Erma Bombeck, quoting someone else, said, “Children are like waffles. The first one should be used to season the grill and then thrown out.”
You might write an entire book and then realize that it’s not what you came here to say. It was your rehearsal. It was your first waffle. It was you seasoning the grill.
My first waffle was called From Om to Oy. It was a memoir scattered and fractured all over the place. I should have called it From Om to Kentucky. That’s how many non sequiturs there were in it. But it greased the wheel. It got me into the habit of writing and letting go of the outcome. Which was a good thing, because the outcome was bad!
Prompt: Write your second waffle.
— Nancy Slonim Aronie in Memoir as Medicine