The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: food

  • Food, glorious food

    In looking over my Confabulator entries from the past few weeks, I realize that food and cooking are controlling metaphors for how I write and think about writing. Food is, naturally, delicious, and preparing delectable food is a natural metaphor for all types of production,including literary.  I find food to be at the center of human existence, and if there is anything more inspirational than good  coffee, with cheesecake, I have no idea what it might be!

    But this week we are focusing more on how other media influences our writing.  You know, I love movies, and we watch the Simpsons on an infinite loop in our house, but I don’t feel like moving pictures have a major effect on my writing.  The two genres that do influence me are advice columns and liturgy.

    A proliferation of advice columns (many published weekly, with years of archives available for mid-week fixes) is one of the many blessings of the Internet age. I do love the folks that people trust to make narrowly useful ethical decisions for them! Dan Savage and Dear Prudie are my favorites, to be sure, but many lesser luminaries light the way as well.  Once, I thought about writing a NaNo novel from the POV of an advice columnist, but thought better of it when trying to plot character development entirely through one-off letters. But often, I use the format to shape my stories.  Now, what would Prudie say about this situation? How about Dan? How about an advice columnist working in this particular culture…

    I am also influenced by the liturgical settings of my religious tradition.  Long have I planned to write a novel whose structure is based off a church service (start with a greeting, confession, etc, and have hymns sprinkled throughout). Although I have not done this directly yet, I do come up with something else to work on every time I start contemplating it. I like to invent liturgies for the various new religions in my stories, and someday my service-inspired novel will emerge full formed from the oven and be amazing.

    Geez.  Another food metaphor spiced it up this time.  At least I am consistent!

     

  • You Influence Me, You Really Influence Me

    Everything I see, everything I do, eat, touch, and hear influences my writing in some way.

    Television gives me an idea of what works and what doesn’t in character reactions and motivations. Sometimes If I can figure out within the first five minutes of a show who the murderer is, maybe something went wrong in the telling. Sometimes it’s more about recognizing patterns in a particular show. The same writers, the same characters, the same circumstances—in some shows that pattern gives away the murderer to someone who’s spent several seasons analyzing each episode. It doesn’t mean it’s a mistake, necessarily. But it is something for a writer to take away to either use or avoid in her own work.

    Movies, like TV, are for learning what works and doesn’t work. In this longer form, I can learn about the effective (and ineffective) use of tension and how it rises and falls to carry the story forward. I believe you can learn as much, if not more, from a bad movie as you can a good one.

    Food has to come into play, too. In my series, I have a closet monster who’s a gourmet chef. I am not a gourmet chef. This means I have to pay attention when we go out for a really good meal. A special New Year’s Eve menu we had at a local restaurant two years ago made its way into book two. The scene required a very fancy menu, and I still had the menu from New Year’s. I ate that meal myself. It was phenomenal. So I reused it on a dinner-cruise scene.

    Music is not so much about learning for me as it is about mood.

    I don’t think there’s a quicker way to influence a person’s mood than with music. Songs tend to be short, maybe three minutes long, and yet in the space of that time I can have all my worries lifted off my shoulders or be reduced to tears. It’s a kind of magic all on its own. When I write, I only play music without lyrics, since I need my own words to go on the page. But mood is everything. When I’m writing about Zoey, I often to listen to the Final Fantasy station on iTunes radio. When I write my djinn stories, I listen to music that sounds more like it’s for belly dancing.

    Art is for inspiration more than any other medium. I can stand in front of a painting of a woman in a chair for a half hour, wondering about her life, whether she was happy, if she had any pets or children or bad habits. After a day spent at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, my fingers itch. My eyes are unfocused and my thoughts are far away. All those paintings and sculptures swirl around in my head and form characters and scenes in faraway places.

    For a writer, everything is influential. It’s all or nothing. If we closed ourselves off from our surroundings, we wouldn’t have anything to write about.

  • Other Media Influences (Week of 27 February 2012)

    We’ve talked about our writing influences and heroes quite a bit here at the cafe. We do that because they’re important to us, they shape us and how we write. Being a confabulator of any kind means being the sum total of everything that one has read, watched, heard, touched and tasted. Have you read a passage about a meal that made you want to go out to eat? Are there songs that make you happy or sad for no apparent reason? Movies that make anxious to go home and write something?

    The team here this week is talking about the other media that inspires us or fires our imagination. When you take your seat at the Cafe this week and get that mocha in front of you, savor the heat of the milk, the aroma of the espresso, the sweetness of the chocolate on your tongue. We’ll tell you everything you’d ever want to know (and probably a little more) about how those things fit into our stories.