Welcome to A Month of Rain and Reads, a celebration of self-published and indie SFF throughout the entire month of November. To find out how you can take part and view the whole list of content, visit our introduction post.
Today, we’ve got a guest post by Frasier Armitage, who explores how food can help the fantasy writing process.
“You are what you eat.” I’m sure that expression has made you feel like a right donut at times, but there’s a certain element of truth to it. How often have you had a bad day, only to have come home and buried your head in a tub of ice cream or a mountain of chocolate? Why do we do it? Because those foods are comforting. They affect how we feel and the balance of our hormones. They release good sensations from our brains through our bodies, and as a result, that bad day doesn’t seem so bleak.
The same is true in reverse. Imagine you’re playing a game of truth or dare with friends. You’re selecting dares that are fun, but not too cruel because you want to enjoy yourself. But then one of your friends dares you to eat something you really dislike. Not wanting to lose the game, you reluctantly finish the disgusting morsel of foul terror that is your food nemesis. But how do you feel? Are you still playing nicely, or are you grimacing as you try to get that rank taste off your tongue while inventing ever more sadistic dares for people out of some misplaced sense of revenge? You’ve become the villain and all because of a flavour that’s left a bad taste in your mouth.
In other words, food is your mood. And this is key to us as writers, because when it comes to writing, mood is everything.
The process of creative writing is one of translation. You have an idea in your brain—a character, a world, a scene, a concept, whatever it may be—and it’s your job to translate that idea from inside your head and onto the page. The purest form of translation is one where that image or that character can move from head to page with as little interference as possible. Every external factor makes an imprint on that concept’s journey from the deep recesses of your imagination into the realms of literature. That means your mood can have a serious impact on your characters, worlds, scenes, and concepts.
Have you ever tried to write a love scene immediately after an argument? Have you ever attempted to write an argument while listening to Enya? If there’s a clash between the mood you’re translating and the external factors affecting you at that moment, it can make the business of writing so much harder.
The recipe for success is to attempt to match your mood with the atmosphere of the scene you’re attempting to convey. It seems obvious when you think about it, but if you need to write a character who’s angry, it’s so much easier to do that when you’re angry. Same applies if they’re sad, happy, fearful—your mood is a tool that can help you with the creative process.
Writers use different methods to influence their environment and their mood while writing. Some may listen to music to place them in a scene. Others may vary where they write in order to elicit a certain reaction. I know some who even dress like their character in order to get inside their heads. Have you ever tried to influence your mood while writing? If you give it some thought, you’ve probably tried it in one form or another.
But remember, food is your mood. It’s one of the most powerful influencers at your disposal. Yet, how often do we reach for the same writing snacks whether we’re writing an epic battle scene or a tender kiss? Our snacks are staples that tend not to vary. And that’s perfectly fine. But let me tell you what I discovered about writing fantasy from eating ice cream.
I was talking to a writer friend, and we posed the question: is there anything ice cream can’t do? I’m sure that question isn’t new to you. We’ve all asked it at some point in our lives. But when discussing the answer, we got to thinking that ice cream may actually be able to help us in our writing, so we put it to the test.
We selected specific ingredients to create an ice cream dessert. Those ingredients were: one scoop vanilla, one scoop chocolate, one scoop honeycomb, topped with cherries. We both planned to make our ice cream, sit down with a notepad and paper, and write a story based purely on the taste of our dessert. So that’s what we did.
I wrote the story Dragonpiercer and it appears in my short story collection, A Stitch Between Worlds. It’s a fantasy take on Jekyll and Hyde, except with dragons, and it involves a murder, a betrayal, and a transformation.
Once our stories were finished, we compared them. My writer friend’s story was a contemporary thriller, but it also contained a murder, a betrayal, and a transformation. This discovery startled us. How could our stories be so similar? Why did they contain exactly the same plot beats? I know the most likely answer to that question is coincidence. But what if—stay with me here—our imaginations were both influenced by flavours that spawned our stories, and that’s why they turned out so similar?
This question led me down a rabbit warren of meditations on what kind of an impact flavour has on my own writing process. I began to tinker with the snacks I ate while writing, and I noticed the same pattern emerging again and again—
You are what you eat, but you write what you are. This means, you write what you eat.
I know it may seem bonkers to think that the food we eat can have such a hold over our stories. But haven’t you ever been hangry? Food is such a controlling factor in our lives, and if we can take control of that factor, we can use it to our advantage.
Perhaps you’re writing a fantasy world where your characters stop off for an ale and pie in the nearest tavern? Why not get yourself an ale and pie before you write that scene? It can transport you to the place in an instant and give you so much more of a feel for the characters and setting.
Perhaps you’re writing a character who’s a dwarf, and another who’s an elf, and you’re struggling to make them different from each other? Why not assign them each a flavour, eg chocolate for the elf and banana for the dwarf, and then eat chocolate when writing from the elf’s perspective and banana when writing as the dwarf? You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to write them differently.
Perhaps you’re struggling with creating an antagonist, or there’s a torture scene that is eluding you? Why not just spend a little time thinking about the flavour of food you hate the most? You’ll find the nasty parts of the story will likely come to you with ease.
This isn’t an exhaustive list. You can use food in all sorts of ways and incorporate it into your writing process. I like to map out the different plot beats of the book and vary what I eat as I come to each section. I’ve found that this allows me to include a greater variety of emotions and pacing. Even figuring out what your character’s favourite meals are, or trying to imagine what kind of meal your characters would be, can be a shortcut in getting to know them better.
Food is so powerful, you don’t even have to eat it for it to be useful to you. Even just the smell of certain foods are enough to send us back to our mum’s kitchen, or that fancy restaurant, or the bargain all-inclusive holiday. If food can transport us to a place and time so vividly, then won’t it be useful to us when we’re trying to transport others into the worlds we’re creating?
I remember reading the Redwall books by Brian Jacques when I was a teenager and falling in love with fantasy. So much of his world building is done through food. The characters spend half their time cooking up vittles and blackberry pies and making strawberry cordial. There’s even a recipe book to go along with the series! You might think that to be a trifle excessive, but it’s not. It’s a key element to what makes those books work and have universal appeal. We’re right there with the characters in the story every time there’s a banquet because food is transportive. Would I have grown up to be a writer of SFF and a lifelong nerd if I hadn’t spent so much of my youth picturing vittles and strawberry cordial? Who’s to say?
Look across every successful work of fantasy and you’ll find references to food. There’s a reason for that. While it’s useful to us as writers as a way of conveying certain moods, it’s even more useful to readers when it comes to the business of translation. Your reader has the task of taking words on a page and making them live inside their own imagination. That’s an act of translation. When creating a fantasy world, you’re building something new from the ground up in a reader’s mind. They don’t have a shared point of reference such as “This is New York” or “This is London.” You need to ground your reader in a world that doesn’t exist. Taste is just as important as any other sense when it comes to creating the world for your reader. Food is a shortcut to influencing a reader’s mood, and as we’ve already mentioned, the purer a mood translates, the more effective the story becomes.
Don’t underestimate the importance of a good meal. This is true both in life and in fiction. In other words, there really is nothing that ice cream can’t do!
So what can we conclude from all this talk of food? Simply, that it’s a tool we can use as writers. If there’s food in your story, eat it. If there’s a mood in your story that you’re trying to capture, create that mood with your choice of snacks. It’ll enhance your writing and feed your imagination with a flavour of the scene you’re attempting to translate. And what’s more, it’ll touch the reader in a visceral way by engaging one of their most powerful senses and putting it to work.
It may be a cliche, but you can’t escape the fact that “you are what you eat.” As a writer, why not use this simple truth to your advantage? Use food to adjust your mood, and it’ll help you serve up a spectacular dish of fantasy to your readers. Now, go and cook up something epic.
Bon apetit!
About the Author
Frasier Armitage writes science fiction. Which is another way of saying he’s a thirty-something self-confessed nerd who sits in a dark room scribbling in notebooks about things that are currently impossible.
When he was a tyke, his first doodles were of spaceships and superheroes, robots and aliens. Nowadays, his stories have developed from sketches into words, which he’s filling books with.
When he’s not writing, you’ll find him with his wife, watching Keanu Reeves movies, or noodling on his guitar. He’s a part-time robot, full-time nerd, imaginer of worlds, and resident of Earth.
- Website: SpotlightIndie.co.uk
- Bluesky: @frasierarmitage.bsky.social
- Goodreads
