Challenge 7: Food
We invite you to get creative using food and flavour - Expand your creative writing to include our sense of taste.
This challenge requires you to think about how you can use flavour to replace sight as the sense we use to describe. What flavours represent your characters? Are they as sweet as blueberries? As soft as over-ripe bananas bursting from their skins...? Are they bitter like olives? It is up to you!
Perhaps you should spend some time concentrating on your food when you eat, or offering to help cook, so you can focus on the smells and tastes as you experience them. What emotions might they connect to? What places do they remind you of? Could you go on a journey through food?
Then invent a story for it. Perhaps it is based on something true, a memory associated with it, or something completely imagined.
For this challenge, you might try some new foods, browse through recipe books for ideas or spend some time thinking about foods you hate - what is it about the flavour that you dislike? How does it make you feel?
Once again, we invite your writing to be in different forms. You might write or create:
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A story
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A biography
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An article
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A graphic story / comic
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A poem
You should:
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Read and look through the stimulus material to help you come up with ideas.
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Plan your work to help you think through what you want to create.
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Use a dictionary and a thesaurus to help with vocabulary and spellings.
Possible titles might be (you can use your own if you want to):
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Just a pinch
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Take one cook, and one kitchen
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Through the steam
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Lemons
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The Perfect Mix
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Burnt Toast
This challenge's criteria:
1. Word count
No more than 600 words or two pages if a graphic text
2. To describe an object in a way that gives it feelings and personality
This means to use powerful vocabulary to create vivid descriptions.
You might challenge yourself to:
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Include similes and metaphors
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Include alliteration
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Include repetition
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Include personification
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Use taste and smell as the primary senses to focus through.
3. To use a food item to represent something
You could use the food to represent a moment, a story or a feeling.
You might also use your food to give your story a moral message.
4. Control the accuracy and effect of your writing
This means to use paragraphs, punctuation and vocabulary as accurately as you can.
You might challenge yourself by:
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Using single word or single sentence paragraphs / stanzas to emphasise something or to create a specific feeling
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Use a semi-colon to connect ideas together
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Use an ellipsis to include a cliff hanger or to build expectation
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Use a first person narrator but as the food speaking
FREE RESOURCES FOR YOU!
The stimulus material:
This week, please find some of the stimuli around your home or out and about. Choose food ingredients, food or veg, or a meal to write about.
This file includes extracts from literature for your pleasure. They each include an element that links to this week's theme. Reading them will provide excellent examples of how to write about the theme as well as give you a chance to enjoy some amazing literary moments.
