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Written by Inanna Gabriel
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Saturday, 03 January 2009 21:22 |
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 | | The bulk of what we do as writers of fiction is to describe. Setting, action, characters, whatever; anything we write is in some way a description. Even dialogue, if well crafted, is a description of sorts in that we are giving the reader a description, by example, of the way a character expresses himself and communicates. The topic of Description as a whole, however, is too broad for a single meeting, so I’ve refined this down to the still rather large subtopic of writing for the senses. It’s easy as a writer to fall into the trap of writing just for the eyes. What does Sally look like? How about her house? Her dog? Her shoes? We often fall into the trap of writing solely for the eyes without even realizing we’ve done it. But we don’t experience the world this way. We take in the world through all of our senses, and through each sense we take in different information and process it in different ways. Writing for all five senses is therefore not only important because it’s more complete—there are things that simply cannot be expressed other than through their native sense. Let’s explore the five senses and what they mean to us and our writing…  Sight
We may as well begin with the obvious one. Despite my insistence in the importance of all the senses, it’s hard to argue that, for most of us, sight is probably the most vital. Think of our common expressions and clichés—“the blind leading the blind,” “wide awake.” “an eye-opening experience.” The list could go on and on. We associate vision with our primary awareness of the world around us, and our ability to navigate through it. In a story, obviously, presenting the settings and characters visually is of utmost importance. Without visual images, our reader is stuck with just black words on a white page. Think about the last thing you read—in your mind do you see the words on the page you were reading, or do you see the story taking place like a movie in your mind? Our visual descriptions build the very walls around our reader and transport them to the world in which your story is taking place—a very powerful act indeed!  Hearing
We can only see within our field of vision, but we can hear all around us. Even though some other animals have much greater senses of hearing than we do as humans, even we can determine distance and location by sound much more accurately than we tend to realize. There’s music around us all the time; the stores don’t pay for Muzak for nothing—they know it’s important to us and that the music they choose to play affects how long we’ll stay in the store and even how much we’ll spend. Bringing these ambient sounds to life for our readers will help make the world we’re taking them to much more real. In movies and television, every little sound, from footfalls to a shattering glass to a punch in the face are all foleyed in. This attention to the detail of sound demonstrates how important it is to feed the sense of hearing in suspending disbelief for the audience. Readers need sound no less than do these dramatic audiences. We are a highly communicative species, and speech is our primary means of expression. In fiction, this translates to dialogue. Rather than merely transcribing a character’s words, it is important to describe their speech—their accents, their rhythm, the timbres of their voices. Doing this allows the reader to actually hear our characters speaking rather than just reading what they’ve said like quotes in a newspaper article.  Touch
In the midst of a discussion of the senses, the word “sensual” stands out as what it truly is—a reference to anything having to do with the senses in general. However, normally when one encounters or uses this word, they are referring mainly to physical sensation. The fact that touch has become virtually synonymous with a word intended to refer to all of the senses demonstrates its significance among the five. When thinking of touch in writing, the first thing that comes to mind is, understandably, sex and erotica. But there’s touch in everything we do, not just sex. Is your character sitting in the same position for a long time? Describe those tiny discomforts that make him shift position from time to time. Temperature and texture are important to our experience of the world. The variations between wet and dry, hard and soft, tight and loose color our lives—show this through your characters encounters and reactions. Let the reader share these feelings, both the good and the bad.  Smell
The sense of smell often considered the least important, but this is very much not the case. While the sensations from the other senses must travel long distances to reach the brain, the olfactory system is only a single synapse away from the limbic system. Our sense of smell is very closely tied to our psychological states, particular to our memories. Something as simple as a whiff of chalk dust can transport us back to elementary school; the smell of baking apples to our childhood kitchen. Research has also shown a close, though as yet poorly identified, link between smell and sexuality; people who completely lose their sense of smell sometimes also experience a complete loss of their sex drive as well. It is therefore important to incorporate smell into our writing, both to show the character’s experiences more thoroughly as well as to evoke the readers’ own experiences and memories as well. When your character smells popcorn and is taken back to the movie theatre where she had her first date, your reader can be there with her, sharing his or her own special popcorn memory as well.  Taste
The diet industry wouldn’t thrive the way it does if taste weren’t important to us. Our distant ancestors, as well as non-domestic animals today, used a sense of taste, in conjunction with smell, to determine whether food was safe to eat or was spoiled or poisonous. Today we may still use our sense of taste in this way to decide whether or not it’s time to give up on the half-quart of milk in the fridge, but mostly for us taste is about pleasure, or the lack of it. Don’t assume when writing that your reader knows all the same foods as you or your characters. Tell them what an apple tastes like—describe its texture, its flavor, the contrast between the sweet juicy inside and the bitterness of the peel. Don’t just say something is sour—describe the pinching sensation in the character’s jaw, the involuntary grimace. And don’t forget that we taste even when we’re not eating. Our senses of taste and smell are very closely linked—a strong odor is experienced as a taste as well. Pointing out that Sally is actually able to taste the fresh pile of dog poo she’s just stepped in might not be a particularly pleasant image, but it’s a striking one, and one that will stay with your reader for sure! Exercise Remember the story of the three blind men and the elephant? We’re going to do something similar. You have five characters, and each has only one sense available to him or her, one of each of the five. They will each separately encounter the same object, creature, setting, or whatever. Describe their experiences one by one, through only their singular sensual experience. Do not give away in any of your vignettes the actual name of the thing being experienced so we can see as a group how easy or difficult it is to guess the thing and whether it’s easier or more difficult through one sense than another. Also remember that these five people have no experience with any sense but the one they have, so don’t accidentally use one of the others, even in reference! | | |
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Last Updated on Saturday, 03 January 2009 21:44 |
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