Are the tastes in your prose disgusting or delicious? It does matter, you know.
Tastes: Disgusting vs Delicious or In Between?
As writers, we may sometimes forget to add any sense cues beyond vision and sound. But there’s more to life than just those two. How much of the tastes of things do you put into your prose?
So, let’s look at adding tastes to your prose.
Food, Glorious Food!
It’s pretty much a cliché, but the bottom line is, if you’re struggling to meet word count during NaNoWriMo, one of the easiest ways you can do that is to sit your characters down for some food.
Disgusting vs Delicious Main Courses
I know that I have Ceilidh do a lot of cooking, and some of that was, yes, to meet word count. But it’s also because it’s a large part of her job. She originally gets a job at the Edwards House because she washes dishes and doesn’t break anything. But to get a job at the Lowell House, she makes the master of the house an omelet.
And the truth is, that’s kind of an odd thing to make for anything other than breakfast in the 1870s. However, I know I will need to edit out a lot of her cookery.
In The Enigman Cave, the crew eat from farms on board, including goats, fish, and chicken. But the Enigmans on the surface eat fern fronds. A big part of first contact is sharing food.
On the other hand, not everyone is such a good cook. In the Time Addicts prequel, the kids joke that their mother has burned soup. This is taken from real life—my mother actually left a pot of soup on the stove for too long, the water evaporated and, long story short, she burned the soup.
But there are also foods which we may find disgusting.
In Mettle, the food becomes hit or miss very quickly. Characters are eventually grateful to share a meal of squirrel. But before that, as a part of the foreshadowing, every character wastes food in some way or another.
If the story had gone on any longer, the characters would have ended up dining on rats.
Sides, Appetizers, and Snacks
Josie eats nearly nothing for breakfast, and her suppers are almost as parsimonious. But her lunches are huge, and they include everything from soup to salad to whatever appetizer works, like Crab Rangoon or jalapeño poppers. She likes to eat—she just doesn’t like being sick.
Dessert!
Whether it’s stale candy bars pilfered from Kitty’s locker, or a cake for Marnie‘s birthday, or tangerines smuggled to Peri, characters have sweet tooths. But then again, so do I.
Protein Pills and Other Oddities
The Cabossians in Untrustworthy don’t eat the same kinds of foods that we do. They subsist off manufactured nutritional supplements and wild herbs which grow along the banks of the Central River.
For spaceships like the Valentina Tereshkova or the Orlando, the last thing I wanted was to have them eating weird cubes or getting injections instead of meals. Eating is, after all, one of the great pleasures of life. It would be a shame for us, as a species, to realize we never wanted to eat normally again.
Diets and Religious Restrictions
Because Josie’s sister Hayley is modern Orthodox, she keeps a strictly kosher home. This means she won’t always eat at her siblings’ homes. It also means she’s a lot less likely to go out for a meal unless she knows for certain that a restaurant keeps kosher properly.
In The Enigman Cave, Jazzie puts Marnie on a diet—and Marnie hates it.
Drink
It’s a big part of Untrustworthy for characters to go to taverns. But they don’t drink what we drink. Rather, their drink of choice is fermented Aromossian oil. No, I don’t know what it tastes like, either. Yet tellingly, it’s not the vagrants getting drunk—it’s the so-called ‘respectable Cabossians’.
As the events of Mettle go on, characters take to drinking a lot of tea to try to stay warm. But this is not before a vat of coffee is made outdoors, in an enormous pot, with no filter for the grounds… and the occasional leaf.
During the Time Addicts prequel, Drusilla and Kent share a bottle of wine, but that happens off-camera, as it were.
And in the first Obolonk trilogy, Peri and Dave go to a number of swanky restaurants, and that often means wine or even Champagne with their meals.
Legal and Illegal Drugs
While Josie is sick, she isn’t on any sorts of medications. But in Mettle, Dez is a pot dealer—and he’s not above taking the medical marijuana that belongs to Mink’s Aunt Doreen. Marnie is treated for knee problems, but those are injections and not swallowed.
Disgusting vs Delicious Takeaways
Not all of your characters have to eat. In fact, you can go through an entire NaNo-sized novel without feeding any of them.
But eating scenes are relatable and easy to put together. And, if you’re pressed to meet word count, they are life savers!
How good does your prose taste?
Want More of Using Disgusting vs Delicious Tastes and Other Background to Evoke the Senses in Writing?
If the idea of leveraging disgusting vs delicious tastes in your writing resonates with you, then check out my other articles about using sense cues.
Sense Cues:
- Senses
- Scene Setting
- Set Dressing—Visual Cues in Writing
- Hairstyles and Costumes—Visual Cues in Writing
- Aroma vs Odor or Stench—Olfactory Cues in Writing
- Mixing a Score in Words and Music—Sound Cues in Writing
- Disgusting vs Delicious—Taste Cues in Writing
- Hot or Cold, Rough or Smooth, Hard or Soft—Tactile Cues in Writing