You’ve spent hours on your paper. You’ve checked spelling, punctuation, and grammar. You rearranged sentences to maximize readability and harness sentence flow. The next item on your list is to insert sensory detail to liven up your text.
Wordscape
The five senses are: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Landscape painters capture the colors, textures, and essence of a particular place. Gourmands combine color, texture, taste, and smell into a fine dining experience. In the same way, great writers use all five senses to create a wordscape. Okay, I just made that word up. My point is, in order to put your reader in the character’s shoes you must use everything at your disposal to transport them into the story. We make sense of the world through sensory detail.
Show, don’t tell is a common mantra for writers. What better way to show than to paint a visual picture? Well . . . here is a visual picture:
Before he can stop me, I clip the black cable to my negative terminal. Sparks fly leaving several hoses looking like Swiss Cheese.
And now the same sentence with sense of smell added:
Before he can stop me, I clip the black cable to my negative terminal. Flying sparks melt the rubber hoses into Swiss Cheese.
In both examples the reader sees the Swiss Cheese-like holes, but the second example asks the reader to smell the melting rubber, too. Any time you can use two senses in a single description you make that moment more memorable for the reader.
Sensory Detail Makes Emotional Connections
Taste and smell are two senses that are often overlooked by beginning writers, yet they can be more powerful than sight or sound. The reason for this is smell and taste evoke strong memories. For me the smell of oil paints transports me to Nana’s studio, a windowless skylit room in the center of her house where an easel held her latest project. Nana has been gone for years, but oil paints act as a time machine on my memory center.
The same is true for the sense of taste. I’m convinced that we prepare the same foods each holiday to recapture the joy we feel from family gatherings. Barbeque on the Fourth of July, pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, and ginger crinkle cookies during the Christmas season are taste traditions that fill me with happy memories of holidays past.
While sight, smell and taste are important senses, sound and texture are too. Sound can set a mood, the dripping of rain on a gloomy day, the creak of a stair on a dark night, or the laughter of children.
I recently read a book that grew from a writing assignment. Jon Walter was asked to write a scene where his main character, Samuel was not able to see. He had to depend on his other senses. The book that evolved was “My Name is Not Friday” . I highly recommend it. Disoriented from the sack that covered his head, Samuel uses his other senses to make sense of his world.
Final Thoughts . . .
Chances are you include the sense of sight through rich descriptions without a second thought. You may even introduce the sense of sound into your scenes on a regular basis. But do you entice the reader with the smells and tastes that bring your settings to life? Does your reader experience the textures and temperatures that your characters feel?
When revising, look for places you can add sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch details.
