Why People Buy Cookbooks (and why you need to know)

My wife wants to be Rachel Ray. Based on the dinner, she cooked last night, I’d say she’s well on her way! Pork chops with cooked apples. Homemade macaroni and cheddar with broccoli and curly, spiral noodles instead of tube macaroni.

At our house the Food Network is a favorite channel. We subscribe to Rachel Ray’s magazine. We buy her books. Our daughter has even adopted Rachel Ray’s signature word.

“Mommy, this is YUM-o!” she says.

Which got me thinking about context. I’ve heard statistics about cookbooks being one of the most popular selling genres in publishing. And travel books. Why is that?

Because both genres imply a specific context for experiencing the book. We know how to read them and when.

A cookbook promises a specific reading experience–flour spread on the counter, pages sticky with butter, bacon popping in the iron skillet a few feet away. Just writing those words are getting me excited about Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Travel books contain the same contextual promise. Last week when I flipped through Back Roads of Texas, I was looking for trips I could take with my family. I imagined the book becoming immediately applicable to my experience. Those lines on the Texas Hill Country maps could become roads under my car, with the kids in the back seat singing along to their favorite CD of pirate songs and my wife next to me talking happily about nothing in particular.

That’s the power of writing that has specific implied context. Once upon a time when I was an English teacher, I called this “occasional” writing. Writing with an occasion in mind. There are two ways to do it.

Writing for an Occasion…

That’s what cookbooks and travel books do. We read them imagining the occasion when the ideas in the book will become very meaningful to the reality of our world.

Does this mean we should all write nothing but cookbooks and travel books? Don’t be ridiculous. Write what you know. That’s the classic rule.

But we can write more powerful fiction (and poetry) if we have a specific occasion in mind. Even more than that, by writing what I call “gift art” we can be so specific in addressing an occasion and a specific audience that the work appeals to a wider audience. (I’ve written more about gift art on TheHighCalling.org, one of the websites I edit.)

I’m a bit of a cheapskate, so I’ve done this for years. Instead of buying people presents, I make them things. Write them poems. I write for the occasion of a birthday, an anniversary, a holiday like Christmas. The more I can please the specific audience on a specific occasion, the more I can please a general audience. And when someone’s gift finds a place for a general audience, the person who inspired the gift receives even more honor.

For example, I wrote a sestina called “Listen My Child” for my wife when she was pregnant with our second child. (It’s one of the poems I stuck in my poetry ebook if you want to read it.) It’s not the best sestina in the world, but having a specific context in mind certainly made it more powerful.

Here’s a platitude: The most powerful writing always rises above the original context for which is was written.

But contextual, occasional writing isn’t limited to specific publication events like a pregnancy.

Writing in Response to an Occasion…

I’m not just talking about memoir writing, though memoir may be the most direct form of responding to a specific occasion.

For many writers, our work becomes a way of processing conflict or dissonance. For example, the time during communion when my daughter was playing with her Barbie dolls. I was struck by the juxtaposition of the innocence of her play and the holiness of communion. My meditation became a scribbled poem on the back of the Sunday church bulletin. Several drafts later, I had something I was willing to share with others: Barbies at Communion.

Writing for an Occasion in Response to an Occasion…

The next logical step is to combine these two approaches as often as possible.

First, the primary occasion prompting me to write is an email from Gina. I was supposed to post this on Monday, and I didn’t. (I wonder if there is a subtle tone of guilt woven throughout the piece…) So what did I do? I grabbed the content from a writing workshop that I’ve been meaning to publish anyway.

I thought through the occasion of that workshop to create the content you just read. I remembered what people found helpful. I left out what they didn’t.

Second, I didn’t forget the context in which people would read it. This particular piece is most immediately going to be experienced around Thanksgiving time. But it will exist much longer in the archives of Writer… Interrupted for Gina’s blog audience (and in the archives of GoodWordEditing.com my own blog audience that I’m going to direct here). Since I know the occasion of its reading will be on someone’s screen, I make particular choices about sentence length and paragraph length.

I even make use of the web’s hypertext functionality by linking out to examples of what I mean.

Here are some other ways to build an occasion of publication into your writing:

• Join a writing group that will expect you to share something for critique.
• Start a blog and target each post to a specific blogger. Link to him/her and try to write in such a way that will encourage them to comment. (Notice I said “encourage” and not “incite.”)
• Start your own gift writing!
• When you do, post it on your blog and let me know with a trackback link to GoodWordEditing.com.