Day 9: The Secret Ingredient of Vivid Writing: Taste

We are Writing: It's a month of writing posts, prompts, exercises, tips, and places to submit

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RANDOM HOUSEKEEPING MOMENT

Hey! Hi! This is just me, Carrie, in your email. I wanted to give you a quick reminder that all these emails (and more) live over here on the Live Happy (and Write Better Now) site. And these daily writing posts are just for the month of February. I’ll go back to the regular routine for March.

LET’S GET LEARNING!

So, these past few posts are all about why and how to use sensory images in your writing to make it better.

Those senses are just:

• Sight

• Sound

• Touch

• Taste

• Smell

Taste seems like a bit of a toughie in writing. But you can do this.

And why do you want to give your characters the experience of taste? Well, it’s a bit emotional connector. Most of us eat, right? And we all have our own histories with food and meals and associations, with abundance and scarcity.

I, personally, will never forget the night Jen Fonteyn and I snuck out of my bedroom to steal fancy food from my mom’s work party. We were so stealthy, sneaking down the hall, going down on all fours and commando-crawling on the gold living room rug and past all the drunk grown-ups in their fancy shoes and panty-hosed feet to reach up and snatch two creampuffs off a very full cream puff plate on the table.

We scurried back down the hallway, totally joyous in our criminality, right?

Giggling, we sat on my bed, counted to three, and crunched into our creampuffs.

Just as quickly, we spat them out, gagging.

“Water! I need water!” Jen screeched.

The cream had gone bad. The puff was created by my Nana. Nana could not cook.

I’ll never forget the taste of that creampuff: rancid cream mixed with confectioner’s sugar.

Taste is also a sense that pulls in sight and smell and touch and even sound, right? Think of the crunch of a cracker or dog bone or apple. The way buttered corn cobs feel on fingers. The melting of ice cream or chocolate. How good food might make you happy and bad food might repulse you and make you look twice at your nana.

Food can trigger our memories and our characters’ memories, too.

There’s a bit more beyond the paywall.