I am a “List and Schedule” girl – I like to have a checklist when I build a scene to make sure I’ve inserted everything into it that I can to give it the strongest emotional impact.
One of those checklists, and something commonly missed are the five senses. To really draw your Storyworld, you need to use your five senses to engage the reader’s emotions. Sight. Smell. Sound. Touch.Taste. When you walk into a room, all your senses are a part of your understanding of that scene.
Before you sit down to write, make a sensory list of everything you perceive in that scene. You’ll use it as a “cheat sheet” as you build the scene.
Sight, of course, is what a scene is usually built on, but remember those specific, mood-enhancing details we talked about yesterday.
Smell: It’s a huge memory tool, and, just like you, your character will remember scents and/or odors.
How do you write about a smell?
- How it makes us feel: nauseating, intoxicating, makes our stomach turn over, etc.
- You can describe in terms of other smells – like comparisons
(Think like a perfumer. Minty. Floral. Earthy. Or a wine taster. Nutty, fruity, oaky.
- Confine the smell to a place or time: The jovial freshness of the fourth of July, grilled hotdogs, cinnamon apple pie, and the tangy sweetness of a bomb pomp.
Familiarize yourself with scent words: Musty, sweaty, sickly sweet, acrid, pungent…
And you can combine them all:
The prunes turned my stomach over even before I saw them, a dark, oily mass that stenched the room with the pungent odor of engine grease and hickory coals, and conjured up images of my uncle’s dirt-floored garage behind his house.
Sound: Rarely is there a place without some noise in it, yet we often don’t read about it or hear it in a scene. Imagine watching a movie with the sound off – this is what happens when you don’t put sound into a book. Sound, probably more than anything, can bring a scene to life.
The wind from this black – sometime green sea – moaned in his ears, burned his throat.
Around him, the foreign syllables gnawed at his ears.
The whistle blew, a high shrill that never failed to make him wince.
I’ve used a couple different techniques here:
- State the sound directly: The whistle blew. We understand what that sounds like.
- Give it a surprising modifier:
The wind moaned in his ears. (verb)
The voice raked over him like a storm wave, gritty, cold, even violent as it turned him. (simile)
The buzzing turned into a hum, then a rumble as Dino found his feet, propped his hands over his eyes. Two Stukas dropped from the clouds, set on a course for the hospital. (adjectives)
- Give it context – tell how it is heard:
Markos would know the song anywhere, but especially the way it lifted above the rush of the waves, more like a feeling than a tune, seasoned with the tang of the sea, the jangle of goat’s bells in the far off hills.
- Use Onomatopoeia effect – help us to feel the sound by reproducing the sound on the page. (not Ring ring goes the phone).
The sound of bedroom slippers moving on carpet might be the hush of slippers, or the whisper of slippers.
A deep thrumming rumbled his bones…
The thunderous gulp of the cave…
Help us to hear it.
Touch: We touch people and things every day. The sense of touch is about slowing the act down for us to feel it, to recognize it, and to give an emotional component. Your character can rub her hand on the soft, worn leather of a desk chair or dig her fingers into the rough bark of an oak tree.
Shards of ice cut his skin even as he laid there, breathing in blades of air.
Markos speared the water. The cool lick of it scooped his breath, slicked from his body the heat of the day.
The kind of chill he couldn’t flee pressed into his bones, turned him brittle.
The touch should connect us emotionally to the scene, and to the description.
Taste: We taste things in our memory. Your heroine could taste her fear. She tasted her past, the memory of sitting in the kitchen with her mother, sneaking cookie dough out of the bowl.
This works in conjunction with Smell as a memory element.
You can use taste 2 ways: Literally and Figuratively
Literally:
- Say what it is: Sweet, sour, bitter, salty.
- Tell the effect of it…..the sweetly bitter chocolate dissolved into my mouth, flooding every cranny until my eyes nearly rolled back into my head.
- Attach the taste to a memory: The taste of my grandmother’s kitchen, her chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the freezer, better licked than crunched, the sweetness slicking off onto our eager tongues, dissolving into our mouths as we grinned chocolate.
Figuratively: We can taste fear, joy, hope, love.
She could taste their tomorrows in his kiss.
You can slurp up the salty air of the ocean, or drink in a tangy summer evening. The innocence of a baby’s skin, the hot fever of a concert hall. Here’s an example from Sons of Thunder.
“Is there a radio in here?”
The voice roused him as he lay on his side, wedged into the short length of the spongy lounge davenport. His neck screamed when he pushed to a sitting position, the hot seams of the vinyl drawn into his face. His mouth tasted as if he’d chewed on cotton batting.
A great scene has all five senses embedded in a way that adds emotional nuance.
Quick Skills: Write you scene, and then, in the rewrite, meticulous craft in the five senses, adding the subtle emotional layer.
Have a great writing week!
Susie May