Thursday's Babble: A Dabble in Craft || The Fermentation of Ideas

Taps. At a brewery, this is where you can get a glass of a craft
beer poured.

The acts of brewing craft beer and crafting the written word may seem unrelated, but they're not. To begin, each project starts with a recipe of sorts. This may not be something tangible or precise, but you still need some sort of game plan, or path, to follow.

For example, if you were going to start brewing an IPA (India Pale Ale), you would need a basic understanding of what comprises that type of beer before you jumped in. So, for our example, you would need to know that an IPA is traditionally bitter, containing a lot of hops to keep the flavor strong in beer during long journeys. (If interested, I can do a later post on the creation of the IPA-style. It's quite interesting.) So, before beginning to compile ingredients, you would have an idea of what types of materials you wanted to include-- the kind that would ultimately create a bitter beer. 

This parallels the writing process. If you decide you are going to write a high fantasy novel, you must first know what a book needs to contain to be defined as such. Therefore, you would have to know what ingredients you needed to mix together. A high fantasy novel typically contains a magic system, a world unique to itself,  and some sort of 'other' creature. This 'other' can be a magic-wielder, a member of the fey, or really, whatever the author's imagination can conjure. The knowledge of high fantasy ingredients lets you know, as the author, that you are going to want to mix together a world that has both magic and its own rules while on your way to "the end". 

Back to our IPA: once the ingredients have been compiled, your recipe created and tested, you have to decide how long to let the beer ferment without interfering with it. When writing, you also should let your story grow without restraint-- without letting your second thoughts and doubts change what has not yet had a chance to develop. It is absolutely okay, and sometimes necessary, to let ideas simmer, or ferment before jumping straight in and trying to finish an idea that is just a sprout.

A photo of my own writing, edited after being
left alone to ferment for a few months.

After the actual crafting, the cooking of the beer or the writing of the novel, is the fixing stage. You can generally fix what you don't like about your end product. With our fictional IPA, you could make it clearer or you could decide to let it sit longer and gain new flavors. Maybe you want to drink it as is, or sadly, throw it away because it is not salvageable. Your written project, at this point, has the same options. You could walk away from it for a bit and think about changes you could make, or you could begin working on a re-write to add new story lines, new flavors. You could add clarity, fixing what you don't like or what doesn't portray your ideas correctly. Or, you end it here by finalizing it or throwing it out. 

The great thing about crafting something, creating it yourself, is that you can always choose what happens next. You are the god of your tiny creation, so let your ideas ferment, and turn them into something great.