Taste

HALLIE: Eyeliner reveals character. It's all in the details. Put a character on the page wearing frayed cutoffs and flip-flops, her hair pulled back in a red plaid scrunchy, and you've got a very different vibe going from a character in pencil thin pants, gold stiletto sandals, her hair cut short and spikey. Pick the telling detail and you don't have to "tell" the reader a thing.

Food can do the same thing. One character gets depressed, she polishes off a half-dozen Godiva truffles, another character fights the blues with a box of Ritz crackers slathered in Peter Pan peanut butter.

So what do the foods you have them eat say about your characters...and you?

ROBERTA: Cassie Burdette, the protagonist in my golf mysteries, never did learn to eat well. Or to cook. Tons of readers commented on the junk food, the fried food, the hamburgers, the beer. The only recipe she was ever quoted as cooking had canned beans and sliced hot dogs as its main ingredients. Her eating style definitely reflected her youth and a self-destructive tendency.

My advice columnist character, Dr. Rebecca Butterman, is a gourmet cook who uses food and cooking to calm herself down, help herself think, and overcome any incoming bad news. My husband is pleased that she's brought my standard of cooking up quite a bit too! I have to try out new recipes in order to write about them, right?

JAN:I love to cook and am always trying out new recipes, but I never eat when I'm nervous. My protaganist Hallie Ahern is usually under a lot of pressure as the story closes in around her, so rarely does she eat. In fact, in a version of an early book, one of my editor/readers commented that Hallie almost seemed anorexic, so I had to go back and give her a meal or two. Now that she's got her life together a bit more, she eats better. But since her character is still single-minded and career driven, usually her boyfriend Matt cooks. Left on her own, she often eats a buttered Pop Tart for dinner.

I chose Pop-Tarts both because I love them(brown sugar cinnamon) and because as a main course, they show a certain recklessness.

HANK: Oh, I love brown sugar cinnamon pop tarts, but I don't eat them anymore. Sigh. Neither does Charlie McNally. Co, um, incidentally, Charlie is kind of calmly obsessed about her eating. And it's built in to her TV reporter job, because TV does indeed add ten pounds. So there are scenes where she extracts croutons from a salad, and eats a hamburger without the bun. And of course she lives on coffee.

Once, though, I had written myself into a corner. There needed to be some tension, but low-level, you know? Personal. So I made Charlie really really really hungry. Then as I went back into the chapter, I realized I had already tucked in several times when she ALMOST got to have a turkey sandwich without the bread, ALMOST got to have an apple, ALMOST got to have low-carb lasagne. And she wound up eating a fistful of almonds in the car. And that was a fun way of introducing her eating habits and her work habits at the same time. I deliberately had her producer, Franklin, be able to eat anything. And what's more, he eats it very neatly. Franklin eats onion rings with a fork. And his fried clam roll doesn't leak. Charlie is more prone to drip balsamic vinaigrette on her blouse. She eats in a hurry. So even how food behaves can be illustrative. And how and when someone *doesn't* eat.

Okay, now I'm hungry.

HALLIE: Food is also a great stand-in for sex. But that's another column...