Challenges of 'Just Eat'

I see each piece I work on as a stepping stone to learn something new, to expand what I am capable of. With this, each piece has its own set of challenges as it goes from the initial idea to the final version. So here is the general process of writing Just Eat. Though this one will be shorter than the ones I write in the future because I wrote this months ago, and can’t remember everything I was feeling or all my rationale for the final product. 

This is a snippet of the raw, raw first notes of this story:

“Plot: A cannibal from a line/family of black women. They have a complex network of meat trading.

Main character: Vaiana Morgan

What is she like? She’s a loner and not because of cannibalism. She finds it hard to connect with people. That’s why she starts a channel in addition to making new food discoveries. 

Conflict:

The main one would be a tiny bit of friction with her family over her dietary changes. They’d more so be concerned, than snarky. 

-Her mom will be the most supportive if not bitchy about it n a good way. 

-Has sisters, I see Vaiana as a middle child. 

-Maybe had a dad, if so I see him missing the tip of his finger. I feel like the men, the ones that are alive, the women in the family have the habit of killing and eating their husbands. And they are never caught or suspected. “Being a widowmaker in society is reserved for fairskinned women who can cry on command and smoother thier children with dead eyes. No one suspects black women who are too emboldened by their existence to kill strategically. 

The Real Conflict  

-After her channel gets moderately successful someone starts to  send threatening messages. They claim to know her secret and that they’d expose her and her whole family secret. Of course she gets paranoid, there are several failed attempts at meeting up. I'm envisioning a white dude, who is a wannabe cannibal. In the sense that he wants to be known for eating people. He wants to have access to thier network which he doesn’t understand will expose everything about thier community. He doesn’t think that it’s fair that they ykeep thier network so well hidden. They could go down in infamy at any moment. But they don’t want to get known, because it won’t be glorified as if it was a white person. Every person of color would be seen as unforgivable monsters and would reflect badly on the rest of the community. 

The ending

Vaiana stared at the person in front of her, unsure of how to perceive the man in front of her. He was pathetic and greasy-looking. What little hair he did have was both wet and crusty. His eyes were very erratic…And even from the distance from him, he was rank. Where was the intimidating person who wrote the letters? That threatened her whole existence.”

Originally this story was going to be my first attempt at a novella, and as we can see, that is not how that worked out. As I started to write, it felt too long. Each chapter was going to explore a different dish, and she would explore different aspects of her humanity. I had the first chapter done. In it, the main character crashed out because her meals of human meat just tasted bad. She would destroy her kitchen, cry, and scream. Then, finds herself watching YouTube cooking videos and gets inspired to try regular food. The following chapters were going to showcase her relationship with her family. There was no terror to be had, and I was bored. So, I shelved it for a couple of months. While stressed at work, I started working on it again. I unfortunately fell into my comfort zone of short story territory. Which I am not really proud of; I need to practice developing longer narratives that are still thrillers.  

I had the history drafted where her family is matriarchal (I just can’t help myself, it’s all I know), and any man who marries into the family has to give flesh. Her father was missing several fingers and the tip of his tongue. There is like blink and you miss it moment when Viana gets some mail from the stalker that references this. The give flesh to marry a family is an idea that I will be using with more focus in a different story. 

The antagonist was not going to be only her family; there was also a stalker of her channel, a would-be cannibal. However, it felt like too much going on for the space I was allowing myself. The idea remained as I liked it a lot, because I could get more tension and fear out of being outed/intimidated by a stalker. However, the original ending was that they would end up working together, and that felt wrong. It felt right when I drafted it, but then it felt forced. As I wrote, I let the character tell me what she was going to do, and she decided that she would feed him to himself. And, after I wrote that, it just felt right. I’m sure other authors get it as well: when you write something, and it just makes your soul sing. Not because anything is perfect, but because it's the organic completion of an idea.

I hope you enjoyed my rambles and the first breakdown of many to come. I love to self-reflect. It makes me think of my old creative writing classes.