In a post on Lit Hub, Flynn Berry suggests an interesting way to inhabit your characters: Take them grocery shopping. “When I’m working on a novel…I like to push a cart around a supermarket, deciding what my character will buy,” she says. “It’s the single best way for me to understand a character well enough to inhabit her on the page.”
While this research may or may not make it onto the page, Berry asks if her character shops for comfort or convenience, if she buys frozen dinners or fresh ingredients. “I usually take her to a supermarket when I’m about a quarter of the way into a first draft,” she writes. “By this point, I know my character’s disposition, her internal weather, and I’m working out the particulars of her life: her job, her home, her routines. A supermarket trip can shake some of those pieces loose.”
Berry also notes that characters are likely to let their guard down at the supermarket. “They might be tired or hungry, stopping on their way home after a long day at work; they might be consumed with worry at the prices; they might be caregivers, carefully choosing food that someone else will eat,” she notes. “They might be optimists, cheerfully buying greens that will absolutely wilt before anyone cooks them. They might be choosing their groceries in a fit of nostalgia, or gloom, or restlessness.”
Food may also play a central role in your plot. Your family may have a serious confrontation over dinner, as in August Osage County, or your protagonist may channel emotions through her cooking, as in Like Water for Chocolate.
