What I Learned From Julia Child’s Soufflé About Conviction
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Pancake flops, studio spirals, and the conviction to flip the damn thing anyway. Julia Child reminds us how mastery handles the mess. Welcome to What I Learned From… “Do not confuse guilt with conviction. Guilt is self-centered, and leads only to destructive obsession. But conviction brings balance—a sense of purpose beyond oneself.” ― Jordan Ifueko, Redemptor What I Learned From …Earlier this week I had what I like to call an itsy-bitsy teeny-tiny existential identity crisis. The kind that grabs you by the collar in the middle of a perfectly productive day and whispers: “What if this whole thing is wrong?” Thanks Existential Identity Crisis. Really classy timing. When I say “this whole thing” I’m not talking about a sentence or a project or a social media caption. I’m talking about the whole thing. The studio I’ve been building. The work I’ve been crafting. The weird, carefully constructed, slightly-chaotic-but-also-erudite brand I’ve been shaping for writers who still care about the words. The one I tried to push public last summer and failed catastrophically. What if my weird obsessions with editing and etymology and seasonal writing rituals aren’t what people want? What if I’ve spent months (years) backing the wrong vision? I started spiraling. Maybe I needed to gut everything and start over. Maybe I’d followed a thread of inspiration so far into the woods that I couldn’t even see the path back to what people actually want. Maybe I should run one more survey. Or ask one more trusted friend. Or get one more piece of confirmation, the final perfect missing piece of confirmation, before I commit. But even as I asked the questions, I could feel the truth underneath them: I already knew. I didn’t need a new plan, I just didn’t have the courage of my conviction. And that’s when Julia Child walked into my brain and handed me a spatula. There’s a now-famous moment from her show ‘The French Chef’ where she tries to flip a potato pancake and misses. The whole thing flops onto the stovetop. She pauses only a beat, then scoops it back in the pan, pats it down, and says, “If you're alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?” What makes that moment stick with me isn’t the mistake. It’s the way she moves through it. Cheerfully and without apology. She just keeps going, adding a little cheese, and she reinvents the dish mid-stream. Earlier in the process, she reminded viewers “When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions.” Then she flipped it and it went everywhere. That part, right there. That’s the thing I’d forgotten. The pancake isn’t ready just because you think it should be, or because you really really want it to be. It’s ready because you’ve done the work, and you’ve put in the time, and you can see the edge browning beneath the surface. That’s when you flip it. Julia Child wasn’t a prodigy. She didn’t even learn to cook until she was in her late thirties, when she and her husband moved to Paris after the war. She enrolled in the Le Cordon Bleu culinary school and flailed through her early lessons, determined to get better. Eventually she co-founded a cooking school with two French colleagues, and spent nearly a decade co-writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book designed to help Americans cook with real technique. She wasn’t born into culinary mastery, she built it slowly, with joy and precision. She didn’t share her mistakes to make them charming. It wasn’t some vulnerability-p0rn that she splattered across social media to get engagement. She shared these moments because she knew they were part of the process…and she trusted that the process mattered more than the performance. Even the famous soufflé story, where she forgot the cornstarch and the whole thing collapsed as she was carrying it out to serve, was something she wrote about openly in the preface to The French Chef Cookbook. Because of that mistake, she added a new rule to her personal cooking philosophy: "No matter what happens in the kitchen, never apologize." Not because she wanted to coddle her ego or avoid embarrassment, but because she was devoted to being the best she could be (whatever that looked like at that exact moment in her journey.) The thing she was building—her craft, her body of work, her public teaching—deserved that kind of steadiness. So does mine. I’m not revamping the whole studio. I’m not abandoning the writing rituals or the old words or the essays that take too long to land, but somehow always stick that landing. I’m just waiting for this side to brown a little more, then I’m flipping it with every ounce of conviction I’ve got. So if you’re hovering at the stove, second-guessing whether the thing you’re building is ready, let this be your sign. You don’t need more feedback and you don’t need to apologize before anyone has even tasted what you’re offering. You just need to trust what you already know, grip the handle tight, and flip the damn thing. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. "When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions, particularly if it's sort of a loose mass like this. *flips potato pancake out of the pan and onto the stovetop* Oh, that didn't go very well. See when I flipped it, I didn't have the courage to do it the way I should have. But you can always pick it up. If you're alone in the kitchen, who is going to see? But the only way you learn how to flip things is just to flip them. So that one, it could have been browned a little more on that side. I shall consider that that's brown, and we will pop this in an oven dish like this. See, it should have been browned enough on the crust, and then it would have held together. Now we'll shake that back in place a little. Any time that anything like this happens, you haven't lost anything. You can always turn this into something else. So in this case, we'll put on a little bit of cheese...we'll pretend that this was supposed to be a baked potato dish." - Julia Child, ‘The French Chef’ Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Finish this sentence in 100 words or less: “I’m done apologizing for…” (Then bury the apology in The Graveyard and keep the defiance.) Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Bravura [bruh-VYUR-uh] (n.) — A show of daring brilliance, often in performance or art. From Italian bravura ("skill, bravery") and bravo ("bold"), with roots in Latin barbarus ("wild, fierce.") Once a hallmark of operas and orchestras, bravura is what happens when technique and courage crash into each other onstage. By the 19th century, it meant any virtuosic flourish: the chef’s rogue pancake flip, the writer’s unabashed manifesto, the moment you commit to the move before knowing how it lands. Sorta synonyms: panache, tour de force, holy-shit-did-you-see-that energy Use it for: Serving the collapsed soufflé, naming your rate without flinching, posting that idea that you know is going to set people off but it's burning a hole in your skull Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Typing Club Are you a hunt-and-peck typer or do you know why those little raised lines exist on the F and J keys? If your touch-typing could use a refresher, this free site will help you figure it out. (My current best is 83 WPM!) The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. I love nature most of the time…but sometimes from a distance. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS. Bon appétit 👩🍳 If you’re ready to flip your damn thing, hit reply and tell me what you’re committed to these days. I’ll bring the cheese (cause I always have cheese.) |