Let's make some bread!

or why every novelist you know is making sourdough (*TW: gluten)

Mar 16, 2026

You wake up one morning and decide you want to make sourdough bread. How hard could it be? You’ve eaten bread before, lots of it. You’ve eaten bread for as long as you can remember. You’ve even made bread before, not sourdough but other kinds. You once bought a breadmaker at a church tag sale which you used to make several serviceable loaves. You think you still have a jar of instant yeast somewhere in your refrigerator.

But sourdough’s different. Sourdough requires something called a starter which you have to make before you can start making bread. You don’t understand the science, but you look up a recipe on the internet, a step-by-step guide and you follow the steps, wondering, again, how hard it could be.

A sourdough starter is not yeast. It’s not a plant either, nor is it an animal or a small child. But whatever it is, you need to feed it. You cannot let it starve. You can do that. You can feed things. You have children and pets and you have fed them all at various times in your life. You have also fed yourself, every single day. Making a starter takes time, and that’s okay too. You have time. You’re a writer, a novelist. Yes, there are the children but most of them don’t live at home anymore and the other one is sixteen. (You fuss over him like he’s a toddler but he isn’t, he really isn’t.) Yes, you have the pets but that’s not the same thing. The point is you have time for this, for sourdough. You have time to make a starter.

Except your starter will not grow. There are lots of people on the internet talking about starters and they all sort of say the same thing and also something different, but they all agree on this: your starter needs to double. They are pretty clear about that. Your starter should be bubbling and doubling every day and yours is not.

You text a friend. She’s a writer, a novelist too. She’s read your novels, both the one you finished and the one you’re still working on (and wonder if you’ll ever finish). She also makes bread. You send her a picture of your starter.

The color is quite brown, she writes back. I wonder why.

You explain that you added some whole wheat flour to it because you read somewhere that it could help jump start a sluggish starter. You sense this is the wrong answer.

You know what, she writes. I think you should just bake a few loaves with it, see what happens.

Yeah! you write back. I’ll do that. That’s a good idea. That’s just what I’ll do.

So you do. What the hell. People on the internet have opinions, so many opinions, and you just need to get in there and start making bread. And the first loaf you make is a little flat, but you know what? It’s still bread. It’s still something you can eat. You can still put jam on it and call it a sandwich.

You’re talking to another friend now. She’s a novelist too. Turns out she’s also making sourdough and she tells you she has an active starter and do you want some? Because here’s the other thing about starter: every day, you throw out half of it, scrape it out of the jar and into the garbage can. (It makes your husband nervous–are you sure you’re not throwing away too much? Your husband, it should be said, is not a novelist.) What that means is you can give it away and you won’t have lost anything. It’s a generous thing to do but also it isn’t because you’d be throwing it out anyway.

So you drive home with your new starter on the passenger seat inside a mason jar. You name her Margaret Qualley because she’s beautiful and talented and also because it helps to give things names. And now you get it–the doubling thing–because it’s happening, it’s really happening. It’s doubling every day, and it’s glorious. And it feels important that your starter came from a novelist because starters are what novels need too, and also to be a writer–a novelist–you have to be a starter. Lots of people want to write novels but only some of them actually start and even fewer finish.

Your new starter is yeasty and smells fermented. When you open the jar, you’re reminded of a boyfriend you had in college who made beer and also had a house in Vermont. And when you smell your starter you remember snowy weekends you spent together, him making beer while you read Cowboys Are My Weakness on the sofa –even though cowboys were not your weakness. This boy was, the one making homebrew who knew how to knit and had broken every bone in his body when he rode horses but he was from New Canaan and most certainly was not a cowboy; in the end, he wasn’t even a weakness.

Your starter can tell stories like that.

So now you’re making bread, lots of it. And as soon as it comes out of the oven, you make everyone you live with–the husband and the sixteen-year-old and even the pets–tell you how good it is. Because it is good. It’s very good. And when they get tired of praising you, you send pictures of your bread to the novelists and they send pictures of their bread back to you. A digital proof of life from one breadmaking novelist to another. Isn’t it beautiful you write. Isn’t my bread beautiful? Yes, they write back. It’s beautiful. Your bread is beautiful.

A couple of notes about this post:

I wrote this as a letter to writers participating in the BookEnds Giving Day Write-a-Thon. BookEnds is a program that supports post-MFA writers (or no-MFA writers like me) while they do the difficult and slow work involved in finishing their novels. I could not have finished mine without it. In fact, I love the program so much I’m now a mentor! If you’d like to consider a donation to this singular, groundbreaking program, which goes beyond what any MFA in creative writing can offer, click here for more information.
Also, I wrote it during a Studio session, that is to say I generated the bulk of it in about twenty minutes. Easy peasy! I lead an hour long Studio every Tuesday morning at 9AM ET, so if you’re looking to get some more writing done, join us! You’d be amazed at what you can do in a short period of time. More info here!