a few thoughts on writing about the senses
I woke this morning to the odor of burning and was instantly disquieted. An easy reaction to comprehend: it’s the first of August, well outside hearth-fire season, and it was 6 o’clock in the morning. It did get me thinking, though, about how important sensory input is to our understanding of our environment. How crucial for a writer.
I don’t mean to offer you a definitive guide to writing about sensations because hey, I’m not a fool: I know better than to make promises I can’t keep. But I thought I might put forth a few suggestions other writers might find interesting. Novel ways to present this vital information so you keep readers on their toes, engaged in the experience.
scents and sensibility
There is no more emotional sense than smell. It seems to bypass the thought process in order to communicate directly with the gut. I’m not sure I even need to produce any remarkable insights or original approaches as regards the olfactory because the best advice is as simple as it is mandatory: use it.
The human olfactory organ may be pathetic compared to that of other animals. But still it’s far too important to be ignored. Unpleasant sights distress us but unpleasant smells make us gag. Loud sounds make us wince but overpowering smells choke us. We may develop visual or auditory cues hinting at survival-level information, but scent is where our brains are hardwired to run toward or away from something.
Smells give your audience feels, it’s criminal not to take advantage of that.
And don’t fall into a food-and-flowers rut, where you only access this sense when clichés are presented to you. Baking bread, a bouquet of roses. Descriptive language is at its most powerful when it isn’t obvious. When it describes things in novel ways that demand the reader pay attention and think about your words to understand what you’re trying to convey to them.
If you tell your audience, ‘She smelled like sweat,’ their completely justifiable response will be, ‘Okay, next!’ Sweat is how people smell, it isn’t interesting. If, on the other hand, you go with, ‘Her sweat smelled malty,’ your readers are going to have to stop and think about it. Remind themselves of the smell of malt and consider what that might be like in the context of a human body.
Like that, your audience is invested. Bought-in to your narrative.
the haptic-fantastic
Your skin covers you, it’s the envelope inside which you address the world. It’s a trap we fall into far too often as writers, that we only want to discuss the sense of touch when it’s screaming at us. We employ it as a vehicle for sex and violence, as if it has no subtlety, as if it tells us nothing else about our environment.
This is the opposite of true; no other sense is more continuously relevant. No other sense do we rely on more to keep us informed that things are going as well as can be expected and there’s no cause to panic.
Touch isn’t only present when the stimulus is the next thing to overpowering. We feel wind and rain, the kiss of sunshine on our skin. Why not switch up your descriptors and keep the reader guessing by handing off experiences you habitually leave to the marquee senses – hearing and vision – to touch?
You feel the stifling mustiness, shut up indoors with the air too still; the dusty kiss of sand in a desert. The uncomfortable tension of salt drying on your skin, whether sweat or saltwater. There are few more awful feelings than waking up in the middle of the night convinced that something brushed against you unexpectedly. Make use of it.
sound and fury
I confess, this took some thought. My immediate, shameful instinct was: but sounds are just sounds! I know that isn’t true, though. In my experience, there is no sense more unreliable.
It’s hard to tell where sounds are coming from. It’s difficult sometimes to identify them. Hell, you’re often not certain that you’re hearing what you think you’re hearing.
This is the stuff nightmares are made of. That bump in the night, was it real? Those footsteps, are they following you?
I was reading the other day about a ghost-yeti native to a particular mountain in Scotland, which owes legends of its existence to 1) people hearing footsteps following them in a heavy fog and 2) shapes moving in dense cloud-cover. Early sightings were debunked by the very people who experienced them – they went back the next day and decided they were hearing echoes – but still folks tell stories of it.
I don’t think this need be the exclusive property of horror. Every story has moments of tension, and hearing can be dodgy. It’s a great way to tap into your reader’s emotional response. Fear is the supreme ruler of all emotions; if you want to make an argument for love, hey, this isn’t a hill I’m willing to die on. It is at least demonstrable that fear is very powerful. I humbly suggest that untrustworthy auditory input is a good way to get at that.
sight for sore eyes
So, vision. Something of an outlier in this conversation, since it’s more than a clever way to add nuance to a story: visual cues are going to carry your narrative. For the sighted, this sense is the framework we build upon as we understand our environment. These aren’t the pretty flourishes but the mandatory facts. There’s a reason Is the sky blue? is our colloquial expression of the obvious and inarguable.
One upshot of this is that authors will never find themselves at a loss for words. I don’t know what percentage of adjectives in the English language are devoted to visual stimuli, but a fair estimate would be: lots. With so many tools, it shouldn’t be a struggle to be imaginative.
If you find yourself forced to describe something’s appearance in depth – as you often will be – remember that challenging expectations is a great way to keep your readers involved. If what you’re describing is interesting, well and good; if you describe it in an interesting manner, that much better.
You don’t want people to be able to skim. Writing is at its most powerful when it controls the reader entirely. When it has hold of both the emotions and the thought process.
Particularly in a situation where you have to devote an entire paragraph to laying out a scene, look for quirky nuances to bring depth to your setting. If your scene takes place in a royal court or ball, what you’re trying to convey is opulence, and texture is a great way to do that. The luster of fine fabrics, the way light catches at precious metal.
Old things degenerate: fix your reader’s eyes on cracks and peeling paint, on the way the elements have weathered statuary. Reflective surfaces are uncomfortable to look upon. If you don’t know, snow is pink or blue at night and blinding in the sunshine.
Humor is virtually never the wrong option: if there’s an oddity to mention – a building with a drunken slant, a handsome mural with graffiti marring it – do not fail to. The goal needn’t be to make your audience laugh, but to make the setting real to them. A well-placed funny detail can make pathos more immediate.
One last thought on the topic: don’t forget scale. Pictures do not and cannot convey mass. You want to be certain, as you write, that you (the writer, not the narrator or POV character) are in your scenes. Not watching them on television.
If you haven’t had the great good fortune to visit the Grand Canyon or be in Seattle on a day when Mount Rainier is visible, go find the biggest damned thing you can – a natural monument or skyscraper – and stand close to it. Let it overpower you. Let yourself feel awestruck, then take that feeling home with you. Vastness weighs upon the mind, and you’re passing up a vital opportunity if you talk about what big things look like and stop there.
sweet like honey
I love food and have an acute sense of taste, but I may not be the right person to address this subject. I read an article a few years ago discussing a movement in the wine industry toward different language, at least in the context of marketing. Apparently people don’t like words like pencil shavings and cherry because they consider these terms inaccessible. The preferred language included words like ‘bright’ and ‘fiery.’
My reaction was: wut? Wtf is fiery? I personally love the tried-and-tested terminology because it equates tastes with exactly what they freaking taste like. If you’re being told a wine has notes of plum and you can’t figure out what that means, go eat a plum: mystery solved!
The point of this little diatribe is that my advice may or may not prove useful to you because I may approach taste in a different way than other people. Personally, I like my gustatory adjectives as literal as possible. It grates at me when descriptors veer into abstraction, and not everyone agrees with that position.
But one thing that’s just nonnegotiable. DO NOT tell me someone’s mouth tastes like fear or they have the taste of fear in their mouth. Fear isn’t a taste. I’ve been afraid, it didn’t taste like anything.
If what you mean is that the mouth is flooding with saliva or bile or vomit, tell me that. There can’t be a person in the world who hasn’t tasted vomit, and it’s not a flavor you forget: if your character just puked, everyone is now on their side and filled with empathy, I promise you.
into the beyond
A final thought: you might consider reaching beyond the canonical five. As regards sight and hearing, the world is filled with blind and deaf people living interesting lives who could make interesting characters. I can’t speak to the experience, and can only strongly caution that, if you aren’t blind or deaf yourself, you research extensively and focus your attention on first-hand resources.
For writers of speculative fiction, why not invent a sense or give your character an ability found in nature but not in human beings? A really startling number of animals can sense the magnetic poles, for example.
Anything to keep the reader from guessing. You don’t want them to be able to skip because the next steps are boredom and putting down your book. You want to maintain control and force them into the narrative. Tell them about the smell of cold, the sound of pain. Be gross, if it’s attention-grabbing.
The senses are more than how we describe our world, they’re how we understand the experience of living. That makes these impressions the most immediate way of drawing your reader in and making your story feel real to them.
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