Your Custom Text Here
--From my latest book, Writing It Real: Creating an Online Course for Fun and Profit @vine_leaves_press .
Available at Amazon; signed copies available at my Etsy store: WritePathProductions.
Excited that Women on Writing published my article today and to share it with you:
“Delicious to Dish: 4 Ingredients That Make Food Writing Fabulous”
Photo courtesy of Vincent Rivaud from Pexels
By: Melanie Faith
What does cooking and writing have in common? A richness of inviting language.
Think about the sheer number of words to describe something “delicious,” for instance. From “decadent” to “delectable” to “delightful” to “exquisite” and “appetizing” and “tasty” and “flavorful” and even “mouthwatering,” each word underscores a very particular quality about the dish.
Speaking of which, even the word “dish” has numerous shades of meaning, tones, and definitions that can lead to descriptive and delightful writing. From the cooking containers to the food itself to an attractive person to giving a friend the scoop by sharing gossip to punishing, as in “you can dish it out but you can’t take it,” the variety of descriptors, contexts, and diction choices make the pairing of writing and nourishment a natural fit. Much like ice cream and the waffle cone that conveys it, they can be a great symbiotic duo.
· Food writing has ample diction options. Our descriptions of the foods we stir, spoon, swirl, chew, or slurp tend to be precise and as varied as the salad of verbs we can choose from to denote how we compose or eat our meals and certainly how we feel or felt about them and/or the people who made them. One of the reasons writing about food is so fun is that there are endless words that bring our passion, distaste, or other emotions about making or eating food to vibrant life on the page.
· Food writing has point of view. Some types of writing are easier than others to denote a clear and strong point of view. Food writing tends to have a very focused and clear POV. For instance, people tend to have complicated relationships with certain foods, such as durian fruit or sauerkraut, and it’s often easy to spot the point of view and tone of the author—whether like, love, confusion, or loathing—often in the first few sentences.
· Food writing has theme. One of my favorite qualities about food writing is that however much the focus is on creating or imbibing or not relishing some eating experiences, it’s never ONLY about the foods at all. Much food writing is rich in setting, imagery, and contextual details that tell the readers something deeper about the speaker’s life or the characters’ lives. Food writing covers a dynamic array of topics, from cultural celebrations and birth stories to addiction, divorce, office romances, first jobs and first apartments, and you name it. Food is present at just about every turning point in our lives, so when writing about food we are presented with endless possibilities, not only for what dishes have meant in our lives in the past but also now and what it might mean in the future. Personal essays, recipes, chapbooks of stories or essays, and/or characters describing foods for children and grandchildren are all food writing. Just about any topic or theme you can imagine from your everyday life will have at least one ingredient, dish, meal, holiday recipe, or family barbecue/picnic/party or road trip associated with it that could make vivid and meaningful prose or poetry.
· Food writing is not genre restricted. We often think immediately of recipe books or cooking shows when we think of food writing, both of which are kinds of food writing, but that is just the very, very, very tip of the food-writing iceberg. Poems are also food writing. One-act plays with a dinner scene, also food writing. Restaurant reviews, too—food writing. Flash fiction and flash memoir and hybrid pieces, all food writing. Guess what: so are jokes, comedic essays, scenes from novels or novellas, and just about any other genre you can think of. If it has something about eating or being unable to eat, someone making something to eat and failing or succeeding at it, people congregating to eat, people rejecting what’s on the table to eat in favor of something else, the struggles of eating and cooking, people learning to cook, and so on, then it’s food writing. Period. The vast variety of food writing makes for especially fun writing and reading experiences.
Considering the rich themes, descriptive language, focused point of view, and genre possibilities, food writing is one of the most exciting writing experiences an author can have. Like a meal to savor, food writing invites a writer’s imagination, memories, and talents to the table, month after month, year after year.
***
My Food Writing class begins on Friday, April 8th. I’d love to have you and a friend join me for this delectable and fun class. Click for more details and the sign-up link.
Super excited to offer my Flash Writing class this summer! Mark your calendars now, and I’d love to have you and a friend join me for this online workshop, starting Friday, July 1, 2022.
Sign-ups are now open.
More info: Featured Online Flash Writing Workshop: In a Flash!
I’ll be using the book I wrote on this topic, which is also available and handy-dandy for all writers, whether you’re in the market for a class or for a prompt-filled read to get those words flowing.
Who doesn’t love food?! 🥕🥔🥑
But what, exactly, is food writing?
It includes a diverse multitude of writing projects and styles to savor, including (but not limited to):
*fiction
*memoir
*review
*personal essay
*free-verse
*flash
*blog
*graphic novel
*recipe and/or cookbook
*haiku
No previous cooking or restaurant experience necessary for the class. If you relish words and the flavors of fabulous food (and haven’t we all?😋), this class welcomes you.
Excellent news! My article was published this morning in the WOW newsletter. Happy to share this fun topic with you, and if you’re interested, my next online class begins Friday, January 14th (details here: Fundamentals of Graphic Novel Creation).
Photo courtesy of Kelly Sikkema @kellysikkema at Unsplash.com
“Why Try Writing Graphic Novels?”
By: Melanie Faith
The initial answer is simple and direct: graphic novels are an exciting mode of storytelling and can encompass several genres. There are comics that are based on vignettes or flash fictions. There are comics that are fully autobiographical and others that are semiautobiographical and based on some real-life events. There are comics that are memoirs. There are comics whose protagonist is entirely fictional as well as comics based on historical figures and events from the past. There are animal comics. There are comics whose protagonist is otherworldly (science fiction and fantasy), from another realm or distant galaxy, from another time period or dimension. There are comics that have everyday protagonists who get stuck in traffic and hate certain foods, like you and me, and comics where the protagonists transcend the daily drudgery as secret superheroes who whip out their cosmic powers just in time.
Even more than that initial answer, however, graphic novels share key traits of meaningful literature that you’re already probably writing to hook readers into these visual stories, such as:
--Graphic novels have strong characters with a perspective and a problem that’s not easily (or forever) solved: whether from a down-on-her-luck office worker who just can’t catch a break or a fairy queen with magical abilities who leads her fellow fae to victory, if you can dream up a protagonist who has something to say and a perpetual conflict to try solving, then you can craft a strong plot for a graphic novel. The office worker decides she’s going up for the big promotion, only to get bested by the office bully, but only for a few panels before she cooks up another plan to aim for that promotion or something equally important to her growth. Even when the fairy queen swoops in to save her folk today, another destructive force must appear—in the next chapter, page, or even the next few panels—to challenge her abilities and give her a reason to test her powers and lead her fellows past obstacles to victory all over again. Struggle, momentary victory, struggle again is a good motto for graphic-novel planning.
--Graphic novels often have characters who are delightful oddballs or passionate outcasts who question their place in the world through their actions, dialogue, and their inner doubts and fears as they move through these challenges, however slowly, haltingly, or while bumbling sometimes. Insecurities, fears, limitations, frustrations, self-consciousness, anxieties—call them what you will, but graphic novel protagonists are often recognizable and loveable for the very sensitivities that keep readers reading (and putting themselves into the protagonists’ shoes). Just like in short stories and movies, nobody roots for a character who is picture perfect in every way and has it all figured out every step of the way. Graphic novel protagonists are often thrown into new environments where they feel overwhelmed for much of the narrative or cannot escape their home environments where they have never felt the same as others. In both situations, the protagonists demonstrate their character, mettle, sass, and wit through how they cope (or barely cope or mostly fail to cope) with not having complete (or even partial) control over their lives. Humor and pathos both result from tales of protagonists doing the best they can as fish out of water.
--Graphic novel characters and narratives touch on universal truths. Whether your novel is set on a distant star or in Chicago of 2130 or in your own home office this very year or in Boston in 1850, one of the hallmarks of graphic novels is that they illuminate what it means to live in an imperfect world with others who frequently have different goals that conflict with one’s own. Readers want to identify with and cheer on the situations protagonists navigate through and, as a bonus benefit, feel a sense of investment in the protagonists’ struggles and triumphs and encouragement about their own lives.
Yeah, but comics are written by people who are whizzes at drawing, right? Nope. Graphic novelists don’t have to have the most up-to-date software or even be skilled at drawing or anywhere near professional-artist level. If you can sketch a table or shapes and/or draw a stick figure, you can get your point across based on the story your graphic novel tells and the strength of your protagonist, antagonist, conflict, rising actions, and story arc. Plenty of writers team up with professional or student artists to make their comics, which is another option. Comics can also be created from photography and collage as well as simple line drawings and from various forms of drawing software and apps.
So, if you have elementary artistic skills or can take a photo or sketch basic shapes and draw a stick figure, possess an interest in making good literature with a strong, identifiable protagonist who gets in hot water and feels hesitant about their vulnerabilities and yet finds their own way, bit by bit, it’s likely you can turn a strong character and story premise into an entertaining, meaningful graphic novel. It’s well worth dipping your toes into the graphic-novel waters to give it a try.
Image courtesy of Kelly Sikkema @kellysikkema at Unsplash.com
15+ Creative Methods for Outlining Your Novel
By: Melanie Faith
As a writer, my longer fiction and nonfiction projects have been aided by prewriting. Outlining has numerous benefits that range from organizing initial ideas (which tend to lead to further ideas, like rabbits from a hat) so that they are not a jumble floating (and too-soon forgotten) in the brain to saving time because the story has a natural narrative arc rather than disconnected passages or entire chapters that veer off plot or point.
Just as writing your novel is a creative process, your outlining can be a creative and whimsical process. Feel free to dabble with a few outlining methods and to mix-and-match your prewriting styles.
What could outlining your novel look like? Great news! There are oodles of formats for outlining. Outlines don’t have to be in the strict Roman-numeral format (unless you want them to be). An outline might be crafted in any of the following styles:
· a hand-drawn map of your story’s setting(s).
· a Pinterest or Facebook page or vision board you create of photographs and posts related to your protagonist or any other element of your narrative.
· a collage (physical or digital) of images or dialogue.
· a series of sketches or drawings for the first chapter. The sketches might be free-form, in storyboard form, or comics form, either hand-drawn or drawn using digital sketchpads/software.
· an audio or video clip—or several—that mirror the rising action(s) or tone of various scenes.
· a web of catch-phrases, dialogue, or verbal imagery related to your antagonist.
· a chart with webpage links related to your conflicts and rising actions.
· a color-coded chart of characters’ backstories.
· a list in a bullet journal.
· a free-write passage of dialogue between the protagonist and antagonist.
· photos that represent the protagonist’s inner thoughts or conflicts.
Outlining is flexible and can include as much or as few details as you’d like, and you can add to the outline as new or different ideas occur. It’s all a step in the right direction: seeing the big picture of your project.
More great news: you don’t have to plan every single element of a book before writing a single paragraph of the draft, although you could if you want to. Some of the best projects I’ve written (or read) began with enough planning for just a chapter or two at a time, if that. Sometimes, just a few short, scrawled sentence fragments about a character.
You can also outline after you’ve started some of your project, whether you’ve run into a snag or just want to plan for the next steps in your project.
A few more outlining ideas:
· You could color code or date material on an outline to keep track of when and how your outline evolves.
· You could outline on computer but also by hand (break out the highlighters, colored pens or pencils and markers, your favorite notebook, pieces of printer paper and stickers—whatever motivates you most).
· Sometimes, my students have purchased dry-erase boards and erasable markers and put them around their office for ease of planning and adjusting initial ideas.
· Other students have used giant sheets of brown-bag paper or butcher paper and permanent markers to chart their next narrative course.
Outlines should be specific enough to encourage a pull towards your manuscript but open-ended and with enough wiggle room that it can be expanded, adjusted, or edited at any part of the prewriting or first-drafting process. It’s perfectly fine to have all or part of an initial outline and then veer away from the outline in your writing. Or to adjust your outline as you go.
Just because it’s written on the outline, don’t force yourself to adhere to your plans if it’s slow-going or if a better idea shows up. The latter happens to me all of the time, especially mid-novel; I just re-plan my next plans when it happens and see where the new ideas take me. In all of my first outlines for my current WIP, my protagonist was on his way cross-country to attend a writer’s colony—until I got a few chapters in as I drafted and it hit me that a storm would prevent his arrival. Take two: a little regrouping, a free-write, and a new list of phrases in my writer’s notebook, and away I went in the direction of the new plot.
Nothing is set in stone, during or even after planning—and that should be encouraging.
Aim for making enough ground work to invigorate and flesh out your initial characterizations, settings, and plot, while remaining open to restructuring as you begin the writing process and as characters reveal more of their struggles and obstacles in the paths to reaching their goals.
View your prewriting as an exciting, ever-evolving map to where your novel likely might be headed, and enjoy the creativity of the prewriting and drafting processes as the pages of your story accumulate and ideas keep arriving.
Learn more via my online class, Outlining Your Novel with Ease, now taking sign-ups. Check out my fall/early winter online writing classes here.
“3 Ways Writing and the Visual Arts Inspire Each Other”
By Melanie Faith
Over the years as a writing teacher, I’ve discovered that many of my talented writing students are also visual artists. From fellow photographers to sculptors, painters, and collage artists, there’s something about the skills used to write vivid imagery and/or scenes that also translate well into other art forms, and vice versa.
So, what can a writer learn from photography (or another visual art) that will enhance their prose or poetry projects?
· Focusing on bite-sized portions create resonance. When you write a scene, chapter, stanza, or paragraph, there’s a format you have in mind—after all, a single chapter or poem can’t last forever. Just as you can’t include everything into a single scene or chapter or poem, you can’t include everything in visual art. A visual artist focuses on parts of a scene for a landscape photograph or painting; it has to stop somewhere. As writers, we make decisions, especially in later drafts, about both what details are extraneous to the whole as well as details or images that must remain to create a unified whole that speaks to a reader’s/viewer’s own experience.
One of the many definitions for “resonance” at Dictionary.com, states: “The ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions,” while Merriam-Webster.com defines the term as “a quality of richness or variety” and “a quality of evoking response.” Ultimately, in both writing and visual arts, this is exactly what we want: layers of meaning from the writer/artist that are interesting and hook the reader/viewer so much that the imagery presented stirs their own emotions just experiencing our art.
Made with my ‘90s Canon and Kodak Gold 200 film: “Curlicue L3.” 📸✨
That’s one of the great joys of reading, writing, and making art: the more specific and focused our own works are, the more others will click with the work and want to spend time with it. Creating bite-sized portions of art informs, entertains, and captures the human need to be understood. What could be better than that?
· Layer it up: the more meaning the merrier! In an essay or poem or novel, no matter what the theme is, there’s more going on in the writing than just a sentence-or-two synopsis of what literally happens or what its main idea is. Reaching into the grab bag of literary analytical terms, there might be one or several concurrent elements that contribute to make a scene, chapter, poem, or visual arts piece seem so real-to-life, including but not limited to: symbolism, auditory or taste or visual imagery, synecdoche, metonymy, juxtaposition, simile, and/or metaphor, and more. Below the immediate level of what the work is “about” literally, the deeper, gooier, more subterranean meanings reside and represent where the creator does some of their best work.
Working subtly to show something deeper about human life beyond the immediately obvious—indeed, the word crafting is splendidly apt here—writers and artists work emblematic representations of ideas, emotions, and conflicts into their work to deepen and connect with reader/viewer experience. Real-life ain’t easy or simplistic, so our writing and art better not be either—there should be more-than-meets-the-eye occurring concurrently with the easier-to-spot initial image or dialogue.
As writers/artists, we shape and sculpt ideas so that they are both what they appear to be and also much more than they at first suggest. That kind of composing requires both literal and figurative decisions that make the utmost of each word, each line, each paragraph/stanza, each page, or each canvas, digital chip/pixel, and/or paint.
· Both writers and visual artists actively compose reality. That is, we consider how parts of a whole interact with each other, we leave in necessary imagery and crop out unnecessary or cluttering details, we omit and/or change the pace of reality by slowing down/zeroing in focus on some elements so that others fade into the background, and more.
The element of careful and mindful composition is somewhat subconscious (at first draft, before editing, anyway), and it’s also where a lot of the plain fun of being a writer or artist occurs in the conscious stages of making.
Some subjects, themes, and ideas we might be innately drawn to, such as trains, but the majority of our work revolves around recurring ideas or symbols from an array of life experiences that seem to recur, both in our lives and later in our work—to take the train example further: the artist’s father might have been a 9-5 commuter for many years and so the recurrence of trains in the artist’s work may suggest a whole host of ideas from family responsibility related to jobs, feelings of missing a parental figure, to what it means to live in the suburbs but work in a city, and more.
Writing and the visual arts integrate many decisions at both the conscious and subconscious level of creation: exciting and complex composition that continues to inspire, mystify, challenge, and motivate our work from the first experiments in each medium through all of the works we produce and share.
Clearly, writing and the visual arts are meaningful, rich explorations into self-discovery and also important genres for commenting on and sharing ideas about the complexity of human experience. One art form—writing—can inform and inspire growth in visual arts as we reach to become better self-expressing writers and insightful communicators to a wider audience.
Photo courtesy of Nathan DeFiesta on Unsplash.com