My Enemy, My Friend: Hunger

The Pens are thrilled to welcome guest blogger and long time pal, Mysti Berry. Mysti Berry has a B.A. in linguistics from UC Santa Cruz and an M.F.A. in writing from University of San Francisco. Her scripts, novel excerpts, and short stories have won awards from Mendocino to Salinas. Her short story, "Inside Job," will be published next year in a Sisters in Crime anthology. Her first crime novel about a fraud investigator in San Francisco and Las Vegas is due to be finished any day now.

For most of my life, I’ve dodged hunger. The mere threat of a rumbly tummy sent me straight to the Ding Dongs, HoHos, PopTarts, or on gourmet evenings, to a box of mac-n-cheese and a fruit pie for dessert.

Predictably, this led to some serious poundage by my fourth decade. Within a few hours of vowing to behave, I would be hungry, and then would dodge the feeling by eating. Finally, the lovely folks at UCSF Weight Management program suggested a “medically supervised, VLC (very low calorie) meal replacement program.” Instead of my impulse-based 3000 calories a day, I eat carefully prepared 200 calorie doses, five times a day. Surely I’ll fail at this as much as I failed at everything else diet related, won’t I?

Turns out, I am 100% compliant with the program, twenty pounds down and a few more sets of twenty to go. And I’m hungry all damn day. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But with the help of a whole team of medical professionals, I’m able to now just feel the hunger and let it go.

There’s a trick to it, of course.

At 1000 calories of “food” like the early astronauts ate, your body and most of your mind loses interest in food of any kind as it settles into a safe, medically-supervised ketosis. However, I’ll eventually have to go back to the real world of making choices about food, and feeling all my feelings instead of stuffing them down with giant pasta feeds or extra large pizzas. So I’m hard at work on all these things while the relative quiet of the program gives me a little extra time and space to sort things out.

What has any of this to do with writing? A whole heck of a lot. Now that I understand hunger instead of run from it, I can use the concept of hunger for both character and plot development. It goes a little something like this:

1. Figure out what the protagonist needs more than anything else in the universe. For example, Sam Spade needs to believe he isn’t as morally corrupt as everyone around him is—he needs to know he has his limits on the downward slope. So he has to find out who really killed his partner—if it was his partner’s wife, he’s partly to blame. In a newer example, Lily Ivory in Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mystery series needs a community—she was robbed of one because of her powers. Throughout the series, she takes incredible risks that we believe, because we know how much her new friends and position in the local community mean to her.

2. Figure out what the flip side of that need is, what endangers it or threatens it. Back to our examples: Sam Spade’s desires threaten to overrun his morality—after all, he’s sleeping with his partner’s wife when the story starts, and Ms. Wonderly is in a whole new league of femme fatale. And Lily, if the “establishment” finds out about her gifts, or if the new men in her life freak out, she’s at risk of losing her newfound community. We know this would be like death for Sam or Lily, and yet it’s so likely they will be overwhelmed that we just have to keep reading.

3. Find every situation you can that both promises more of what the protagonist needs and threatens to take it away, preferably in the same scene! Sophie Littlefield has mastered this with her Stella Hardesty series—after a lifetime largely shorn of adult love, Stella needs the affection and approval of a romantic partner. The object of her desire, however, threatens her safety, her freedom, and her new day job. We can’t imagine how she’ll resolve this contradiction between absolute need and nearly certain failure, so we have to keep reading.

So for fictional characters as well as real ones, hunger is both a friend and an enemy. Please tell me, what do you hunger for, and what threatens to take it away?

Wanderlust & Coffee

I thought I'd gotten off easy.

No nausea. Mild fatigue. Turns out I can even pull off short hair. (I was told I look French with this even shorter haircut at left. Thoughts?) Chemotherapy isn't so bad, I thought to myself.

But then I found out what my specific side effects were to be. Here are the two that have left me ravenous:

1. I cannot drink coffee. Coffee. If there is anything in the world I'm addicted to, it's coffee. Not only physically. I'm convinced it's overwhelmingly psychological. But that only makes it worse. I'm entering my second month of four months without coffee. Will I make it? Only time will tell.

2. My immune system is so shot that I'm stuck in the house. Not only can I not travel, which sounded bad enough, but I can't go out and be around people. I'm an explorer by nature. I'm used to getting on a plane every couple of months. When I'm in town, I'm trying out a new cafe for writing or stopping in front of a random art exhibit in someone's front yard in Berkeley. Well, not this fall.

But I'm also never one to dwell on the curve balls life throws my way. After a small amount of moaning and planning future travels that seemed quite far off, I decided I'd bring the adventure to me.

Last week, I bought a Lensbaby Composer, a selective focus camera lens that allows you to pinpoint the spot in an image you want to highlight and also focus ridiculously close to objects. That latter point is rather important when one wants to make an adventure out of one's house.

The lens arrived earlier this week. Here are a few of my first shots.

Three Lewis Chessmen sit on my bookshelf. The Lewis Chessmen are the famous pieces found in Scotland's Outer Hebrides a couple hundred years ago that scholars believe to have been originally carved in the 12th century. They're so fascinating because each of the dozens of pieces have unique, often humorous, facial expressions. I made these three pieces out of a plaster cast when I was a kid.

A miniature version of the classic Rolleiflex camera.

Self-portrait in front of my favorite bookshelf.

-- Gigi

Martha Tries Hunger

Both my parents come from poverty.

My dad was raised in rural Georgia, the son of a saw sharpener, and hunting for food wasn't rare.

My mom grew up in war-torn Vietnam. My dad has a story he sometimes tells - how the first time he brought her to a grocery store, she tried to stockpile the rice because she didn't believe it would be there the next day.

They've both known hunger. Real hunger. Not the wimpy kind I'm about to talk about.

Given my obsession with apocalyptic scenarios there's a part of me that thinks - what if? What if food is gone, tomorrow? What if I can't find something to eat? Could I survive hunger? Would it break me?

I've gone days without eating before. Sometimes while fasting for religious reasons. Sometimes because I've gotten too busy to eat. Sometimes because it's just something to do.

Don't get me wrong, I eat often, I eat lots, and I eat well. I'm not in any danger of anorexia. I don't have glamorized ideas about our world's hunger problem. Sometimes I just like...not eating.

It's weird what gets to you when you go hungry.

It's not so much the sensation of hunger. The gnawing at your ribs. Or the cramping in your gut. Although it's not pleasant, trust me. Sometimes you're so hungry you can't sleep and sometimes you can't think about anything else but making that pain go away.

But it's really the lack of socialization that gets to me first. So much of what I do with my friends surrounds food. In the end, what breaks me is hunger, not for nutrition, but for companionship.

Who knew I was so needy? :)

Hunger in America

Sometimes, it's difficult to be slated to post in week two of a topic. This is one of those times. We've talked about character hunger, metaphorical hunger, cravings, all slants I considered for this topic but they've already been done and done well. So I'm going to return to a subject that is near and dear to me.

Hunger in your town. With the shift in the national economy, the squeeze on local budgets, the corporate layoffs, the trickle down effect to every single citizen has been felt in our bank accounts. Add in the rising cost of food and you've got a recipe for a whole lot of hunger right around the corner.

The Hunger in America 2010 study is the first research study to capture the significant connection between the recent economic downturn and an increased need for emergency food assistance. The number of people in need of food has increased 46% since the previous study in 2006.

If you want to read more about Hunger in America:
http://www.foodbankccs.org/pdfs/Hunger-Report-2010-web.pdf

The thing about food bank donations is that everyone thinks to donate around the holidays when they are out shopping for their own excessive meals

but food banks need to feed the hungry year round.

Consider ways you can help:

1. Find your local food bank website online. They likely have events all year long where they will have donation bins. Buy a few extra cans of corn or an extra jar of peanut butter at the store to place in their bin. Every can or jar feeds someone.

2. Organize a food drive at your school, church, tennis club. Most food banks make it very easy to organize a drive. Your job is to promote and get people to give.

3. Donate money to help with organizational costs. This is the easiest way but probably for most people the hardest thing to do is take money out of own already tightened budgets.

4. Donate your time. Volunteer to sort food. Most food banks have volunteer shifts to take the food out of donation bags and bins and sort into food categories for storage AND to make sure the food is edible. (FYI-They keep any cans within one year of the expiration date.)

And remember EVERY gesture helps.

Lisa

ps. And now for listening to my plea, I'll leave you with a little taste of my next thriller, Betrayals, due out at the end of September.


Something snuffled in the corner.

I curled my arm protectively around the meager bowl of whatever they’d brought me. No stinking rodent was going to touch my daily ration.

The dank smell of urine-soaked sand, feces, and human sweat filled the fetid air. A thin layer of grit and despair coated everything, including my tongue. I vowed never to set foot on a beach again.

Probably wouldn’t anyway. As I was likely to die in this godforsaken rathole of a prison. I scooped the cooked until mush food into my mouth greedily, careful not to spill a single grain.

Hard to believe a month ago Jordan and I had been dining on spice-rubbed porterhouse and chipotle garlic mashed potatoes in D.C.

That life was long gone. The contrast between then and now was laughable.

Then, I’d dabbed daintily at my mouth with a soft linen napkin. Now, I lapped the bowl with my sand-coated tongue and carefully sucked on each dirt-crusted finger.

If malnutrition didn’t kill me, the germs probably would.

I could hear the woman, our chef, server, and general attendant, coming. But I wasn’t finished.

Fuuuuuccckkkkk. I screamed the expletive silently. I’d learned brutally fast that cursing, especially from a woman, in this prison was taboo.

One by one, the locks clicked open. I huddled over the tiny tin bowl, licking with short, frantic strokes, trying to eat it all before she took my food away. My arm chains clanked as they swung together, ringing in the silence. I ignored the stabs of extreme pain in my left arm.

The woman scurried in furtively and eased the door closed.

This was a change in routine. Subtly, I shifted to a higher state of alertness. The bruises, aches, and burns from the last ‘change in routine’ still hadn’t healed. I hadn’t had a beating or torture session in a few days. They’d left me alone.

I was pretty sure the radius bone in my left forearm arm was broken. Fortunately not the ulna and fortunately not my shooting arm.

“Miss,” she whispered in Pashto.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how much they knew about my background and I wasn’t about
to give anything away.

“Miss.” This time she whispered in Dari.

I remained silent.

“Miss.” Next it was Modern Standard Arabic. Something must have flickered in my eyes because she continued in Modern Standard. “Come. I will let you go.”

My brain whirred. It had to be a trap. Let me go and then follow me. Thinking I’d lead them to whatever they thought I had.

Common torture tactic. Slowly break down all barriers to civilized behavior until the prisoner was more animal than human. Then dangle the carrot of freedom and watch the animal lunge for it.

If I was in their shoes, that’s what I would do.




pps. Some national and international food resources.

www.feedingamerica.org

www.strength.org

www.one.org

Hungry for Stories

L.G.C. Smith

It’s tempting to think that the hunger for stories follows hard on the heels of our need for food and shelter. As far as I know, all cultures have rich story traditions. Those of us who write popular fiction feed a need that must surely be as old as humanity.

Readers look to assuage different tastes with different types of books. From the time I was able to choose my own novels, I always loved stories about times and places beyond my reach. The first novel of my very own that I remember reading was Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s “The Velvet Room.” I got it through the Scholastic Books order program at the elementary school in Cincinnati where I attended third grade. Remember filling out those order forms, and the careful deliberation that went into choosing however many books you could get? And then the exquisite anticipation when they arrived. I couldn’t wait to get them home and start reading.

"The Velvet Room" was about a twelve-year-old girl, Robin, whose family struggled to survive as itinerant workers in California in the 1930s Depression. When her father gets a job at the McCurdy ranch, life is better, but it's still hard. An unexpected friendship with an older woman who lives in a hidden cottage opens a new world to Robin. She sneaks into the derelict mansion on the ranch. There she finds the velvet room, full of magic and the promise of hope. I've forgotten the mystery Robin solved, but the velvet room is still clear in my mind and heart.

“The Velvet Room” whisked me into a world I’d heard about from my father, who had traveled from South Dakota, where his parents, both teachers who didn’t get paid through the summer, to work in the apricot and cherry orchards that belonged to their California relatives. At three years old, my dad was put to work cutting ‘cots grown on land my sister now owns. Like Robin, they lived in a tent community of itinerant workers. When I read “The Velvet Room,” I could see the kind of people who had worked in those orchards. I could smell the fields and feel the hard won stability Robin’s bare-bones four-room house represented. “The Velvet Room” whetted my appetite for more. More stories. More novels.

I still hunger for good stories. I like variety, but I can live for a good long time on a steady diet of romance and adventure. A little mystery, a little magic, a lot of history or a setting where I’ve never been—all add spice and savor. Because I like to read stories with these elements so much, that’s what I write.

I’m curious: What stories do you hunger for most?

Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk

I've always had a strong connection to this Rufus Wainwright song. Though I don't smoke (anymore) and Nesquick doesn't do a thing for me. If it had been my song it might have been called Cheetos and Giant Cups of Coffee. Not quite the same ring, I'm afraid, but you get the picture.  I am not a woman of modest appetites. I never have been. And not just when it comes to food. But let's be honest, it comes down to food a lot. 

I have never understood how people can walk away from anything halfway through. I'm not saying I don't envy them--they're usually quite a bit thinner than me, for starters--just that I don't get how they do it. How can you turn your back on the last piece of cake? Or spend half a vacation day in a hotel room? How can you watch just one X-Files episode and not want to settle in for an all day marathon? Seriously, tell me. I'm dying to know how you do it.

Yeah, like he says, we won't mention those things. But I will say there is an upside to this constant hunger--my mind is always humming. I never worry about running out of story ideas, never fret that I won't be able to come up with unusual characters to write about, because they're always there. The downside--they're always there.

Yeah, what he said.

The Spice of Life

Food is wonderfully nostalgic.

The tiniest whiff of gumbo file makes me think of my mom, and the smell of an omelet sizzling in the morning reminds me of dad. The aroma of turkey and stuffing? I’m immediately transported to Thanksgiving feasts throughout my life.But sometimes we hunger not for the familiar, but the exotic. Something different. Variety. It's fascinating to remember that much of our human history was motivated by food – the attempt to get enough, sure, but also over spices. Salt –and certain other spices-- helped preserve food, but they also made it taste better, more interesting, more intriguing.Many years ago a "sound man" told me about a film project he’d worked on with a rebel group in Central America, back in the 1980s when that region was rife with war. He believed in the cause and spoke about it passionately, but what I remember most was his description of eating the same thing, day in, day out, for every meal (Imagine the following told in a darling half-British, half-Spanish accent):

“We were hiding in the mountains for weeks at a time, eating nothing but black beans and rice -- no onions, no chile, nothing to spice it up." "It’ll keep you alive, but boy… It kills the spirit. One day I found a small patch of wild chives growing in the jungle." "I kept them to myself, hoarding them as though I were a miser with gold. I never thought of myself as a stingy man, but I cut up a tiny bit at each mealtime, hiding at the edge of camp from my companions, and used them to spice up the beans. Just the tiniest taste of something different, some variety, kept me from going insane. I don’t know how the others did it – they were much tougher than I.”Recently I asked the Indian man at the copy shop what he liked most about this country and he told me that Ethiopian and Thai food were his favorites, though he was developing a taste for Mexican as well.

Mind you, I didn’t ask him about food.

But this is common when speaking with immigrants. They often are amazed at the food in this country, not only its plenty, but its variety.

And this is what harvest festivals celebrated: the joy of a full belly, and the ability to eat lots of different kinds of things.

Enough really isn't enough. We’re animals. Eating is a base instinct. Compelling in a way only a primal urge can be. And as humans, we crave the variety to keep our palates interested, happy, content.

I feel a metaphor for life coming on...

Satiety

One of my greatest hungers has been sated, and it feels like a miracle.

All my life, from the time I knew what a book was, I’d longed to write one. When I was five, I wrote a small book and illustrated it, and I was frustrated it didn’t look like a book. As the years went on, I routinely took a pen, a notebook, and a flashlight under my covers, determined that this time, I would write a real book. Every time, I didn’t write more than a few disappointing words.

When I was eleven I tried to write a romance novel. It was going along great guns until I got to the second chapter and got irrevocably stuck. The worst part was the I knew with complete certainty what that book was. I knew the emotion of it. I knew the ache of the kiss, the look of the night sky above my world-wise (and practically elderly) fifteen-year old protagonists. I just couldn’t write it.

In high school, I started short stories based, again, on an emotion—the urge to capture a moment of great change in a small space. I failed. In college, I started to “really” write. I wrote what I thought was a good short story, and my beloved mentor and professor Al Landwehr, sat me down and told me I was talented. Then he leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and said, “Talent doesn’t count for much, though. And I’m not sure you’ve got enough to say yet. Even after you've lived some more, I’m not quite sure you understand this—it’s a hard road.”

Of course, I didn’t think he was right. I knew I was ready to write big things. Novels. I just had to start, that was all, and I’d get it right.

So I started. Over and over again, I started. I’d lie in bed and figure out the story. I had plot! Characters! I knew exactly which amazing words I’d use. Then I’d get up and string a few words together and stare at them, almost unable to believe how much it was possible to let myself down.

I know now I was at that state where your taste is better than your talent, a state Ira Glass talks beautifully about here. An excerpt:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

You know what’s good—you just can’t do it. Most people, I think, stop there. They have the hunger to write, the burning need to share emotions on paper with another person, but when it doesn’t go well on the first or second try, it’s so damn easy to say, “I was wrong. I’m not cut out to be a writer.” Or worse, “I’ll figure it out later, when I have more time.”(The thing about later is that it automatically holds less time, not more.)

Some people (those crazies who don’t mind slamming their heads into walls, over and over again) just keep sucking at things until they get better. That’s what I did. I worked at sucking at writing until I sucked a little less, and now, every day I write I get incrementally less sucktastic.

And here’s the miracle: that ache is gone. The longing I’d had my whole life to write, the hunger I’d feel in the middle of dark nights to pick up a pen and get the words down, is completely satisfied because I do it. I do it all the time.

I remember about five years ago, after I’d been writing regularly, I felt tired one afternoon. I didn’t usually nap—it wasn’t something I’d ever been able to do. But that day, I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep, and when I woke, I realized it had been because the voice was quiet in my head, the voice that had always—always—been telling me I needed to listen to it, to feed it.

The unsatisfied hunger is gone, and now I write. I am a writer.