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>>129304
Everyone has different styles. Writerfail just needs a bit of a nudge when it comes to more showy writing. I have a very empirical way of writing, which can be seen in what I am about to quote from IW, where I make Vera rant about le stroopwafel:

>“Sorry. I haven’t eaten.”
<Right index finger to the island. “I’ve got snacks. Help yourself.”
>“Lollipops?”
<“I take it you like sweets, Kamerman.”
>“My mom tells me I need to watch my sugar.”
<She goes to the island, grabs a lollipop with the ashtray, and fits one into her mouth, tasting the sweetness, “I have stroopwafels.”
>“I’d love to but not now.”
<“Sounds like the words of a man who would have a more refined palate.” She grabs two from the packet and hands one to him. The other she places on top her coffee.
>“It’s not that, mevrouw.” He takes it, asks for a plate, lays it there. “I just eat anything. I’m craving for a cheeseburger actually.”
<“Cheese.” Pulling her seat back, lollipop exiting her lips. “When most people hear cheese, they think of places. Amerika. Parma and Reggia Emilia. Zwitserland. Gouda.” She spins the lollipop stick. “Syrup waffles are out of the picture for outsiders who hear of Gouda in particular. 1810, 1837, 1840, 1853. Whatever the dates are, Gerard Kamphuisen is the one name constant when you hear of the pastry’s origins.”
^The lollipop makes its way back into her mouth, and so do his eyes, before it comes out again. 4th of July starts.
<“Well, some want to stretch it to 1784. I highly doubt it.”
^He says nothing.
<“This baker from Gouda mixed dough scraps with a syrup of his own making. His recipe was sealed in an unopened envelope by his bakery, though by the Springtime of the Peoples, the recipe was already known. With these peasant uprisings, you’d have people needing to sustain themselves on whatever was at hand, and a syrupwafel borne from scraps had got them a crude nickname because of the people who ate them, armenkoeken—the poor man’s cookie.”
>“Reminds me of ship biscuits.”
<“Precisely. But the wafel, unlike hardtack, managed to make it out of its periphery and became sensational. Whereas the ship biscuit was the sustenance of the naval tradition—it got as far as the trenches we never trudged in, but only just—” Pinching her fingers, “Stroopwafels were truly made for the masses.” Palm wide open.
>“Am I really listening to you talking about the history of a waffle?”
<“Then I’ll stop.”
>His left fist on his lips, his cheeks a slight bright hue. “No, please continue.”
<“The Industrial Revolution happened, that one bakery in Gouda got enough gas to sustain a commercial enterprise, an industrial behemoth of its own kind, and by the Franco-Prussian War was also the first time the wafel made it out of its hometown in meaningful ways. Ninety years after the skirmish, Gouda is now the stroopwafel hub it is today, at that time having seventeen factories dedicated to that pastry alone.”
>“It also happens to make good cheese.”
<The confectionery’s circular shape fits exactly the ashtray. “You already know September 30th.”
>“A day entirely dedicated to stroopwafels, why?” His surveillance on the moist sweetmeat.
<“Twenty-two million packets per annum is truly worth celebrating. But what we Dutchmen can’t resist doing is a sense of reclamation. We do it against the sea, hence the provinces that are entirely polders. And we did it with a pastry whose tradition it was derived from is distinctly continental.”
>“Well, the Belgians do have their waffles.”
<“And the Belgians owe their tradition to the French. The first waffle guild—and do not think of it as something silly, Kamerman—was by the Parisian oubliers in 1270, over half a millennium before Kamphuisen’s first scraps, though one can argue the oublies they made are precursors to waffles than actual waffles. And a comprehensive cookbook Le Ménagier de Paris, dating from 1393, already laid out the backbone of what waffles would become. We tried to be different by using caramel syrup instead of cheese, and putting the wafel over our coffee before the first bite, the heat a part of the process, the waiting itself a ritual.” Cigarette on her right, its turn to making it for her mouth.
^He cannot stop looking as she then devours the entire thing in one sitting.
>“So waffles are continental, but I don’t see the issue here, mevrouw.”
<“The revolutionary aspect of the stroopwafel was that it was a snack made for commoners by a commoner. It has largely achieved that.” She takes a drink. “If it is quintessentially Dutch next to windmills, polders, dikes, tulips, clogs and bicycles, the same can be said for a sack of rice from Soerabaja, or cigarettes from Aruba.” She takes a hit. “And people nowadays only see why things are there but not why they were put there. Not, ‘Why is that there.’ It’s just there, and the objects are unable to not compel them otherwise.”
>“Why do you say that, mevrouw?”
<“People don’t know how to think, but instead they only know how to react to certain stimuli.”
^The kitchen is quiet for a little bit.
>He takes off his glasses. “Well, I think I’m hungry.”
<“Again, help yourself.”