Weekly Prompt: A bad taste in the mouth

Summary

The website content presents a writing challenge prompting authors to craft a story inspired by the sense of taste, with an optional additional challenge to create a Novella in Flash.

Abstract

The webpage introduces a creative writing prompt centered on the sense of taste, encouraging writers to explore how flavors can evoke memories and emotions. It suggests that participants experiment with new or familiar tastes to spark their narratives, emphasizing the connection between food and personal experiences. The prompt specifies that the stories should focus on the actual taste experience rather than cultural or stylistic preferences. Writers are given a 300-word limit for their stories and instructed to use the sorting tag "Taste Buds." For those seeking a more ambitious project, there is an extra challenge to construct a Novella in Flash by interlinking five stories around a single theme or event, with a navigation pattern to guide readers through the narrative arc.

Opinions

The prompt implies that taste can be a sophisticated and nuanced experience, extending beyond basic flavors to include texture and smell.
It suggests that taste has the power to trigger deep emotional responses and personal memories, such as the transformation of the writer's personality with the taste of morning coffee.
The content encourages writers to draw from their own cultural backgrounds and past experiences with food, suggesting that even odd flavor combinations can be inspirational.
The optional Novella in Flash challenge is presented as a way for more experienced writers to engage with the prompt on a deeper level, indicating that regular prompts might be too simplistic for them.
The use of a navigation pattern for the Novella in Flash is recommended to enhance the reader's experience and coherence of the longer narrative.

What flavour makes you think of a dreamy day faraway?

“I’m hungry for a juicy life. I lean out my window at night and I can taste it out there, just waiting for me.”― Brigid Lowry, Guitar Highway Rose

A sophisticated palette can detect a whole range of flavors beyond the usual sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. There's also the texture and the smell mixed up in the experience rolling over your tongue.

There are flavors that trigger memories, that stir feelings buried deep of youthful misadventures, lost love, or a long-ago shared moment

The taste of coffee in the morning for me triggers personality, without it I’m just another meat bag grumbling about the light and the noise. One sip later and the hazelnut-infused Columbian brew ignites the deep empathetic centers of my brain and out leaps a caring and loving husband and father.

This week it’s simple, write a story triggered by taste

Bring in the flavors of culture, of foreign lands bursting onto the palette with a crash of sensation and searing of emotional memory.

Take something from past gastronomical adventures or better yet expose your taste buds to something specific before you write.

Plumb the depths of your cities hidden treasures. Try out that oh-so-odd combination of flavors you've been avoiding.

Or fall into something familiar, for me, there’s nothing like a street-side boerewors roll with fried onions and mustard. Hungrily devoured to beat back the hangover and fill that bizarre pit that opens up in your gut at 2 am.

Remember this prompt references the sense of taste, not the cultural or stylistic accumulation of preference and opinion embodied in this quote.

Join me in trying out a Novella in Flash

We have a diverse mix of writers at Microcosm, some of the more experienced ones might find a weekly prompt, shall we say, a bit pedestrian.

You have five complete stories to tell this month, center them around a single event, or theme, and you will have strung together a Novella in Flash.

A little one, but still something more than the usual five stories, something bigger and more complex. You know the senses, so you can at least start plotting. A taste to start and the end in sight.

Use a navigation pattern (like the example below) to link your stories together and help readers follow along.

First | Current | Third | Fourth | Last

Weekly Prompt: A bad taste in the mouth

What flavour makes you think of a dreamy day faraway?

This week it’s simple, write a story triggered by taste

“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”

And if you want an extra challenge this month

Join me in trying out a Novella in Flash