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There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw
Hello, this is Joy , this week’s Drama editor. Our topic in this issue is the drama of food.
“That look! She had been walking to the table carrying a tray of egg-yolk candies when she first felt his hot gaze burning her skin. She turned her head, and her eyes met Pedro's. It was then she understood how dough feels when it is plunged into boiling oil.”
Laura Esquivel from Like Water for Chocolate
“It was the sort of dessert that appalled Greenie on principle, but it also embodied a kind of uberprosperity, a transgressive joy, flaunting the potential heft of butter, that Protean substance as wondrous and essential to a pastry chef as fire had been to early man.”
Julia Glass from The Whole World Over |
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Deserts, appetizers, entrées, pizza and beer, hamburgers and fries, holiday cookies, barbecued anything, outdoor cooking, take-out food, home-cooked food, gourmet food, weird food, fresh food, dried food, food your mother cooked, soul food, Cajun food, French cooking, Italian Cuisine, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking, Oriental cooking…Do you feel your mouth watering?
Food and the idea of cooking can capture the imagination for some original, dramatic writing. I love food, and I love stories that mention food or build themselves around cooking. Luckily, there is an abundance of books in different genres involving food in the market today.
Food is a very important part of our lives. Not that you should be writing dull passages, but put food in the middle of a dull passage, it will reawaken the reader’s attention right away.
Food can be a metaphor for love, lust, and relationships, as in Like Water for Chocolate. Food can be the uniting factor of characters no matter how far apart they are, as in Harry Potter books when students and teachers sit together at a school banquet, eating made-up fantasy food. Food can be used as a shaker upper of emotions like disgust, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses where Leopold Bloom “liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” Food can make a foreign or international story feel closer to the reader by easing intercultural barriers and introducing ethnic food and the behavior of multicultural characters around food, as in Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones, and Passover by David Mamet.
Here are a few suggestions for putting food in your stories:
1. Use it as the subplot. While your story may seemingly center the action around food, you can make the characters and their quests to become the central conflict, thus making the food and cooking a subplot.
In The Whole World Over, Julia Glass centers her story around a pastry chef and different tastes and settings that influence the personalities and lifestyles of all the characters in the novel, while in reality, she explores personal commitments, love, betrayal, forgiveness, and understanding In Cooking for Harry, Kay-Marie James, too, cooks a good argument for the battle of the sexes and romance.
2. Make food important to the story even if its main character or important characters do not cook. You might design food as a reward or a punishment; you might also gather characters around the table to eat, as they exchange insults, ideas, or flatteries. The possibilities are endless.
In Playing for Pizza. John Grisham puts a disgraced quarterback in another culture to play for the honor of the game and the reward of pizza, while he employs the themes of maturation and redemption of self.
3. Make food magical or seem magical. You might invent your very own magic food and recipes or you might use regular food items and dishes and the manner they are prepared to perform magic on the people eating it. A good example to this can be the movie, Babette’s Feast.
Shitra Banerjee Divakaruni, also, makes spices create their magic on people in the Mistress of Spices, using her main character Tilo who runs a spice shop in Oakland, California.
4. Use the senses. Even if you are not making food central to your story, you might mention dishes or recipes for reminiscing memories, family members, and backgrounds. This way, using the senses of smell, sound, vision, taste and touch will add depth to your writing and to your characters.
5. Use recipes. An entire recipe can end up as a winner or a disaster in a story, adding dramatic and comedic elements to your writing. You might take a simple recipe and enhance its each step with emotion. For example, if the recipe says ‘add butter’, your character may use an internal dialogue, something like this: “'Add butter', the recipe says. He knew how to butter me up. Actually he butters up anyone, so…I think I’ll add Canola oil instead.”
On balance, remember that using food is only a strategy in writing, but if it is mixed with other strategies, perspective, literary imagination, and narrative techniques, it will add an alluring element to your work.
May all your writing end up like gourmet food. 
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
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Short Stories:
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Thank you for reading this newsletter. Before I answer the feedback on the last issue, here are a few tidbits for you:
Treats:
 Make paragraphs work for you. To emphasize a point or a certain element in your story, use a short paragraph.
Publishing Vocabulary:
Copy Editor: person who sees to it that errors inside a manuscript, such as grammar, spelling, and fluency, are corrected; acts as a liaison between the editor and author for problems that need solutions; and prepares the style sheets.
Line Editor: high-level editor who helps the structure of a book by focusing on things such as plot, tone, pacing, characterization, etc.; or in the case of non-fiction, organization of ideas, sections, and chapters.
Editor: person responsible for finding manuscripts for publication and helping the author to revise and shape his manuscript to fit the publishing house's needs.
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spidey 
You said: "Watching a live stage show, a serious play, or a musical is a great thrill that cannot be matched by the movies or the television." I couldn't agree more!  There's just something magical about the experience of being in an audience during a live performance. As an audience member, you're actually a part of the performance, I think. The actors feed off the audience, and we get something out of it, too. I wonder if there's a way for that to come across in written plays? Another great newsletter!
Thank you very much, Spidey.
What you say is so true. The give and take between the audience and the actors is what makes a stage play so thrilling. A skillful playwright, therefore, is one who can imagine audience reaction as he writes his play.
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StephBee 
Joy,
Fabulous letter on Broadway. Two thumbs up.
Thank you very much, Steph.
I think I am blurting out my weaknesses in these newsletters. 
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Drama: November 19, 2008 Issue [#2718]
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