Food

Being a Better Writer: Using Food

Max Being a Better Writer , , , , ,

A quick reminder to start keeping a list of your ideas for future Being a Better Writer articles! Topic List #15 is almost out of topics, which means there will soon be a topic call and a chance to make your requests for ideas and topics heard!

Got it? Good! Because today we’re diving right into our topic, which was inspired by a writing chat I hang out on. You ready? Today we’re talking about food.

Ah food. That subject that everyone has an opinion on. Food is as basic a part of the human lifestyle—or really any living lifestyle—that it’s ubiquitous to existence.

With that in mind, to kick this post off, I want you readers to try a little thought experiment for me. I want you to think of a memory of a favorite holiday. Got one in mind? Now analyze it: was food in that memory somewhere?

There’s a fairly high chance that it was. What kind of food may have varied, but some of you may have even been able to almost taste it as you imagined that holiday.

All right, now let’s try a second little experiment. Just read the following things and see what sort of thoughts pop up at the prompt. Ready? Go!

  • County Fair
  • Wedding
  • Shopping
  • Exercise
  • Business meeting
  • Birthday
  • Break

All right, made it through the list? Now, this may have been tempered a bit by the topic, but how many of you thought of foods associated with those events, activities, etc?

Sure, it might be something simple, like donuts at a business meeting (the 90s standard) or snacking on a break. It might be wedding cake or onion blooms at a county fair. But all of these activities, in one way or another, can, and most likely will, involve food!

However … if you were to look at those events in a book of some kind … how many might skip over the food altogether? More than a few, actually. And those books?

They’re missing out.

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Because it’s Not Always About Writing …

Max Misc , ,

There’s more to life than writing. Which probably sounds odd to some of my readers on here. After all, I’ve kind of admitted that I spend close to an unhealthy amount of time daily perched in front of a keyboard, fingers clicking away at the keys in order to produce the next something (which currently is a short story collection for which the first short story has become a small novella … go figure).

But that can’t be all I do. And, if I were to throw a bit of a “Being a Better Writer” advice moment to this, nor should it be all any writer does. First of all, being in the basement apartment that I rent, simply writing all day every day without any breaks would probably leave my skin a shade of white that would only be matched by paper—which in turn at some point in the future would make an “About the Author” post really awkward-looking (Hey, look who wrote this! Nosferatu!). That, and as a writer, the more you do, the more you can write about.

So, point being, I like to do other stuff from time to time. Stuff that gets my blood moving. But today, just for fun, I wanted to share a new non-writing thing I’ve started recently. Don’t worry, it’s not active. It’s just something fun and entertaining.

It’s the Ultimate Hot Dog Summer Variety Special.

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