Using your senses
However many you may have
I’ve received this writing advice from my writing coach, the internet, books about writing. But I still need to remind myself of it when I am in the thick of a scene and can’t get the descriptions right.
I’m not big on descriptions. I don’t have full character profiles set up before I start writing. I often change the gender and appearance of my characters as I go. Occasionally, I have a feature that must be there in order for the story to work. Something like Captain Hook’s missing hand. A necessary detail that drives something visceral in the plot itself.
Otherwise, if I say my characters are in an old house, I tend leave it up to my readers to imagine that house. Spaceship, saloon, forest, castle. Perhaps I trust them too much, but I think readers are well able to build a scene from their own internal schema.
But I can enrich it. I can describe the damp smell of mold and old earth. The chill of rooms long unused. The hiss of the wind as it slips between the shutters. Much more evocative than simply saying: it was an old house.
You could even get metaphorical. Is the air heavy with secrets? The wind cold with malice? Do the shutters clatter like old bones?
No matter how rich your imagery, they all need an element of physical sense. Sight, smell, hearing, touch, vibrations, pressure, temperature, taste. You can use these to pull your reader deeper into the story, make them feel what the character is feeling.
Tying a sense or physical experience to something in the tension intensifies your efforts. Is something bitter to the tongue and to the heart? Are the flowers wilting along with the relationship? Has the rain washed the world clean after a great ordeal?
Don’t be afraid to use this sort of imagery in your work. It can be hard to strike a balance. Laying it on too heavy, like a thick layer of buttercream, can turn your prose saccharine. (See what I did there?) But I generally find that if my scene is feeling flat, I haven’t grounded my characters and reader with enough physical sensation. I tend to do a lot of introspective writing; my characters ponder as they move about their scenes. But that can leave the outer world pale and undefined.
How do you use physical sense in your scenes? Do you have a favorite way to tie scene and plot together? Let me know in the comments!
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