This creative writing workshop will focus on using evocative descriptions of food to help your reader to understand your characters and their life experiences.
Evocative descriptions of food might make your reader’s mouth water, but including food in your fiction is a fantastic way to enable your reader to connect more deeply with your characters, as well as the places and people that have influenced them. Effective food descriptions can provide an insight into your characters’ emotions, relationships, and desires: this workshop with author and novelist Emily James will look at how to achieve this in your own writing.
What will you do in the workshop?
The workshop will include some discussion of effective descriptions of food in literature, along with writing exercises aimed at putting these techniques into practice. Participants should bring an idea of a character that they would like to explore through food.
What can participants expect?
The workshop will reference writers including Stephanie Danler, Melissa Broder, and Bryan Washington. Exercises will involve reflecting on these extracts to inspire our own descriptions of food, both short descriptions of individual ingredients and a longer meal shared between characters.
Who is this opportunity for?
This workshop is for writers who are interested in developing their characters using food, whether you are working on a novel or short story or have an idea in mind.
About Developing Tutors
Developing Tutors offers new and established writers their first opportunity to teach a creative writing workshop with enhanced support from lesson planning to delivery. Following an open call in April 2024, Spread the Word selected 7 workshop ideas from over 40 applications. The workshops will run up to February 2025 and if successful, there will be another open call in 2025.
Bursary Places
We have 5 free bursary places for each Developing Tutors workshop available to those who cannot afford the price of a ticket, allocated on a first come first served basis. Please email [email protected] stating which event you would like to attend for free and if we are able to offer you a place we will. Due to availability, we can only accept one bursary request per person for the series of workshops.
Access Notice
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If you require BSL interpretation to take part, please email us at [email protected] by Monday 10 July and we’ll try to secure BSL interpretation for you. Spread the Word will cover this cost.
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We’ll send through any reading seven days in advance. We can create adapted handouts to writers attending our workshops and events by request.
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If you have additional access needs or questions, please email us on [email protected]
About Emily James
Emily James
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Emily James is a Birmingham-born, London-based LGBTQ+ writer. After graduating from the University of Leeds, she spent time living and working in France, Spain, Denmark and the USA before returning to the UK. In 2022, she won third place in the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize, and in the same year she was awarded a scholarship for underrepresented writers at The Novelry. She has since signed with a literary agent at Mushens Entertainment. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found walking her dog around her local park, coffee in hand. She is currently working on a novel set in the Copenhagen fine dining scene. She can be found on Instagram at @emjameswrites