To fix a bland opening or beginning area of your novel or memoir, even a screenplay—try the sense of taste. You’ll stand out AND join authors who are selling well.
Most writers ignore sense of taste in opening pages—and that’s why it’ll help you.
We writers often focus on action. We also easily fill in colors, smells, and a sense of touch. What if after the tenth, twentieth, or second pass on your material you revise your beginning by including a significant taste sensation? How about trying the quick fix now, before you send out your new material the first time?
Readers REMEMBER tastes, flavors, and food. We gravitate toward taste, and that’s why it can work on pages one and two in particular.
The sense of taste can be used anywhere within the manuscript. The Harry Potter series has Aunt Petunia’s “violet pudding,” and we know about the novel and movie with “fried green tomatoes.” How about “green eggs and ham”? Or “pickled limes” in Little Women?
Look at current authors using food for killer book sales in any genre.
In her suspense/thriller “Sean McPherson” series, Laurie Buchanan puts scrumptious food on the pages and table of her crime-fighter family.
In John Sandford’s Easy Prey, his first paragraph contains this line: “He lay with his eyes closed, breathing across a tongue that tasted like burnt chicken feathers.” The writer means business. I’ll read on.
Harlan Coben’s The Boy From the Woods has this tasty material on page one of Chapter One: “They threw things at her. Paper clips. Rubber bands. Flick snot from their noses. They put small pieces of paper in their mouths, wad the paper into wet balls, propel them in various ways at her.” Coben used our familiarity with the taste of paper to draw us in.
In The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman the mystery begins with Joyce at lunch having shepherd’s pie. We know instantly we’re in England.
Sometimes a certain food is the basis of something special within a plot, tying strands of action, time periods, and family members together. That’s the case with the well-received novel Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson. Title your novel with food! It’s a draw! By page 15 we have this:
“Black cake. Byron catches himself smiling. Ma and Dad used to share a slice of cake every year to mark their anniversary.”
The author goes on to describe more about that special cake, which ties together the novel’s beginning, middle, and end.
What about memoir and nonfiction? Food on page one sells there, too. Perhaps you’ve heard of the uber-popular nonfiction books by Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass. In her shorter book, The Serviceberry, she gets us right into “taste” on page one as a touchstone for how we live and improve our communities.
“They are all around me, Cedar Waxwings and Catbirds and a flash of Bluebird iridescence. I have never felt such a kinship to my namesake, Robin, as in this moment when we are both stuffing our mouths with berries and chortling with happiness.”
Food helps express all five senses. Some foods crackle; colors are vibrant or not; smells might be ambrosial, heavenly, or not; food textures in our hands or mouths may pull in readers, too.
The sense of “taste” makes us pay special attention.
Food references on your page one might lean on food history, recipes, politics, chefs, farmers, gardeners, other people, travel, places, culture, money, adversity, beauty, animals, seasons, surprises, and more.
What is your character’s favorite food? For an exercise, describe it through their POV on page one and add a twist.
Taste success with your delectable writing.
Christine DeSmet: Author 