writer on Instagram before, but now we do. There’s always [inaudible 00:36:01] or how to do a sponsored post, which I don’t do, but people make a lot of money from those as writers. There’s always something new, and I’m grateful for having the opportunity to be able to continue.
Marion: Well, we’re grateful that you did, and I think that’s that I should say that, that you take this right up to the very moment of the social media, what we need to do, that you do have to be present. I’m so grateful. Thank you, Dianne. It’s been really fun talking with you.
Dianne: Thank you, Marion. I really enjoyed it so much. Thanks for the opportunity.
Marion: You’re welcome. The author is Dianne Jacob. The book is Will Write for Food. It’s in its fourth edition, just out from Hachette. Her blog on food writing, also called Will Write for Food, is aimed at food bloggers, food writers, and cookbook authors. Read her at her website, dianne j dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios com.
Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more in the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach.com and take an online class on how to write a memoir with me. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others define their way to their writing lives.
