My mother was a dump cook. Although the phrase calls to mind the act of harvesting edible ingredients from a dumpster, in my mother’s case it was making do with what was available at the tail-end of the Great Depression, and during WWII rationing. A dumpster might have offered a better selection.

As a young bride in the late 1930s, my mother, like many others, had to scramble to find enough money to buy groceries. In the 1940s, as a mother of two children, she found herself  stuck on a sheep ranch in Wyoming where she had to cook for her family and three of her husband’s tight-fisted bachelor uncles–not to mention occasional hired hands and threshing crews.

 Helping the uncles with the ranch chores was the only work my father could find at the time. That left my mother relying heavily on her garden, mutton, and an unreliable wood stove.

After the war ended, my father found work more suited to his skills, and they were able to leave the ranch.The availability of affordable food never changed her habit of her improvising recipes. When asked, she was never able to provide specific directions for her creations. She would only laugh and say, “Call me a dump cook; I dump a little of this, a little of that until I think it tastes right.

I should probably have called my recent book The Dump Cook’s Daughter instead of Helen and Jess: The Hard Years, because I have inherited my mother’s attitude about cooking and, apparently, writing.

Having taught writing for a long time, I stressed the importance of having a theme in mind, attending to  plot points, and, in the case of a short story, following the standard ascending and descending pattern.

But, I was never able to practice what I preached, and I usually let a story develop as one idea after another popped into my head. Most of the time it worked for me, and I could end with all the loose threads explained.

In a recently completed police procedural novel, my method wasn’t ideal. I was three-fourths through the book before I even knew who had “done it,” let alone providing properly developed clues. Even after I determined who would be the killer, I had to work hard to tweak the text and attain an adequate closure that wouldn’t frustrate or irritate the reader.

But yesterday, as I listened to a lecture, and gave myself a failing grade on organization of plot and development, the lecturer concluded with giving credit to the “start out and just see where it will take you” approach. 

Sometimes, just dumping words on a  page, and more on the next page, will work for you. True, like some of my cooking attempts, it may not end up palatable, but it can add a little levity to the hard work of writing, and  just might turn out perfect–well worth the attempt.