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I’m so pleased that 5 of my photos were chosen as part of J. Mane Gallery’s latest juried exhibition. The theme is “Eat.” Among them are these 2 photos that were so fun to take and make. 📸😊
See my other 3 photos and all of the amazing art by talented artists at: J. Mane Gallery “Eat” Exhibition.
If you’re in the market for an awesome online writing class, check out my similarly themed Food Writing for Fun and Profit (starting Friday, October 6th).
To art and food!
Wonderful news! 🥳My article was published by Women on Writing today! Check it out, and then give the writing prompt a whirl. 📝
Four Reasons Food Can Spice Any Genres You Write
By: Melanie Faith
It’s just about autumn in the US, which is an important weather shift in the seasonal states. Humidity dissolves as leaves turn into a crayon-box bonanza of shades while it remains sunny, bright, and crisp enough for a walk in a cozy, knit sweater and a mug of steamy tea after. Another signal of the time shift is the shortening of days and the lengthening of my appetite.
While I enjoy eating all year ‘round, there’s something special about the chill in the air and the darkening of the evenings that increases my appreciation for sweet and savory flavors. Bring on the ooey-gooey cakes and breads, the creamy mac and cheese, the hearty, saucy spaghetti Bolognese!
No matter the season, the rituals of eating; snacking; food buying, storage, and preparation; meal clean-up; and food sharing surround our days and can be integrated into our writing to enrich our work. Let’s look at four reasons why adding food writing to our repertoire can deepen our writing:
Food connects us: Nothing reminds us more of our communities and the cultures we belong to than food. References to the recipes, meals, and snacks your protagonist grew up eating and still makes can provide shorthand for so many parts of your character’s background and life, including but not limited to her family of origin’s geography, socioeconomic status, and more. Certain foods will instantly be connected in readers’ minds with a particular state, region, cultural heritage, or country, while other foods and beverages are universal to many communities—which will give your readers other insights into how your unique character fits into a larger trend or social sphere or, conversely, how they might rebel against it. Including meals or restaurant scenes can also demonstrate how your character interacts with others, what she feels comfortable saying or not saying, what she wants to share in public compared to her private thoughts, and so much more.
Speaking of which, food can create both bonds and tensions: If one of your characters loves attending a weekly potluck she organizes and hosts once a month while another character lives for a quiet dinner for one at home to get away from the stresses of his day job and rejuvenates with the radio on while preparing couscous and a salad, you’ve already set up a way to show (rather than tell) extroversion and introversion. You’ve also set up a scenario where their differing styles could create conflict if these characters become friends, coworkers, family, or romantic partners. Characters can react strongly, or they might have inner hopes or misgivings about what is being served, about their dining companions, or about where the dining takes place.
Food is also often connected with larger social issues that deeply impact many people both locally and globally—such as food instability, hunger, and ever-rising grocery prices—that you can shine a light on within your writing in nonfiction, poetry, flash, novels, and many other genres.
Photo by Atie Nabat on Unsplash
Favorites and aversions make us each unique. Including small details about what your character loves and loathes eating can strengthen your characterizations. Just like all of us, characters can have detested foods show up in their lives and have to navigate their distaste quietly or verbally, or they can absolutely love quirky regional favorites that their friends and family can’t stand or refuse to try. Conversely, we all love to share our favorites, and sometimes these favorite foods are eagerly adopted by those we love, spreading the joy. Writing that praises, describes, humorously disses, or delights in foods can connect with your audience’s own experiences of likes and dislikes.
Try this exercise! If you write fiction: your antagonist has just invited your protagonist to dinner. Where will they go? What will they talk about? What is being served for dinner? If you write nonfiction, poetry, or other genres: jot a list of five of your favorite or least favorite foods. Pick one of the foods, set a timer for twenty minutes, and describe a time when you were served or served others this particular food. Use as many sensory details as possible to denote the food and reactions to it. Go!
Care to learn more? I have a few spots left in my Food Writing class that begins Friday, October 6, and I’d love to have you and a friend join in the fun. Details at: Food Writing for Fun and Profit.
Do you love language and helping others make their writing clearer and more resonant with readers? Have you ever wanted to launch your own freelance editing business and wondered how in the world to break in? Then this info-packed webinar is the one for you!
I’ll be giving an online webinar on Friday, September 15 at 1 pm EST. Cost is $39 and includes helpful handouts, a presentation with oodles of tips, and a Q + A at the end of the session.
More info, and sign up today, at: https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_FreelanceEditorWebinar.php
I’d love to see you there! 🥳
So pleased that my article was published today as a Women on Writing Spotlight article. Check out the prompt I share as well:
“Abounding Images: An Invitation to Imagery Power: Photography for Writers”
By Melanie Faith
I found three rolls of brand-new film in a drawer earlier this week that I’d forgotten I’d purchased. It felt a little bit like unwrapping a Christmas gift to myself. Eager to head into the great weather, I took my ‘90s Canon Rebel outside for a few nature shots. The heft of the camera body nestled in my hands just right. Working with a physical, clicky dial to blur the background and focus on the foreground was like stepping back into a favorite pair of blue jeans—comforting and the perfect fit. Need I say that I took the rest of the roll and returned to my desk, smiling?
I’ve also been taking a lot of photos with my cellphone camera and find it a wonderful photographic experience, too. It is featherweight, and I can take as many pictures as I please. Cellphone cameras have come a very long way in the past ten years. Smart phones are equipped today with much better software and make sharper photographs than any of my first digital cameras. And they’re quite easy to use, and super handy. Rare is the person without a phone as a near-constant companion, which (of course) makes them absolutely the best for capturing inconspicuously as we go about our daily lives. And sharing cellphone photos is so easy it’s a dream.
Whether you prefer making photos with an old-school film camera that takes film or film cartridges, taking pictures with your cellphone, or a combination of both, there’s something meaningful and meditative about the art of photography. Much like the craft of writing, we begin to see our surroundings, our daily lives, and even ourselves a bit differently, a bit better in some ways, by taking the time to focus on elements we might previously zip past on our way to the rest of our appointments and to-do lists. The fact that no two people see the same images in the same way nor interpret them in the same way enhances our development as artists.
Making a photograph, like making a poem or a short story or a song or a chapter in a novel or an essay, is deeply personal. We have so many options that it’s exhilarating. We get to choose the subject. We get to choose the angle we take the image from. We get to choose the crop or zoom of the photo. We get to choose if we print the photo to make it a physical object in the world or if we keep it a digital file. We get to choose if we make the photo part of a series on a subject or if the photo is a one-off and stands alone. We get to choose light source and time of day and if we scan or upload the photo to software to alter its hues (hello, black and white!) or shoot in black and white mode or with b & w film.
It is in making these choices, often intuitively and in quick succession and very frequently learning and experimenting as we go, that we grow in other art forms as well.
Thinking about making a better photograph certainly continues to influence and encourage my poetry as well as my prose. Photography, much like writing and other art forms, focuses on the importance of the image, the resonance of created expression, and the great fun and challenge when we take the world as we experience it and offer a new creation that very likely will connect with other people who themselves make writing and other art.
There’s no prerequisite needed, and I’ve had students who made visceral, beautiful, jaw-dropping photos from disposable cameras, phone cameras, underwater cameras, instant cameras, pinhole cameras, film cameras of many makes, and even from photosensitive photographic paper.
The field of photography is wide open to individual interpretation and vision. Begin where you are, with that little “Hmmm, that’s interesting” when you’re out on a morning walk, and see where it takes you. One snap, one click, one moment documented at a time.
Try this prompt: Make a photo today of an object someone else uses every day. Aim to show a special quality about this object—whether its shape, its size, its hue, its placement in the home or outside, or some other quality. After taking the photo, either write a few sentences describing this object, why you chose it, and who uses it OR create a character who uses this object and write about that character for fifteen or twenty minutes. What would happen if the character reached for the object and it was missing? Go!
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My online class Imagery Power: Photography for Writers starts Monday, July 3rd. Sign-ups open: to register, clickety-click!
I also wrote a fun craft book called Photography for Writers that’s packed with photo tips and prompts, sure to get your writing and your camera inspired. Get a signed copy here at Etsy or through Amazon.
This afternoon, I’ve given myself a few hours to rest. I started with some reading, some writing, then an afternoon nap, then some doodling, and now this post.
May has been bouncy and active in a good way, and it’s always refreshing to work in little pauses whenever possible for the simple power of joy—you know, those hobbies or spaces of free time that are the first to get shoved aside in a busy schedule.
Photography is certainly one of my places of simple joy. So is doodling, so I combined them and worked on this perfectly imperfect doodle of one of my film cameras, the Canon Rebel K2 I got for a song in 2019 or 2020 online.
This summer, starting July 3rd, I’ll teach one of my favorite online courses, Imagery Power: Photography for Writers. Just looking at this camera reminds me of the creative fun that awaits in the class—in which students are free to use any kind of camera (or a mixture of cameras) they fancy, from cellphone cameras to digital cameras to disposal cameras to photosensitive paper, to make their own photographic images and then write about them.
I’ll use this handy-dandy book, Photography for Writers, that I wrote as a class text and also have just written some new prompts that’ll be fun to take for a test spin. Teaching the class also inspires my own photographic process, and I’ll be doing the assignments alongside my students.
Have some time this summer? Care to tap into some simple photographic joy? No previous photography experience necessary. I’d love to work with you and a friend. Sign-ups currently open! More details: Imagery Power Clickety-Click.
As we think about summer, the time is perfect to pause and think about how to work in a little more time here and there, a little more time this week or as soon as possible, for these little pauses that bring you joy. To summer and much happiness ahead!
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If you’re looking for an online class to jumpstart your creativity later in the year, I also have these two courses coming up:
Food Writing for Fun and Profit (starts October 6, 2023, 5-week class; sign-ups open)
I’m so pleased to announce that a poem I wrote about roller skating was published today in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review’s Spring 2023 issue! The theme is “Growth.” It’s also a great joy to appear in the same issue as my dear friend, Charles. Follow the linky-link to check out the issue, filled with poetry and photography by many talented artists.
A splendid way to start National Poetry Month! To all of the poems we’ll read, write, and celebrate this April!
Starting a new notebook—this little 5 x 7 beauty was a whole $1.25—is always a good feeling for me. Potentiality on each page. I’ve been experimenting with different types and sizes of paper for my doodles.
Last night, right before sleep, I broke out my new notebook, my 0.7 mm lead pencil, and my colored pencils and made an outlined sketch of a photographer. It was a peaceful, simmering hour as I drew a preliminary/reference sketch on scrap paper, opened the second page of the notebook (I often skip the first, as it sits a bit askew in the binding), and then started this drawing.
Filling in the figure was a particularly pleasant part of the process as well—colored pencils force a kind of quiet contemplation and over-and-over-and-over patience that slows my thinking and flashes me back to childhood hours quietly coloring or writing.
It’s probably not surprising that I would choose to draw a photographer in motion. One of my other happy places is photography (a few years ago, I wrote a book that combined my writing with my photography practice and tips, Photography for Writers).
Much like when writing, when I’m behind the lens, the daily drops away. I like the challenge of making what I see and how I see it into a composition. I like that it’s not an easy process nor a process I can take for granted or even a process that I fully steer, but that there are many do-overs available—as many as I have time and inclination to make.
Mostly, photography is a place of rare transcendence where the world slows and I make my thinking and my seeing into something at once me and not me. It’s a good space.
This is my first go-’round with sketching what I’m calling a silhouette portrait. Kindly ignore the erased shoulder and erased original feet, which I only realized after pondering them were pointing in the wrong direction from her body’s stance along with the smudge at the bottom of the page by the date. We’ll just call those markers of authenticity.😁
I have to say, though: I was a little surprised that one or two elements of this drawing felt to me like what it feels when I’m behind my camera: a liminal in-between space that just is what it is and unfolds as it should (if, frequently, not as I would have originally imagined).
Or maybe this is just my fancy-pants way of saying I couldn’t believe it actually sort of resembles a human and not a stick figure. 😆
The little notebook says “Plan” on the cover, but as we know, there are many things we simply cannot plan. Mostly, we can move, slowly, in a slightly new direction and see what happens, and then repeat the process as the happening unfolds. Drawings, photographs, writing, ourselves—all unfolding.
Happy March! I had so much fun writing a fresh flash essay about my doodle last month that I decided to create another one to share. 🤗
“Interior/Exterior: Reflections on Drawing a Scene”
I almost wrote this reflection yesterday afternoon, but I was hungry and promised myself that after eating I’d get right to it. And then, I just needed to pay a bill quickly and I’d sit right down and write. And then, I remembered a time-sensitive email, and then…well, you know the rest.
Yesterday’s writing didn’t happen.
Alas, I had the “perfect” hook pop into my head yesterday, but tonight is no longer yesterday. So, scrap that. My tone today is different, and my hook has evaporated like a cartoon bubble. So be it. This reflection won’t be about whatever that would have been, and that’s okay, too.
Earlier this week, I also promised myself some time to doodle during a break, and I did follow through on that intention. I decided to try to draw a scene—a whole interior SCENE!—which I haven’t attempted since…probably middle school. Yeah, it’s been a hot minute.
I usually doodle one thing at a time, or parts of a scene, or words/phrases paired with a mini doodle or two, but to fill a whole sheet with myriad elements kept my brain and my hand hopping.
I put on some music, broke out a coffee-table book filled with gorgeous photos, picked the one that called to me most as a reference photo that I then adjusted as I went.
I started my scene on a scrap piece of newsprint paper I bought online this summer in a jumbo, 500-sheet package.
There’s something about knowing that I’m not going to save the first drawing because it’s on the kind of paper that tears when an eraser hits it that frees up my creativity. Nobody will ever see this first sketch so, who cares? Onward!
Without contemplation first, hand motions of pencil on paper are often quite soothing.
I try to get that way about more things: that not skipping ahead to envision outcome. Sometimes, my creative process lands, and I don’t stop to examine or even to think about forming whatever I’m creating until I have a draft or five. Those are the best days.
More often, though, my mind loves nothing more than just to keep skipping ahead. Ahead, ahead, ahead!
I’m certainly not the only creative to find my process varies like this. Depending on my day, my mood, how tired I am, how hungry I am, fill-in-the-factor-here, the challenge of crafting something is either easier than imagined, or more frustrating than imagined, or (most frequently for me) somewhere in-between, but it’s rarely the same type of journey more than once.
Each piece needs something different of us, like every friend, like every life circumstance.
My original sketchbook scan in all of its uncropped glory, spirals and all.🤗
So, my interior scene (which I also drew in pencil first, free-hand, on the sketchpad page and then traced with felt-tipped marker and pops of color from watercolor pencils) has some walls that are certainly not architecturally sound, a baseboard that shouldn’t look like it’s cutting through one of the plant’s fronds, some picture frames that are crooked despite practicing perspective, and a chair that I’m pretty sure doesn’t even resemble a chair.
On the other hand, I got the happiest kick while drawing the arched doorway between the rooms that reminded me of more than one friend’s home, and drawing the little locks on the big bay window, and then having a light-bulb moment about adding in a pop of life-giving green on the plants, and attempting some splash of light across the floors, and making the one rug a sisal rug with squiggle motions, and then drawing lines for wooden floors, my favorite flooring—all, nothing but joy and in the flow.
The floors!
The wooden floors. That’s right—I was going to write something about those yesterday.
There was also originally going to be something about the lemonade I tried recently and loved. But today’s reflection needed to be the way it turned out here—about the challenges (for me, anyway) of drawing whole scenes in scale and with perspective but doing it anyway, and something about the comfort of putting elements together that make an interior that becomes exterior, which is also, pretty much, what we do when we create, whether it’s a conversation, a painting, a poem, a dance, or a birthday party. So be it.
On the balance, not bad for a cozy interior. Not great or professional, but not shabby, either. Onward!
Happy February!
I’m excited for all that this new month will bring, including my Leaping Worlds online creative writing class for historical-fiction and time-travel writers.
Begins Friday, February 10th. There are still a few spaces left, and I’d love to work with you and a friend. Details at: clickety-click.
Also, here’s a favorite and motivating Hafiz quote to enjoy.
To February, and sweet inspiration!
Super excited to have reviews of From Promising to Published at Liberate & Lather and at Word Magic!
From the Liberate & Lather review: “I ended my read feeling built up, and options I never thought of were gifted to me. My power to forge along as a writer has been renewed. If you are on the fence about publishing or not publishing, wrestling with imposter syndrome, or needing fresh ideas to get your work in front of many eyeballs, then you want this in your hands.”
Many thanks to Angie Clay. Check out Angie’s awesome Ignite & Write Subscription Boxes, inspiring podcast, and self-care products.
From the Word Magic review: “Melanie’s goal is to demystify the mystifying process of publishing and she succeeds in this by giving a step by step, logical sequence of milestones and how to accomplish each goal. The chapters are coherently arranged for easy navigation. The author also advises that not every tip will apply to every reader, and they should feel free to pick up on the ones that most suit their situation. One piece of advice I liked was this: say you are a writer/author right from the start, not an imposter, and cling to that knowledge.”
Many thanks to Fiona Ingram at Word Magic. Check out Fiona’s amazing books and her wonderful series website: clickety-click!
