Food Fight by Alex Latimer
Food Fight is full of fun, puns and a brilliant story- all brought to life by Alex Latimer. In his guest blog today, he shares some insight into the creation of this book!
Food Fight – Alex Latimer
I love when a book idea grabs me and won’t let go. Food Fight was one of those ideas.
For as long as anyone could remember, the Fruits and the Vegetables had been fighting.
That’s how it starts and for a long while, that was all I had. Sometimes when a book is just an apparition or a vague idea – the best way of bringing it into focus is to draw the cover. So I drew the cover. It looked good – two rows of cross-looking fruits and vegetables glowering at each other. I sent it to my agent – the first line, the title and the cover and he loved it.
‘What happens next?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. I’m working on it,’ I answered.
And so, for a while, I wrote versions of Food Fight – all of them not quite right. Some were about a boy who wouldn’t eat his vegetables. In some versions the fruits ended up in a fruit salad. In one version the Vegetables found art supplies for some reason.
In essence, what had started out as a simple flash of inspiration was turning into a bit of a fight. My agent would ask after Food Fight and I’d send through the latest version.
‘I’m not sure that finding art supplies is a good resolution to the story,’ he’d say.
I let the text sit for a while – which is often the first step in the process of realising that I should just bin it and move onto other stories. Thankfully, after a month away from it, I opened the file and I could see what needed to happen.
‘It’s Shakespeare,’ I thought, ‘it’s Romeo and Julienne!’
The solution was to have characters caught between the warring parties – a tiny grape and a paltry mushroom – who together demonstrate cooperation and friendship. There is a Wise Old Cheese (who lives on the very top shelf of the fridge, where no morsel has ever stepped foot), but he offers no magic solution, except to point to Grape and Mushroom as examples.
Once I had that, the rest fell into place. The cover changed a little, but the title and the first line stayed. The rest of the process was me trying to jam in as many puns and food-themed jokes as I could. And then of course, drawing the whole thing.
I love that stories often seems so simple, but that simplicity is no doubt the result of a lot of hard work, and sometimes a bit of a fight.