For this week’s creative prompts, the theme is food. Yum, right? Take a few minutes, or more, to write about one of the great animal pleasures. Of course, writing is just one idea. Don’t hesitate to create in whatever way that you feel like, in whatever medium sounds fun (even if you’re not great at it). Make music, paint a picture, do a dance, make a toothpick sculpture. You get the idea.
- Make a dream shopping list without regard for budget, availability, or storage space—with only regard for yum.
- Write about a time when you realized that you’d lost the taste for a certain food or drink—either temporarily, or for good.
- Recall a meal eaten in the company of someone with whom your relationship later changed in one drastic way or another.
- Focus on a moment—real or imagined—in which variances in regional food terms caused a misunderstanding or miscommunication.
- Without using numbers or measurement of any kind (including time frame), give instructions for the preparation of a specific dish.
- Write about a time when you ate food you really didn’t want to eat, whether because you were being polite, because you were forced to, or because it was the only option.
- Explore the archives: search ‘cookbook’ or ‘recipe’ in Google, select Books, click Tools, then adjust your time range to find a strange or oddly described food from the past to use as a jumping off point.
- Think about hunger. What does it feel like? How does hunger for food differ from being hungry for something else?
- Describe an ideal meal. Include a guest list, details of the space, the dishes, any background music or foreground entertainment, conversational topics, etc.
- Write a scene or poem in which an ingredient mix-up in a recipe sends events in an unexpected direction.
Did you miss our earlier, less yum-filled prompts lists? Here they are. Fire one up the next time you get stuck on a larger project, have a spare 15 minutes, or are staring at the terrible blank white page.
Like what you’ve written? Consider turning it into a bigger work, or incorporating it into your larger project. Don’t like it? Instead of deleting it or tossing it, put it in a drawer and return to it later. Sometimes these things need space and time before we see their potential. If you have something polished that you’re proud of, submit. If you have feedback, or ideas for prompts, please get in touch.
[Photo by Edgar Castrejon on Unsplash]