I want to challenge you to use the sense of touch in your writing. The obvious uses are texture and temperature. But there’s so much more. When you think of the sense of touch you may think of your fingertips. The sense of touch goes beyond what you feel with your fingertips.
Texture and Temperature
Floors are hard, roads slick, and pillows soft. That’s texture. Sometimes a simple word will describe texture, other times you may use a comparison. For example, the floor was hard as a tombstone might be appropriate in a ghost story. But for a light-hearted tale you might describe the floor as hard like rock candy. Do you see how the comparison you choose changes the image? When you describe one object directly to another object as in the examples above, that phrase is a simile.
The air can feel stifling hot or freezing cold. In these examples I amplified the temperature word with an adjective because there are many degrees of heat. (Get it? Degrees and temperature). In other instances you can pick a very specific word like balmy to give your reader a sense of temperature, or in this case climate. You can also hint at temperature using visual cues. Steam rising from a cup suggests heat. Exhaling a cloud of steam, on the other hand, tells you the weather is cold enough to see your breath.
Sense of Touch: Example
Skin feels more than texture and temperature. It can detect pressure, tension, wet, dry, and pain. As writers we fall into doing what is easy. If a character cries, we may say, “He cried.” That’s lazy writing. Instead, we might write, “A tear slid down his cheek.” Well, that’s better. But let’s try to show it from the character’s POV using the sense of touch. “He felt the pressure of a single tear trace a path down his cheek.” They all say the same thing but you can see how the last example is much more powerful.
Take a moment to think how you could describe wet, dry, or pain from a character’s perspective. Now focus on the character’s sense of touch and rewrite it to make it even stronger.
Beginning writers often overlook sense of touch when practicing show don’t tell. Make an effort to include sense of touch at least twice in each piece of writing. You will be surprised at the depth it adds to your work.
