Food in Fiction: Quirks and Customs

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. For most of us, that means celebrating with a big turkey dinner. However, in my Italian-immigrant family, every holiday calls for a multi-course dinner that typically consists of antipasto, soup, bread, pasta, meatballs, salad, cooked vegetables, roasted meat, potatoes, fresh fruit, and dessert. For Thanksgiving, we simply accommodate the turkey tradition by featuring the bird as our roasted meat.

I am so used to our family’s customs that I neglected to prepare my husband (then boyfriend) before he attended his first Thanksgiving dinner with my family. When my mother served homemade fettuccine and meatballs (following the requisite antipasto and soup), he assumed there would be no turkey. Being an easy-going guy, he didn’t say anything and simply ate his fill of pasta and meatballs.

(I couldn't find clip art of fettuccine with tomato sauce and meatballs, but you get the idea.)

Well, imagine his surprise when we whisked the pasta plates away and my mother brought out the bird, vegetables, and potatoes. Afterward, he told me he'd been too full to have more than a bite of turkey, and as a result, it hadn’t felt much like Thanksgiving to him. (Now he knows to pace himself, which I’m sure he’ll do tomorrow when we celebrate at my aunt’s.) Ironically, for me it wouldn’t have felt like Thanksgiving without pasta.

In this series of posts, we’ve been talking about the role of food in fiction. As JoAnn discussed, food can “ground fantasy in reality.” I agree. I also believe food plays an especially important role in historical and multicultural fiction. Everyone has to eat. Seeing what a character does and doesn’t eat can give readers insight into that character’s world, whether it’s a world of Scrapple and food rationing, as Mary Ann described in her post, or one where Christmas Eve dinner revolves around seafood, as in my novel Rosa, Sola. Because food-related customs and rituals can serve to bind people together or to set them apart, food can affect a character’s relationships, too. I still recall feeling like an outsider at lunch in elementary school. While other kids were eating peanut butter and jelly on squishy white bread, I had to deal with mortadella on crumbly, homemade Italian bread. No one ever swapped sandwiches with me!

Of course, food can be a characterization tool in all types of fiction. Like real people, characters may have quirky food preferences, preferences that can even affect a story’s plot. We see this in picture books like I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato by Lauren Child and I'd Really Like To Eat a Child by Sylviane Donnio, illustrated by Dorothee de Monfreid. But food preferences can also play a role in middle-grade and young-adult stories. After all, where would the plot of Twilight and other vampire books be if vampires craved macaroni and cheese instead of human blood?

For everyone celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, I wish you a happy and safe holiday. As you sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner, I encourage you to take note of any unique food customs and rituals. And even if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope the following Writing Workout will help you think about incorporating food quirks and customs into your fiction.

Writing Workout: Food Quirks and Customs 

Do you have any food quirks? Perhaps, like me, you only eat cold cereal without milk. (I just can't stomach soggy cereal!) Or maybe it's a friend or family member who has a food quirk. For example, one of my brothers-in-law will eat peanut butter on bread, or jelly on bread, but never peanut butter and jelly together on one sandwich. Try writing a scene where one of your fictional characters has a food-related quirk. How is that quirk a reflection of the character's overall personality?

Are there any food-related customs in your family, or special family recipes?
In the her last Writing Workout, Esther suggested you record a family recipe along with a memoir about the recipe's creator. Now write a scene where family members try to recreate a custom or recipe without the originator present. What happens? 

Happy writing!
Carmela

Reader's Question on Dialect and Diction or Easy on the Tabasco Sauce

Today's Reader Question is one that I address nearly every day in my writing:

"In MG and YA novels, do you ever use diction from other cultures or parts of the country in your characterizations? Or do you focus more on a character's actions, behavior and gestures to define them?"

Great question! And my answer is....it depends!

My novels (so far) have taken place in very specific places and times (Jackson, Mississippi, 1964-65 and Pittsburgh, 1943-44). Because the setting in these books (Yankee Girl and Jimmy's Stars) has the same weight and importance as my main characters, to ignore how characters sound style: is a lost opportunity to add another dimension not only to the characters, but to the entire story as well.

The way people talk has always been a big issue in my own life. I moved to the South from the Midwest when I was ten, and to this day, whenever I open my mouth, native Southerners say "You're not from around here, are you?" Most of my cousins are Pittsburgh-born and raised. When we talk, I note the difference in their sentence structure, and the local expressions that pepper their conversation. Pittsburghers are so proud of their unique vocabulary, it has been officially dubbed "Pittsburgh-ese", complete with dictionaries, websites and cultural studies.

In a mobile society that has been made ever smaller by TV and the Internet, Americans are losing their geographical and cultural speech patterns. We are beginning to all sound alike, with a homogenized "standard Broadcast American Speech" *sd they called in Speech Class) I think it's sad. We lose something of our roots in the disappearance of "local color" in our language.

So to answer the question, I often use speech as a component equal to action and gesture in developing a multi-dimensional character and to add depth to my fictional word. HOWEVER...

Pure dialect or dialog written entirely using regional expressions can be murder to read. Maybe it's just me, but looking at a page that thick with apostrophes substituting for all the dropped "g's" in an attempt to "sound Southern," makes my eyes hurt. (If you don't believe me, find an old edition of anything by Joel Chandler Harris.) If you don't have an issue with your vision, then try reading the page out loud. For me, anything that I can't read aloud smoothly, is not great writing. If I have to re-read a dialect-laden sentence over and over to puzzle out what the heck the writer is trying to say...well, that's a sign of dialect overkill. Using dialect correctly is a tightrope act. Too little of it, and it calls attention to itself, which of course, takes the reader of the fictional world you have worked so hard to create. Too much of it, and it's like someone dumped a bottle of Tabasco sauce on your meatloaf. A little brings out the flavor; too much, and your dinner is simply inedible.

The trick to using dialect and local speech is a light hand in places where the meaning can be understood in context. It's easy to fall into a trap of stereotypical speech. All Southerners don't sound alike, just as all Midwesterners or New Yorkers don't sound alike. Listen to your character. Let your character talk to you in his own voice. I find this easy, because I have never attempted a speech style that I haven't heard first hand. I never drop "g's" or the initial sounds of a word to "sound Southern." I prefer to use expressions like "we're fixing to go" or "what're you so ill about?"(Translation: We are about to leave, and why are you in a bad mood). I handled the Pittsburghese in Jimmy's Stars by using my mother, who left Pittsburgh in 1943, as a model. If the terms "slippy," "lift supper" and "redd up" had remained in her speech after all these years, they must be central to Pittsburghese, and fairly easy for the outsider to comprehend in context. (Translation: slippery, put a meal on the table, and to clean up a room)

Sometimes speech has more to do with the age and social class of a character. I have a pet peeve of indicating the age of a young character by using the words "gonna," "gotta" and "wanna". (In fact, when I teach Young Writers classes, some of my students are surprised to find out that these are not actual words!) If I use each one of those words once in a book, I feel that I have taken a short cut by resorting to the stereotypical "mush-mouth" teenspeek There are other ways to accomplish the same effect. Kids don't talk in complete sentences. They use contractions. They sometimes use incorrect grammar. They run words together. They talk in Text Speak. Ok, I made up the term, but some of my fifteen-year-old's friends do say things like "You're my BFF" or "OMG, OMG" (and if you don't know what those mean, you need to eavesdrop on kids more often!) Again, all kids don't sound alike. Let your character be your guide.

My last point has to do with the use of historically accurate terms. Or, if you don't write historical fiction, allowing your contemporary characters use outdated or archaic expressions. Like from when we grew up. You know what I mean? Like groovy? Can you dig? (Hopefully your mental ears are hurting by now as I "laid my best 60's jive on you.") If you DO write historical fiction, you have to be aware that some commonly used words today had an entirely different meaning fifty, thirty, even ten years ago. Believe it or not, there was a time when there were no "nerds." When I was in junior high (oops middle school), nerds were "goobs" or "social misfits" and several less politically correct terms. Yes, sometimes I do use politically incorrect words, but only if absolutely essential to the story and character, and never, if there is an acceptable equivalent...like "goobs." In Jimmy's Stars"goobs" were "sad apples", "wet blankets" or "drips." Again, who says this, and in what context, should make the meaning apparent to the reader.

To sum up (finally!!), in using dialect and expressions, less is more. More is...too much of a good thing. Easy with the Tabasco.

THIS WEEK'S READING. I've been slacking a little since school has started here (always a trauma at my house.) But here is what I've managed to digest between High School Emergencies:

CHAPTER BOOK: For the Duration by Tomie DePaola
MG/YA: Night Fires by George Edward Stanley
MG/YA CONTEMPORARY: Slobby Ellen Potter
YA FICTION: After by Amy Efaw, Jumping Off Swings by Jo Knowles, Donut Days by Lara Zielin
YA NON FICTION: Years of Dust by Albert Marrin
ADULT MEMOIR: The Slippery Year by Melanie Gideon.