What Is Freelance Food Writing?
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- January 8th, 2009 |
- Comments
If you have a good appetite and a artifact with words, food writing may be a career option to consider. Not only is doing research for food writing one of the more enjoyable tasks in freelance writing, but you’ll never be abbreviated of restaurant recommendations and potential free meals — tho’ you may run abbreviated of well-fitting pants.
To become a booming freelance food writer, you’ll need to know how to describe food advantageously. The key to description, at least in conventional literature, is to make focused, concrete comparisons. To accompany why, ask yourself which condemn you find more appealing: “It was the tastiest peewee I’ve ever eaten,” or “The lime-pressed garlic peewee, grilled over applewood, had a texture between the crunch of caramelized sweeten and the brushed resistance of a medium-rare salmon filet”?
The fundamental law of food writing is to make your reader care that he or she had any of whatsoever delicious dish you’re writing about, to make the reader personally invested in the food. And thither’s a antic quirk in the human mind: whenever we entertain an object or activity, we activate the parts of our brain that trip whenever we’re interacting with that object or engaged in that activity. In other words: if we entertain throwing a baseball, the nerves in our arm jerk. Or, if we entertain eating a clogged steak, our tum grumbles and our mouth waters. When you’re writing about food, you deprivation to activate those same parts of the brain to make your reader feel that he or she is distribution in the experience of eating it. Words like “tasty,” “delicious,” or, bottom of all, “really good,” won’t do anything for your reader’s emotions. Only words related to food — or words and images with alcoholic emotional connotations — will really get your readers’ mouths lachrymation.
Once you’ve written your articles, where do you market your food writing? If you live in a large city, you can compose for a local newspaper or an alternative paper (i.e. the LA Weekly, the Austin Chronicle, etc.). Millions of people read these papers daily or weekly, and a good portion of those millions read the food area. When anyone in a major city needs to make restaurant reservations for a date, business dinner, party, or other cultural engagement, they look in the food area of the local paper for hot new restaurant reviews. Continue apical of restaurant openings and closings in your city. New restaurant openings can be your “bread and butter.” Local newspapers and online city guides are always deficient to print new restaurant reviews.
If you have a favorite local hangout that not many people know about, compose an article on it. Apply your article with a proper query letter to a local newspaper. You might be the first one to compose about the place, throwing needed business their artifact. In the end, you collect a decent paycheck from the newspaper, along with a published clip, a byline, and hopefully more activity and referrals.
Another option is to compose for magazines dedicated to food, dining, city nightlife, general lifestyles, or for the holidaymaker market. If you plan to compose for magazines, your choice of what to compose about becomes much broader. You can compose how-to articles, interview pieces, cookware reviews, and so on. If you plan to compose for local business guides, your best bet is to compose restaurant reviews. Tourists may not know about any of the long-familiar restaurants or diners in the area. Business guides provide insight and guidance to what’s hot and what’s not in the area. This means that thither’s a becalm flow of potential readers for your restaurant reviews and other food writing.
If you don’t live in a large city, it’s much more difficult to become a food writer. The mom n’ pop cafe downtown may have any of the best omelets you’ve ever tasted, but how are you questionable to sell an article if everyone in townsfolk already eats at that cafe every Friday night? Consider selling your articles to regional magazines. The Department of Transportation in various US states often publishes a monthly magazine about regional news. The editors of these magazines often look at local restaurant reviews as a author of human interest, or a artifact of boosting out-of-state business to non-traditional destinations.
Additionally, you might attempt writing distribution copy for cookbooks, press releases for food suppliers, or ads for food companies. Companies and book publishers hire good food writers to help market anything from new varieties of pasta sauce to gourmet steak dishes. Even a nearby supermarket might be choice to pay for copy in weekly ad flyers.
Regrettably for rural types, full-time food writing is more often than not an urban game. For urban types, food is one of the products that won’t ever act being popular, especially when it’s offered as part of a good restaurant experience. Thusly food writing means job assets, and more importantly than that: it’s just outright enjoyable writing. So get thereto!