Are Your Characters Starving? By Cheryl Owen Wilson

We populate our books with people or other worldly beings. Even beings have to eat don���t they? Are they eating bland oatmeal and drinking only purified water? If so, what does that tell the reader about them? Or are they sitting in front of a 3lb. tray of spicy, boiled crawfish, ripping the tails to enjoy the meat contained within, then completing this ritual by sucking the fat out of the crustacean���s head? Now that, my friends, will tell your reader something entirely different about said character, even if he���s green and has four hands. Why just think of how many of those red tiny creatures he could consume with those extra appendages.

I���ve just returned from my childhood home in the deep southern toe of Louisiana, a place where food is its own character. From gumbo���which bares a remarkable resemblance to the muddy waters of the many swamps peppered throughout the state���swimming with white rice���brown would be sacrilegious���to the stuffed sausage known as boudin���food is its own unique being in the land of my youth.

The first words out of anyone���s mouth when discussing my home state is, ���The food, oh man ���the food���!��� Followed lasciviously by. ���Do you know how to cook like that?��� When I say yes, their next words are—“Can I come to dinner?���

Now I know other cultures have their own unique food characters. But I���m writing about what I know and what I know is gator on a stick and grits glistening with sunshine yellow butter. I know if I have my protagonist dusting powdered sugar from her perfectly creased black slacks and eating beignets, she is probably sitting somewhere in the Deep South and drinking a steaming cup of syrupy, chicory coffee.

So again I ask you, are the living beings in your books starving? In many stories I read the meals are skipped over, fading from one scene to the next. What a waste. I say, let���s start feeding our antagonists and protagonists. Take for example, the 4-year-old girl in a story I started this morning who bites the heads off her Barbie dolls. Now don���t you want to know what she had for breakfast this morning or better yet, who or what she���ll have for dinner tonight?

I know you want to go out and eat now. But first, please tell me how food plays a part in your stories.

��

Tagged: Characters, creative process, Food, Louisiana, Silence of the Lambs, southern culture, Thomas Harris, writing