How to make a sandwich

Word­count = 86,116

Wel­come to the latest in this con­tinu­ing series of instruc­tional guides to the sandwich-making art. Today’s recipe, the Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Grill for Nov­el­ists, was learned dur­ing a six-month study tour of the finest sand­wicher­ies of Paris, from a tra­di­tional French sand­wichier whose great-great-grandfather claimed to have received the recipe from Vic­tor Hugo in 1831 after a par­tic­u­larly messy bender dur­ing the early drafts of The Hunch­back of Notre-Dame.

Step one: As early as pos­sible, prefer­ably when you are eight, decide to become a novelist.

Step two: Buy bread. You’ll be toast­ing, so ask for thick slices.

Step three: Make your first attempt at novel writ­ing at twelve, no later, or the lettuce will sag.

Step four: Hone your craft. Spend much of your teen­age years read­ing instead of run­ning around outisde or mak­ing friends. At this stage, any sub­ject mat­ter will do: cheap detect­ive fic­tion is fine, although remem­ber, if you wouldn’t read it, don’t cook with it. Hint: wiz­ards and dragons are to be avoided, as they tend to res­ult in a lonely, intro­ver­ted sandwich.

Step five: If you’ve been read­ing under a single forty-watt globe or sub-blanket torch, you should be ready for your first optician’s pre­scrip­tion by now. Feel free to choose bold, col­our­ful frames — if you’ve fol­lowed the recipe closely you will have no sig­ni­fic­ant cool to lose.

Now is also a good time to start mak­ing friends with the local pig-farmers.

Step six: Choose your season­ings and an dir­ec­tion­less uni­ver­sity course to occupy the next four years. I’ve found that sea salt, toasted cumin seeds and almost any of the human­it­ies are a nice match.

Step seven: Once your innate cre­ativ­ity and exuber­ant writ­ing style have been com­pre­hens­ively crushed by aca­demic life, drop out and take a menial job at the cam­pus book­shop, serving first-years in the course you’ve just gradu­ated. Note: if you have a gas oven, you may need to retrieve sig­ni­fic­ant fam­ily mem­bers from inside it at this point.

Step eight: Make your second attempt at novel writ­ing, a sprawl­ing philo­soph­ical dis­course set on the bus from Shep­par­ton, in your mid-twenties. Fail.

Step nine: Travel, relo­cate, marry and allow to settle for one year. Don’t for­get to send the tra­di­tional Christ­mas bottle of retsina to the pig-farmers.

Step ten: Sud­denly find your­self in pos­ses­sion of three really good ideas, and com­pletely balls them up as short stor­ies, before finally com­ing to your senses and com­bin­ing them into a longer piece, thereby start­ing your third attempt at novel writ­ing without real­ising you’re doing it.

Step eleven: Waste five years.

Step twelve: Waste another year. Pur­chase a tomato.

Step twelve: 80,000 words in, finally real­ise that the novel is actu­ally quite good and take it up full-time. Don’t wait any longer to remind your favour­ite pig-farmer of that time you gave him a lift home from the cinema — now is the time to get that bacon!

Step thir­teen: The ideal day on which to actu­ally make your sand­wich is one where the ideas dry up about ten thirty, and you’ve dis­al­lowed your­self any more trips to Office Works until the damn chapter is fin­ished. Go into the kit­chen, col­lect your bread, bacon, tomato and season­ings, remem­ber the lettuce and traipse out to the car in par­oxysms of delight for a long, unsched­uled stroll through Coles.

Step four­teen: While in Coles, have the exact idea required to fin­ish the damn chapter. Since you don’t have a pen, repeat it to your­self out loud while bliss­fully strolling the aisles, filling your trol­ley with things you haven’t even looked at.

Step fif­teen: Return to the house and microwave one of the numer­ous amorph­ous objects in per­for­ated plastic sacks which you brought home from Coles.

Step six­teen: Sit down before the com­puter with sev­eral steam­ing objects on a plate and strain to remem­ber the idea you had at Coles, which you can now only recall was born in the cer­eal aisle and may have had some­thing to do with toucans.

Step sev­en­teen: Bite into one of the objects. Vow to spend much more time on lunch tomorrow.