This is a green tea cake with strawberry cream filling.

I love cake. Love love love it with the fires of a thousand suns. And this cake is ridiculously pretty, like 95% of commercial cakes out there. It looks too gorgeous  to eat.

And that’s kind of the problem. I don’t entirely understand the proverb of not being able to have your cake and eat it, too. (What’s the point of having cake if you can’t eat it?) When it comes to all things cake, everyone knows it’s still the taste that’s important. The cake might have all the outward appearance of dark liquid chocolate, but nobody likes a center full of hard unchewable nougat.

Same goes with writing. You can dress it up with flowery language or literary prose or even figure an iambic pentameter or two into an epigraph, but these are the literary whipped creams and artificial flavorings of what makes up your plot. These are not what necessarily make the story good - it’s the major ingredients like flour and sugar and chocolate and fillings you use that make all the difference. Would a good cake still taste great without the added cream and sprinkles? Absolutely. Would a good story idea still work without dressing it up with an unnecessary romance or hot vampires? Very much so. When you’re competing in the chocolate cake category, you need to find a unique ingredient to make your confectionery stand out. Similarly, when you’re competing for agents in a sea of dystopian novels, you need something to make agents sit up and say, “Hey, I never heard of it done in this way before. What would that taste like?”

But not all agents appreciate the same kind of cake. Some LOVE chocolate, others are vegan. Some love the taste of spiced apple, and others prefer a mango tart. So when baking your cake, it’s good to know what selection your target agent prefers. You might think your white chocolate ice cream mousse is the toast of the town, but that does diddly squat to an agent who’s allergic to cocoa.

And if you have tastes so obscure that you can find no other agent sharing a similar preference, then maybe it’s time to take a big risk and market your concoction directly to the world via self-publishing. There’s a bigger chance of being dismissed by all the big cake connoisseurs, but who knows? You might find a million people who just happen to like the same peach-and-cassava cake you’ve got in the oven, and if there’s anything bigger than reviews in fancy food magazines, it’s word of mouth.

So that’s what you need to ask yourself - is your story good enough to eat? Is there the right mix of character development and conflict, of a satisfying climax and resolution / denouement? Has it been thoroughly baked in months of constant editing and revising, so that it comes out neither underbaked nor overdone? Does the combination of strawberry and lemon work, or does it need a dash of almonds, a smattering of more action or less dialogue?

And that’s why you need to eat cake. Figure out what flavor works with your story, and take out everything that makes it too rich, or too sweet, or too overtly creamy. Sample it again, then repeat the process until you’re satisfied.

Write your cake, and then eat it, too.

*other cakes depicted here were from the Cake Couture Exhibition at the Podium Mall. Lots of free samples. Yay.

Original Article

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