The Pre-Book Phase:
I can’t say exactly when the idea for writing this book occurred to me. It happened gradually, after I moved to Budapest and began attempting to find my way around the city’s food scene. I quickly realized that I was going to get little help from most of my guidebooks, which had restaurant reviews which often barely mentioned the food and sometimes seemed as if the writer hadn’t even been there. The local expat papers didn’t help much either. Their restaurant writers either had obvious distastes for Hungarian food or had clearly received special treatment. Many of the writers who wrote the restaurant reviews seemed pretty uninformed (and uninspired) about food, cooking, and restaurants in general.
I had quite a few bad restaurant and eating experiences, but I also had lots and lots of good ones. I enjoyed seeking out cafés that were far from the beaten tourist track, and I was forced to practice my Hungarian at the food markets where I started doing all of my shopping. It became my hobby to find out everything that I possibly could about Hungarian food and drink, cooking and culinary traditions. I had fun along the way, and somehow the idea formed in my mind that I should write the type of book that I would have loved to have when I first arrived in Hungary. There were culinary guidebooks to France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and even Ireland. Why couldn’t there be one about Hungary? After all, I was (and still am) convinced that Hungarian cuisine is one of Europe’s finest when it’s done properly, it just remains relatively unknown.
Of course, things were also different in Budapest then, in 1999, when I arrived. There were fewer good restaurants, and there were many more bad restaurants. There were fewer specialty food shops and shopping seemed to be more time consuming. Eating at ethnic restaurants was riskier (my first meal at a Budapest Chinese restaurant included a dish that involved potatoes and paprika). The wine scene was a bit different, too. Wine tourism seemed to be really taking off around that time. Since then, Hungarian wine has only gotten better, and wine tourism has become more popular and better organized.
Somehow, the book proposal slowly formed. By the time it was finished, it was around 40 pages long, including a detailed table of contents and list of sidebars. I can’t say how long it took me to write the proposal. I started writing it on a whim, without reading any “How to Write a Book Proposal” guides (although I did read some of those before I polished it off and sent it out), and I enjoyed the process, digging into the details of all of the different types of paprika and Tokaj wine. The thing I liked most about writing the proposal was what I also liked most about writing the book: it was an entirely different type of writing than what I had been previously doing.
The proposal gave me a taste for long-form writing, and it felt nice to have such a big project ahead of me. Rather than quickly turning out short magazine and newspaper articles like I had been doing, this required me to come up with an organized layout, carefully plan every component that would go into the book, stick with the same style throughout the book, and somehow bring it all together in a readable, smooth way. My proposal was pretty thorough, which helped immensely when it came time to writing the actual book. All of the content in my proposal ended up being in the actual book (albeit significantly altered and expanded on). Once the contracts were signed and I started writing the book, I was happy that I had spent so much time writing my outline. I didn’t have to sit down to a blank computer screen. I had my plan all laid out, and I was ready to start writing the book. But first I had to find a publisher…
Read Book Update (Part I)
