Never Write When You’re Hungry

Image: DOB

After a dear friend of mine, who also happens to be a writer, finished reading my latest manuscript, she said, ‘There’s a lot of food in your books, isn’t there?’ It’s not surprising, considering that food is one of my obsessions – eating it, cooking it, poring over cookbooks, planning dinner parties, even dreaming about meals. So I suppose it’s natural that delicious food should feature abundantly in my manuscripts.

Part of the problem is that I tend to write when I’m hungry – or more exactly, I become so engrossed in the writing process that I forget to eat. (Yes, I do know it’s not good for my health.) Most mornings I wake up, go straight to the laptop and write for a couple of hours, oblivious to the gurgling of a reproachful stomach. The missed breakfasts manifest themselves in my writing.

You can see the results in MR CHEN’S EMPORIUM and A PLACE OF HER OWN. Every morning my female protagonist, Angie Wallace, goes to the local café, and not just for a piece of raisin toast or a healthy bowl of muesli. Mostly she consumes big, hearty meals, incorporating all my favourites elements – sourdough toast, savoury muffins, corn fritters, crispy bacon, perfectly poached eggs and the sauce to beat all sauces – hollandaise. That sauce even permeates its way into a conversation between Angie and her rather prosaic landlord about the colour that she intends to paint the walls of the Old Manse. Naples yellow hue, she tells him, an artist’s colour (after all, she is an artist) and then she adds by way of explanation: ‘…the colour of hollandaise sauce’. 'You mean the stuff they put on my eggs Benedict,' he replies, 'that wouldn't be so bad.'

‘Never shop for groceries when you’re hungry’, the diet experts warn us. ‘You’ll end up buying chocolate bars and potato crisps’. It’s true, isn’t it? When your stomach’s full, you can summon up the willpower to proceed through the confectionery aisle with nary a sideways glance. But just watch how the snack food piles up in your trolley when you’re hungry. It’s the same with writing. Sometimes, I notice that a sentence I've just written contains a whole list of food items, almost as though I'm composing a menu, and then I know it’s time to stop and have something to eat. When I return to the laptop, I set about abridging that list. If I’m fully sated, I might even delete it altogether.

And what of the reader? Can reading about food make you hungry? Of course, it can. And not just reading cookbooks either. I recall my childhood encounters with Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’. Although the food in those books could never be described as ‘gourmet’, it certainly hit the spot with a hungry eight-year-old. Invariably, after reading a description of a mouth-watering picnic, I would head straight for the kitchen to raid my mother’s biscuit tin, filled as it always was with home-made melting moments, or date and walnut slice, or jam kisses, or peanut cookies, or ANZAC biscuits, fragrant with golden syrup, or …

Actually, excuse me for a moment, while I just disappear into the kitchen … 

Deborah O’Brien

July, 2012