Friday, November 1st, 2013  Reuben Sandwich. Photo by Ernesto Andrade.
November 3 is National Sandwich Day!
Yay for sandwiches! I love a good ‘wet’ sandwich: soft, fresh bread, good cuts of meat–and for cold sandwiches–heavy on the pickles and hots. My favorite hot sandwich is a Reuben: corned beef and Swiss cheese on rye with lots of thousand island dressing and sauerkraut. Yum!
Novelist Lawrence Sanders in his book “The First Deadly Sin” describes his detective eating a ‘wet sandwich’ over the sink, accompanied by a bottle of beer. It’s the first time I’d heard the term.
Sanders goes into such loving detail describing the making and eating of this sandwich–taking nearly an entire page to do so, if I remember correctly–that my mouth watered the entire time I was reading.
That’s good writing. (Or maybe it’s my Pavlov response to sandwich descriptions!)
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write a scene in which one of your characters eats. He doesn’t have to eat a sandwich. If you’re writing fantasy, it could be stew, or bread and cheese. If you’re writing contemporary, maybe it’s wings or tapas. The point is: spend time crafting a few sentences which will make your reader’s mouth water. Don’t spend a page doing it: that was Sanders’ schtick. Write it your way.
- Write a scene where “the big reveal” is made during a meal. Don’t let the dialogue carry the scene. Bring in the setting: the tablecloth and silver salt and pepper shakers, or, the scarred wooden table and broken crockery.
- Write a “long” haiku of four of five stanzas describing the perfect sandwich and building it. When you’re done, see if you can whittle it down into one stanza, but still keep the ‘flavor’ of the long poem.
- If you journal, write family history, or enjoy memoir, write about a memorable meal. Don’t forget to include descriptions of the food.
Good Luck!
Friday, April 6th, 2012 One of the big criticisms of fantasy fiction is ‘dining’ scenes. They often become the joke of the story, and it’s those scenes that are discussed as clichéd in reviews, no matter if they’re a key scene that the entire plot hinges on.
Three dwarves walk into a tavern…
See what I mean? Hard not to make a joke out of it.
But I’ll argue until I’m blue-faced that dining scenes are necessary to make the fiction realistic. And if you want to argue some more, I’ll state that these scenes are just as clichéd, if not more so, in other genres:
- the engagement announcement made at dinner (in any genre)
- the discussion of other worldly food (especially those slimy, living foods consumed by bug-like creatures) in science fiction novels
- the ‘let’s have a polite chat over dinner’ (but you know someone’s going to get killed) in a western or gangster story
- the cozy, steamy, dinner for two which escalates into a torrid love-fest of unusual positions and food in usual places
Your job with today’s prompts is to create a scene, a poem, a short story or vignette that is about food or dining, but isn’t clichéd.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write about one of these things:
- hunger
- simple dishes
- eating alone
- forbidden fruit
- temperamental chefs
- eating alone
- a family meal
- a holiday dinner
- family recipes
- Someone yells from off in the distance, “Come and get it!” You hear the klaxon sound of the triangle, bell, or digital tone if you happen to be aboard ship.
- These are the ingredients…
- Use the five senses (taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight) in your writing, but focus on one of them; for instance: the smell of fresh-brewed coffee; the site of lush, colorful fruit, the taste of something hot and spicy, salty or sweet; the sound of crunchy cereal, or fries sizzling in grease; the feel of salted nuts or buttery popcorn when you lift it out of the bowl…
- “Sustain me with raisin cakes, Refresh me with apples, Because I am lovesick. ~ Song of Solomon
- The refrigerator’s full, but there’s nothing to eat…
- The cupboard is bare…
- A pie eating, ice-cream eating, hot-dog eating, you-name-the-food-eating contest at the local fair
- Write about the guy standing on the corner who “Will Work for Food.”
Good luck!
|
Writers - Maryland Writer's Assn.
|