food writing prompts

Food Writing Prompts: Your Own Desk is a Prompt

Published by Elatia Harris + Wednesday, August 13, 2014 Permalink 2

by Elatia Harris

So many great writers need their writing rooms to meet precise specs. E.B. White preferred a rough-hewn, minimalist space, with nothing but a typewriter. Virginia Woolf needed lots of green around her, and took some serious kidding about it from her sister. I have noticed that a writing room is almost never gender-neutral, even when the writer is going for a low-key, orderly space that gives little away. There’s something I need, that I’ll give up things I like to get: a window. Looking at photos like the National Trust photo above, of Vita Sackville-West’s writing table at Sissinghurst, I always notice — does the writing table face a window, or a wall?

Which leads me to wonder — how much of a writing prompt is your desk itself? It has four corners, like the ancient Chinese idea of the Universe. Within that space, you can put anything you have that helps. When you look up from your work, are you still seeing with the mind’s eye? What could you arrange to see, physically, that would give you the most of what you needed to keep writing?

Elatia Harris is a writer and consulting editor in Cambridge, Mass. She is most often at work on books and articles about food, wine and travel. Contact her at elatiaharrisATgmailDOTcom or via text at 617-599-7159.

Food Writing Prompts: A Brighter Kitchen

Published by Elatia Harris + Saturday, August 2, 2014 Permalink 2

by Elatia Harris

We value a bright kitchen for many reasons — ventilation, ease of cleaning, the unimpeded visibility of the food we prepare, and not least, the maintenance of the mood of the cook. The cook is almost always the owner of the kitchen, now. In a centuries-old kitchen, however, like this one at Townend in the UK (National Trust Photo), that was not the case. There were paid workers who lacked for light and fresh air, in the kitchen all day and into the night. In these circumstances, even a tiny slice of light makes a big difference. One candle, reflected in a glass bowl full of water. It was called a light enhancer, and it could bring deep joy.

Elatia Harris is a writer and consulting editor in Cambridge, Mass. She is most often at work on books and articles about food, wine and travel. Contact her at elatiaharrisATgmailDOTcom or via text at 617-599-7159.

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, July 28, 2014 Permalink 0

How to Use a Food Writing Prompt

Schedule a minute or two with a prompt, whenever you feel stuck. Whether you sense the deep need of a new idea, or you want to feel more centered by clearing space around you before you write, using a prompt is the very opposite of procrastinating.

We have gathered a selection of prompts for your pleasure and productivity – some with stories of their own, some with an implicit demand that you write the story, some for clearing your mind, others for the experience of sheer marveling. We’ll keep adding to it, too.

To build your own collection of prompts, look around you differently — right now! Are there photos, sea shells, paperweights, bottles of perfume, spiritual symbols, or even baseball cards that are special to you? Maybe you walk by them every day, and they’ve been in the same place long enough to be invisible to you unless you look for them. Gather a few of these things onto a little tray. Handle them. Sniff them. If you feel a little less bogged down now, and sense a re-set, then you have been prompted.

That’s how it works. It’s tiny, but powerful.

Food Writing Prompts: M.F.K. Fisher

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, July 28, 2014 Permalink 0

The Gastronomical Me. by MFK Fisher, photo courtesy of http://www.chanticleerbooks.com/shop/chanticleer/20267.html

Food Writing Prompts: M.F.K. Fisher

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.–M.F.K. Fisher

Food Writing Prompts: The Morality of Plenty

Published by Elatia Harris + Friday, July 25, 2014 Permalink 1

The Morality of Plenty

Splendid Food — Does it Have a Moral Dimension?

by Elatia Harris

In The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Simon Schama tells of the sickening tensions produced in 17th-century Amsterdam when far too much in the way of material goods sat badly with an ethic that twinned virtue and thrift. The Dutch were suddenly able to have anything they could name, from anywhere in the known world. Immediately, they began ascribing sinfulness to certain new foodstuffs, candied fruit being high on their long list of gruesome luxuries.

Dutch painting of the 17th century illuminates a question familiar to us now: Has splendor beyond dreaming no moral dimension? Paintings such as this — Still Life, by Adriaen van Utrecht, painted in 1644 and now in the Rijksmuseum — both celebrate and condemn the expanding sensual world, full of the transient beauty that distracts without sustaining, but that so delights us. We too know that struggle, that makes it hard to think of the rarest and most wondrous foods without ambivalence.

For a writer, is it a matter of tone? Or one of content?

Elatia Harris is a writer and consulting editor in Cambridge, Mass. She is most often at work on books and articles about food, wine and travel. Contact her at elatiaharrisATgmailDOTcom or via text at 617-599-7159.

Resources

Published by Jonell Galloway + Thursday, July 24, 2014 Permalink 0

Stimulation for Writers in the TRE Community

Food Writing Prompts

Do you have a great idea every single time you sit down to write? An idea you are on fire with?

If so, that would be most unwriterly.

Not feeling inspired, however, is what keeps many writers from being productive – even from beginning to be.

Productivity will come with application. Inspiration is a matter of showing up for it. Be there.

Be here, too. Where we provide you with stimulation. Writing prompts, for instance. Rather than ask you to force a focus that won’t come, we invite you to jumpstart your productivity with writing prompts. Whether visual, verbal, or olfactory, prompts work the way leafing rapidly through a cookbook works, when you can’t think exactly what to cook: you may not see a recipe you’ll perform, but your thinking gains in ease and speed from small doses of stimulation that throw open big windows for you. Check out our food writing prompts.

Food Writer Role Models

Be who you are, of course. It’s the Socratic lesson.

And it’s hard. To make it a little easier, we have assembled a company of writers for you to engage with (LINK TO ENTIRE LIST) en route to establishing both your turf and your voice. These writers may treat food glancingly or with intense focus, but they all treat it vividly. Whether known for their food writing, or known better for writing something altogether different, they are citizens of the world of the senses, and their approach is unerring.

Classic Food Writers

Is food writing from earlier centuries a bit flowery? Does it take too much time to read? No. It’s surprisingly lean, precise and vigorous. Past masters of this kind of prose were not searching for words. They’d found them. Browse these authors (LINK) to see if they tire you with excess. We’re betting that won’t happen. And, please comment to add to the list.

Contemporary Food Writers

Are there true masters among us today? Food writers whose work is both current and lasting? The journalists, memoirists and novelists who now turn their attention to food make our era a very rich one. Food writers of our time have much more mobility than those of earlier times – the world is their material, as it is yours. Browse these authors to find kindred spirits. (LINK) And, please comment to add to the list.

To make sure you stay stimulated as a writer, join our community. You will receive a monthly newsletter, and occasional tasty food quotes.

Food Writing Prompt: Foujita, Wine & Blotting Paper

Published by Elatia Harris + Wednesday, July 23, 2014 Permalink 1

Food Writing Prompt: When Blotting Paper Gets Most of Your Ink

by Elatia Harris

This young woman, painted by Foujita in 1948, puts a pensive face on a harrowing dilemma — failing to make a good enough start on writing to have the courage to finish. Her blotting paper is the record of her distress, our deletions the record of our own. Looks like she’s hoping a second glass of wine will get her over the hump — the little saucers under the glass tell us, and her waiter, how many she’s had. My guess is that her heart is too full. What should she do? What would you do?

Elatia Harris is a writer and consulting editor in Cambridge, Mass. She is most often at work on books and articles about food, wine and travel. Contact her at elatiaharrisATgmailDOTcom or via text at 617-599-7159.

Food Writing Prompt: Maria Callas in the Kitchen

Published by Jonell Galloway + Wednesday, July 23, 2014 Permalink 0

Truly Effective Travel Writing

Published by Elatia Harris + Sunday, July 6, 2014 Permalink 1

Oh man, I really really really really really really wish you were here

It’s just a paint chip — prescott green. But longing and intensity are vividly present, and the writer’s sincerity is unquestionable. A scrap off the Internet that delivers — oh, man. What would you write on your paint chip? What color would it be?

Adriaen Coorte, Baroque Dutch Master of Asparagus

Published by Elatia Harris + Saturday, July 5, 2014 Permalink 1

oil paint on paper mounted on a panel, h. 25cm × w. 20.5cm.. The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Of the Dutch painter Adriaen Coorte, very little is known, not even the year of his birth or death. He was active for about three decades, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Only one contemporary matter of record truly stands out: in the provincial city of Middelburg, where he lived and worked, he was taxed for selling a painting without being a member of the local painters’ guild, after which he joined up. His simple compositions, their dark backdrops, their few and plain props, put him out of fashion, for he painted during the Dutch Golden Age, when nimiety ruled the still-life genre. He was forgotten until the 1950s. Since then, however, his 55 known works, a significant number of them depictions of asparagus, have gained a luster not bestowed on them during the artist’s life. In 2011, a newly discovered painting by Coorte went at auction for more than $4,000,000.

When an artist sticks with a subject over time, it’s natural to wonder why. In the 1600s, asparagus was a luxury food, as it is now. One might make the case that, in any era, an expensive food is a love food on those grounds alone, but asparagus was in the 17th century considered a love food for its special properties. The English physician and botanist Nicholas Culpeper, in his Complete Herbal (1652), wrote of asparagus that “being taken fasting several mornings together, [it] stirreth up bodily lust in man or woman (whate’er some have written to the contrary.)”

Did the reach of the Complete Herbal, a runaway bestseller for its time, extend to Middelburg, then a slave-trading hub whose first university came as late as 2004? How I wish I knew. But Coorte’s images — fruit, butterflies, shells, asparagus — are rich in the symbolic language used by painters of his time, and lit with a radiant specificity that suggests the deeper meaning will be revealed with contemplation.

Still Life with Asparagus, Adriaen Coorte, 1697. Oil paint on paper mounted on a panel, h. 25cm × w. 20.5cm. The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Elatia Harris is a writer and consulting editor in Cambridge, Mass. She is most often at work on books and articles about food, wine and travel. Contact her at elatiaharrisATgmailDOTcom or via text at 617-599-7159.