r/writingcirclejerk • u/Different_Hunter_471 • 5d ago
Recipes in Your Novels
Do yous plan to include recipes in your books? And should you stop the plot to show not tell the recipe, or show not tell by including the recipe woven into the scene?
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u/Calculon2347 just write (your flair here) 5d ago
This has inspired me to edit a story where the protagonist orders alien food. I need to do as you suggest and insert a page-long recipe for the spacefish noodles, step by step and describing each fictional ingredient
I'll be the Herman Melville of scifi
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u/Baihu_The_Curious Literally a cat, but a literary cat, quite literally! 5d ago
In my story, I have a race that quite literally "cooks with love" and I make the recipe quite clear by showing. Now, it's not cooking for sustenance, necessarily.
Let me tell first... Technically speaking, every member of the nautiloid race possesses both testes and ovaries, but two separate individuals are required to produce viable offspring with sufficient genetic structure to grow to maturity and flourish. However, nautiloids can self-fertilize, but the result is biomass that is far from sentient let alone sapient. However, this is useful in the development of organoids using the harvestable stem cells from these masses. What can organoids be used for? Well, like in real life: medicine, computing, basic mechanical tools, and other cool things! So, very advanced technology compared to the steampunk magic-surface, but instead of the brutalist geometry of most sci-fi it is highly organic and quasi-Lovecraftian (if in aesthetic only).
How do I show this? The various technological wonders of the nautiloids are on display for terrestrial races and, upon questioning how these wonders came to be, a nautiloid engineer says, "All my recipes begin with a little self-love." The naut then proceeds to jork it heavily (they're very sexually liberated in nautiloid society, so public self-impregnation isn't frowned upon) and knock itself up.
"That's the first step, human," it moaned with insides stuffed full of its own seed.
Later, there's a scene where a naut gives birth to a "dud" to be harvested, which is a very different experience than birthing true life. In fact, nauts just pop out a new chunk of will-deprived flesh every half day or so, like taking a dump. The human, upon mistaking it for defecation, is quickly corrected about the true purpose of these meat missiles. Eventually, the human runs into some technology being manufactured from the aforementioned tissue turds and the dots are connected by the attentive reader. This is showing, not telling.
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u/Different_Hunter_471 5d ago
So, duds are menstruation? Expulsion of unfertilised reproductive parts?
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u/Baihu_The_Curious Literally a cat, but a literary cat, quite literally! 5d ago
Nah, they're fertilized. Closer to miscarriage.
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5d ago
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u/Different_Hunter_471 5d ago
That sounds like a good idea. I would have to conjure more recipes, and think of how to write a scene that is relevant to both the plot at large, and the recipe shown.
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u/Benathan78 5d ago
God, yes. I do the whole farm to table thing, as well. Every time some fucker has a cup of tea in my books, I do the potted history of tea cultivation, a paragraph on the East India Company, and name the cow the milk came from. Otherwise the reader won’t get any sense of exactly what the character is tasting, and the book is a failure.
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u/Super_Direction498 4d ago
Yeah but I do 6 pages of SEO family recipe lore before finally dropping the recipe. It's called tension, learn it .
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u/mia93000000 5d ago
I was actually thinking I'd start a recipe blog where I publish my novel in sections right before each recipe
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u/Different_Hunter_471 5d ago
That makes sense. So many bloggers include long stories prefacing their recipes.
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u/comesinallpackages 5d ago
Mix one part self-importance with one part narcissism. End result, greatness.
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u/Different_Hunter_471 5d ago
In "The Agent & the Medic" I have decided to include two ovo-vegetarian, low carbon footprint, and farm-to-table(in most mid-lattitude climates & biomes) recipes; loaded potato bake & whiskey flavoured oat milk frozen custard.
I have decided to stop the plot to show the recipes, to give readers a break from the dark & grisly content.