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.

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Last month, I bought front row tickets to see my most favorite band in the world ever, live in concert - Train.

Uh-huh. Cause I am fly like that.

There aren’t a lot of things sexier than listening to Pat Monahan’s voice, except maybe listening to Pat Monahan’s voice while he’s singing four feet away from where you and a horde of other girls are gathered, shrieking for a lock of his chest hair and punching bouncers for getting in their line of vision. (That he started peeling at least one layer of clothing off after every song might have contributed to this.) I am trying to sound cool and cocky as I write this like I hadn’t succumbed to the teenage fangirl mob mentality at any point during the concert, but unfortunately I was right up there with the rest of my crazed Train-loving soul sisters, screaming my lungs out.

But the biggest surprise came when he sang “Marry Me”.

Yes, this “Marry Me”.

At this point, Pat Monahan abandons the stage and begins dancing his way through the crowd like the stampede of girls suddenly attempting to track the coordinates of his booty-shaking path down the aisles ISN’T HIS FAULT AT ALL, NO SIREEBOB. But what startled me was when he picks up a hysterical girl’s camera, aims it in both their directions, and snaps a photo on the fly. Then he hands the camera back to the now-orgasming lady, finds another camera, and takes another photo of himself and a lucky fan.

Eventually, dozens of girls are now waving their camera screenshots in the air and hollering like mad, and from every one I could see he had captured the photos perfectly. Centered images, no heads were sliced or harmed in the making of this picture kind of good. It’s hard enough to take pictures of yourself, much less if it’s not even your camera to begin with.

Holy shit, I thought. For all his suave and talent and booty, I never would have expected Pat Monahan to not only possess the same skill subset as your average narcissistic thirteen-year old tween, but that he would pwn it so, so hard.

And then, because writing is never that far away from my mind even when you’re in the same breathing space as one of your favorite celebrities, that got me thinking about characters. One of my favorite fictional characters is a little Belgian detective with an egg-shaped head, named Hercule Poirot. He’s very dapper and elegant, dines at only the best restaurants with unpronounceable French meals, and has bank drafts of four hundred and forty-four pounds and four ounces. He likes toast because bread is symmetrically shaped. For all his finickiness and seeming orderliness though, Poirot also picks locks with passing familiarity, trespasses frequently, reads suspects’ personal love letters with little inclination for personal privacy, and has even [HIGHLIGHT FOR SPOILER]

[/SPOILER]. It seems like a walking contradiction when you understand Poirot always advocates for legal justice, but this apparent inconsistency makes him a more interesting personality to me (and his views on the subject changes gradually the more cases he undertakes, as seen in the Murder on the Orient Express and the Murder of Roger Ackroyd.)

you had me at mustache.

That’s what I try to think about when writing characters. No one is ever one-dimensional. Just because someone seems happy and cheerful most of the time doesn’t mean he’s happy and cheerful all the time.  And part of the challenge is adding in an odd quirk or habit to a protagonist or antagonist that makes readers think hey, this is not a skill or a trait I would imagine this person to have but that’s awesome, and still make it work.

YES I AM THAT GOOD.

Train’s been writing and performing for years. I can’t imagine how many tours they’ve been on, how many people in sold-out concerts they’ve played to, and how many times Pat Monahan’s taken photos with fans. So when you think about it, it’s pretty logical that he could take a camera, gauge at a glance how it works based on the hundreds he’s already handled, then angle his arm the right way to snap the perfect picture. He’s not good at it because he’s vain, but it’s a side effect of being a performer beloved by his fanbase. In the same manner I could write about a surly, sword-wielding teenage boy who happens to be afraid of heights, or an awkward, stuttering geek with no upper body strength but with a natural grace that could put Igor Zaripov to shame, and find ways to believably string these contradictions into their personalities.

It’s not the only step toward making a three-dimensional, rounded out character, but it’s one of the best places to start. As Monahan himself would sing, in a slightly out-of-context song: shake it up.

Also: an extremely crappy and incomplete recording of “Save Me, San Francisco”, taken from the concert. Apologies for the very sucky bass sounds. My camera hates subwoofers.

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