Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. ~Ursula K. Le Guin
I haven’t bought a loaf of bread for years now. I have bought a lot of bread flour and whole wheat flour and other ingredients. But you can get spoiled pretty quickly to homemade bread.
Some years ago – I have no idea how many – everybody was passing around sourdough starter with a recipe for feeding the starter and making your own bread. I said I didn’t want to do that. I mean I had lots of other things to do. Not make bread. But when Mom and my sisters made some bread and it was pretty good, I thought why not make a couple of loaves. So I got some starter and I’ve been making bread ever since. The sourdough way was easy for me. I could mix it up in the morning, make the dough that night, form the loaves the next morning and bake it whenever it rose sufficiently. None of it took a lot of time and I do love good bread.
When the grandkids came along they loved making the bread too. They always wanted to do 
some different things. Make pizza or bread sticks. One of them even made some sort of cinnamon cake that was delicious. It was mostly cinnamon bread, but you put a little frosting on it and you can call it cake.
There’s something therapeutic about making bread. It can’t be rushed. It has to be kneaded and kneaded some more. It smells divine when it’s baking. That heel sliced off the end when it comes right out of the oven is the best thing ever with a little butter spread on it. It makes great toast. It makes yummy rolls and even yummier cinnamon rolls. That’s a Christmas time treat.
But you can’t just make one loaf of bread or two and expect to have sandwiches forever. You have to keep feeding that starter. Keep mixing in the extra ingredients. Keep baking more bread.
Writing stories can be something like that too. Stories can’t always be rushed. They might need time to rise. They always need some kind of starter, an idea that sparks a creative response. Sometimes to get the story into the proper shape you may have to knead the idea, work it over until the story forms the way you want it to. To make a good loaf of bread you pummel and punch it. It can be the same with a story as Carolyn Chute says in this quote. Sometimes a manuscript is like bread dough. You have to abuse it.
But it’s good if you can love the process of working the dough of your story. I’m finishing up my work in progress. I’ve worked my story over and over. I’ve cut out over 9,000 of those unnecessary words. I have shaped it the best I can and now I can only hope that it will be baked into a book that will bring readers as much pleasure as that first slice of bread fresh from the oven.
What ingredient do you think is most important in a novel?