First, I concede that I possess the arrogance of a person with experience. This is tempered by the many things I don’t know or how to do—many more unknowns than knowns. Even so, there are things I have been doing regularly for decades. I may not be the best or perfect at doing all those things, but I do know what I’m doing.

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I will use the example of Paul Hollywood, a professional baker who has written books about baking, and has been the host of The Great British Bake-Off (known as The Great British Baking Show in the U.S.) since it began. I willingly concede he knows more than I do about baking. He achieves perfectly even bakes and has experience with more products than I ever will. He is a professional.

On The Great British Bake-Off, I have watched Hollywood make a show of slapping his bread dough onto the kneading surface. Whaap! Whaap! Whaap! Contestants sometimes do it too.

As I write this, Hollywood is 58 years old, born in 1966. By that year, I had baked bread with my mother in our kitchen and was watching Julia Child on Public Television. I was a regular watcher of The Galloping Gourmet with Graham Kerr years before Hollywood baked his first bun.

Here, I’ll let you in on a little secret about kneading bread dough: Slapping it has no effect whatsoever. It might knock bubbles out of the dough, if that was something you wanted to do before the first rise, which you don’t. The purpose of kneading is to make friction within the dough which develops the gluten (which is protein and healthy for nearly everyone). Squeezing, stretching, and otherwise manipulating the dough helps develop gluten, which you don’t want in a tender crumb (which is why you stir cakes and quickbreads as little as possible). Bread needs gluten to rise. Gluten is elastic, stretchy, and is what allows bread to retain a film of dough around puffs of tiny or larger gas-filled holes caused by the growth of yeast. (Yeast is alive—even now I can hear Julia Child’s voice in my head talking about the live yeast!) btw You really are not supposed to eat raw dough (which is not good for you), but I can still recall chewing on small lumps of raw bread dough until all the flour and salt and whatever was sucked out of it and all I had left in my mouth was a substance like chewing gum. That was the gluten.

My mother baked with bleached white flour, which was standard in those days, but by the time I was in college and living away from home I had shifted over to unbleached white and stoneground whole wheat flour. I baked every week. I liked baking a rich, braided loaf on Fridays. Paul Hollywood had not yet left high school by then to work in his dad’s bakery, but a few years later that’s exactly what he did. I was still baking once or twice a week, and he was baking in a commercial bakery every day.

Hollywood knows that bread dough doesn’t need to be slapped on the counter, that this does nothing at all. (Wedging clay, on the other hand, leads to quite a different result, and slamming it down does, or may, accomplish something. I know as much about wedging as kneading—understand the process down to the molecular level. Thank you, Clay and Glazes for the Potter, read when I was a teenager and Bob Gee for taking us to dig clay out of a hillside, allowing me to devise glazes from raw chemicals, and helping me build an electric kiln.)

Hollywood certainly knows how to knead bread by hand, though he probably doesn’t actually do that very often. A bakery uses machines to do grunt work. (Even I use my KitchenAide to start the kneading.) He understands how to develop gluten, so what he’s doing when he slaps that dough down is what we call theater.

It’s pure showmanship. And that’s something we both know a little bit about.

I have been studying, as another example, Book Arts at least since I was twenty when I took Richard Proctor’s class at the University of Washington. We designed books. I study book covers every single day—many of my favorite books were chosen for their covers. One of the greatest disappointments of last year was a book chosen for its cover (I still love that cover, darn it!).

Qualifications for my first job teaching English were working with English Department staff as a substitute teacher and my graphic design background that supported advising Yearbook. My undergraduate degrees were in the studio arts. I have designed booklets, pamphlets, and advertising that has gone all over the world. One booklet was distributed across the U.S. and to many countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, France, Italy, England. Layout is not my strongest skill, but it’s one I have been paid to practice for over fifty years.

I was not yet four when I looked around my Kindergarten classroom and recognized that “red hair” was not red but orange. My mother shared enameling and mosaics with me, so I was using potentially dangerous materials as a child. I have been weaving since my age was counted in single digits. I did not become a runner till I was in my forties, but I have kept a journal off and on since the age of ten. I began writing fiction in 1990 after Sandra Dorr’s class, Writing for Educators. I came home after our last class and wrote a story that later won an award and publication. Before that, I wrote memoir, essays, poetry, and just one fictional story in 7th Grade from the point of view of Marie Antoinette about to lose her head. It was an assignment of some sort. I was never asked to write any sort of story for all the remainder of my schooling. That’s a little bit sad, I think.

I assigned a lot of stories to my students—true stories, stories in 250 words, stories in the form of fables and fantasies and written from the point of view of characters in novels we read for class.

The way we tell stories is peculiarly, uniquely human. The fact that we preserve stories should have suggested that long ago. Sometimes we depend on science to prove the obvious. Neuroscientists have found that people learn from stories—even stories they are aware are fictions—with the same precision and persistence that they learn from personal experience. I used to explain to my students the difference between the way a person learns and the way a lab rat learns. Lab rats learn from experience. Human beings learn that way but also from others’ experiences. They observe or hear a story and learn.

Many of my experiences have come from books, but also from putting my hands to work and manipulating materials from clay to cloth, from metal to meals. Mine has been a diverse life of richly rewarding experiences.

On the other hand, sometimes I reconsider my choice to diversify. I’d likely have found more success by sticking with and developing one skill—instead, I kept moving on to the next thing. I thought that’s what might happen with writing fiction after I’d done the basics. I thought I’d become restless…

Not so long ago, a well-published author suggested I didn’t need to be taking more writing classes or workshops. I have been writing seriously for longer than some instructors have been alive. It’s not that I know everything—far from it. Thirty-four years on, I am still learning, still figuring it out, but when I need help—and we all need help now and again—I know where to find it. I’m clearly not done. I have experience but am still excited to be writing fiction, still thrilled when I figure something out.