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[ SENSORY DESCRIPTION ] illustration

Twenty or so years ago, I attended the dedication of the planetarium at the arts and sciences center in the town where I live. James Michener was the speaker. He had moved to Texas to research and then write the novel of that name, and his novel Space had recently been published, so his public blessing of a planetarium was altogether fitting and proper. And quite a crowd gathered. He packed the house.

That night, Mr. Michener talked about his long career as a novelist, about some of the fascinating places he had lived in and written about, and even about what he considered to be his strengths and weaknesses as a writer. His place in literature was secure by then — his many long sagas in their millions of copies — and he seemed satisfied with what he could do well and with what he couldn't.

I don't recall what he said were his failings, but I remember exactly what he said he believed was his great strength as a writer. He said that he could imagine a chair, carefully write a paragraph or so about it, and his reader would know precisely what it would be like to sit in that chair. To not only visualize it, but feel it. To hear it creaking under his weight and to smell the oil that was used to polish it and the old cloth of its cushion.

And he was right. James Michener was quite often letter perfect when it came to using the five senses to describe.

In fact, he hadn't come to my part of Texas to dedicate that planetarium at all. That arrangement got cooked up when the committee had learned that he would be in the area. What he had come for was to spend a couple of days with a local water well digger that he had heard of, that, most probably, one of his research assistants had dug up (no pun intended). Michener was an absolute stickler for accurate detail, and a researcher of the first order.

The digging of a well certainly plays no great part in Texas, and the author could easily have told one of his minions to just look up the procedure. But he intended to watch the location of a site and then observe the actual digging, noting every detail, missing nothing. A couple of chapters ago remember how much emphasis was put on the importance of paying attention to everything and collecting details? Michener's work is the perfect example of how details can make an important difference in engaging readers.

Michener told us that night that he was off to the frozen North soon to research his next book Alaska. He intended to stand somewhere in the Arctic Circle, outside, for long enough to truly know the effect of that frigid temperature, and at the coldest time of the year. Most writers — myself included — would be content to just imagine how darned cold that would be. But not Michener. He had to feel it, taste it, touch it, hear it, and smell it, so that his readers could, too.

That's the important business we'll undertake in this chapter. Because, as I've said all along — and you're no doubt tired of hearing it by now — the success of your story or novel will depend on many things, but the most crucial is your ability to bring your reader into it. And that reader will be most completely in when you deliver the actual sensations of the many things that comprise your story.

USING THE FIVE SENSES TO PAINT A PICTURE

Have you ever stood in front of a painting in a gallery and gotten hungry? You've looked, perhaps, at one perfect peach in a still life, with just a glimmer of morning sunlight falling on it, its delicate fuzz caught in the muted illumination, its plumpness attesting to the sweet nectar and meat inside. You hadn't been thinking of eating a peach before you came across the painting, but now you're giving serious consideration to stopping at the market on the way home and picking up a few.

You can blame the artist for that. With a mixture of just the right colors and tones, and the careful application with the brush, the artist made you realize what that peach would feel like if you could actually touch it, what it would smell like if you could lift it to your nose. And — this is what will cost you the trip to the market — what it would taste like if you could bite into it. In short, the artist has given you a mental perception of a peach. The better the artist, the better the perception.

In your writing, you have to do exactly the same thing. You have to describe places and things and people and situations so completely that you actually give them to your reader. If you're good at it — and you'd better be very good at it if you want your fiction to work — then you, like the painter of that peach, might also be responsible for a little inconvenience. A fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies in your story, their aroma wafting through the house like sweet perfume, might just send the reader off to the bakery in search of a dozen.

The way to do this is to make use of your readers' five physical senses, and sometimes even that mysterious sixth. When they can relate to the tangible nature of things and places and characters, then you, the writer, have taken a giant step toward bringing them fully on board.

Let's briefly review two important distinctions again — the difference between showing and telling and between literary and popular fiction — before we look at ways that you can work sensory description into your story.

Showing and Telling

First, think back to the preceding chapter, to all that we talked about regarding showing and telling. Nowhere will all of that be more important than in the use of sensory description.

Saying that something smelled like or tasted like or felt like is always telling. Sometimes that's fine, like following up a long description of a slaughterhouse with a curt proclamation like this: It smelled like death. But to simply blurt out that something smelled like death, without somewhere showing why, is ineffective.

Having a rich aroma wander in is better than saying that it smelled like coffee, just as showing why a person's feet hurt is preferable to saying that they do.

Nowhere in your writing would I encourage you more adamantly to show more than you tell than when using sensory description.

Your Audience

You might recall that I said readers of literary fiction will usually be more tolerant of long passages of description, since they are as concerned with how the author is working her magic as with what's going on in the story. Readers of popular fiction want the magic worked, also, but they want it done more quickly. The plot and its various twists and turns are more important to them than how the story is being unfolded.

Look at a couple of examples — one from a literary novel and one from a popular one — to help illustrate how to work description into different types of stories.

Here's William Goyen in The House of Breath, a novel that is something of a literary classic of southwestern prose:

A fragile, melodious Oriental language blew in on the wind like the odor of a flower and we saw the string of smoke from a gypsy camp somewhere in the woods. The sliding of our feet in the road flushed a flutter of wings from the bush. The fields were alive with things rushing and running; winged and legged things were going where they would, no engine or human to stop them. Out in the fields under the thick brush and in the grass and green were myriad unseen small things that were running and resting from running.

Now compare that to Joy Fielding's New York Times bestseller Whispers and Lies:

I unlocked the kitchen door and tiptoed outside, the grass cool on my bare feet. A sudden rush of nausea almost overwhelmed me, and I gulped frantically at the fresh air until the feeling subsided. I took several long, deep breaths before continuing toward the cottage door. It was then I heard the sound of laughter from inside the cottage. Clearly, Alison wasn't sick. Nor was she alone.

The reader of literary fiction is as interested — in the first piece — in what the character is seeing and hearing, the intricate details of the sensations, as in where he is going. In the second piece, the character sees and hears and feels things, also. But the emphasis this time is on what Alison is up to in that cottage.

The reader of popular fiction doesn't mind at all that the narrator tells her outright that she hears laughter. Someone used to reading literary fiction might want to know what that laughter sounds like.

One of your first jobs as a writer is to determine which of these audiences you're aiming for and craft your description accordingly. When writing popular fiction — for readers who want that story fairly zipping along — you'll need to keep detailed description to a minimum.

EACH OF THE SENSES IN THEIR TURN

You will, of course, use sensory description many, many times in your fiction, and the employment of one or another of the senses will be dictated by the plot and the setting. Never feel compelled to use all of them. The crafting of fiction is not like coaching Peewee League Baseball; you don't have to get every player into every game. Determine in a particular scene or circumstance which image you most want to convey, what exactly you want your reader to experience. Then you will know which of the senses to use. Let's say a child in one of your stories receives a new puppy. Now you need to decide how to describe it: by how it feels, smells, sounds, or looks. Maybe — if the child you have created is particularly curious — even by how it tastes. If the old curmudgeon that lives upstairs gets angry about noise, then what the dog sounds like will be most important; if the child has allergies, then smell will move up on your agenda list. You might end up using a combination of the senses. And you might end up using none of them. Maybe this gift is not at all important to the larger story that you are building, and it will suffice for the reader to know that the gift was given and received. Use the senses as you need them or, more precisely, as your reader needs them to get a more detailed, personal conception of whatever it is you are describing.

Titles With Sense and Sensibility

Your title is your very first offering to your reader. In many cases, its appeal will determine whether or not she will move on to the first sentence and paragraph. So you need to craft precisely the right few words — or sometimes just one — that will stand above your name.

It might be a good idea to appeal to one or more of the senses in the title, before you do it continuously in your text. Here's how some writers have worked sensory description into their titles:

Don't hesitate to let the senses overlap. For instance, you might want to let what something looks like describe what it tastes like. You do this all the time (remember that peach in the painting), so let it happen in your fiction, also.

Let's consider each of the senses now, looking closely at how you might use them effectively in your fiction and how other writers have done so.

Sight

This is the one you'll use most often, since showing what things and people and places look like is the most common sort of description. The inherent danger in using this sense is to use it too often, to the exclusion of all the others. But when you use it, pay close attention to what you're showing the reader, and how you're doing it.

The trick is not simply reporting what you want the reader to see. It's using your wordsmithing to full advantage, filling your writing with words and images the reader can't predict. Surprise him. Look at these two snippets from Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain:

Billy peered out at the high desert. The bellied light wires raced against the night.

And, a little later:

Billy sat watching the night spool past. The roadside chaparral, flat black scrim of the mountains cut into the starblown desert sky above them. Troy smoked.

Before I first read that passage, I never thought of the sagging lines between utility poles as bellied, but now I do. Neither did I perceive them as racing against the night, which gives the image of a vast, seemingly endless landscape, reinforced in the next section by the night spooling past. I doubt if scrim — a light, transparent fabric used mostly for window curtains — had ever before been used to describe a mountain range, but McCarthy wants us to see these mountains as distant and hard to detect, as almost not there at all. The stars, on the other hand, he wants to be there in abundance, so he makes the desert sky starblown.

He uses unexpected images — uncommon phrases and adjectives — to paint precise images in the reader's mind.

This is an effective approach that you will want to make use of in your own writing. Describing something or someone in an unusual way — like this writer calling the power lines “bellied” — makes the reader pay a little closer attention and remember the image better. It also makes her remember the writer better, which is what that elusive voice is all about.

Avoid giving your reader the overused cliche´s that she's read time after time after time. Like a startled character being caught “like a deer in the headlights,” or one gazing intently “staring daggers.” Those have been done to death. But they are resurrected by far too many authors.

A warning here: while uncommon, unexpected bits of description will serve you well, they will probably only do so once in a single story or novel. A uniquely turned phrase is delightful the first time around, but goes stale quickly if used again.

In your fiction, you might want to use description to do more than simply describe. It's also a good way to establish the tone you are seeking or to call attention to the time period. If your story is set in London in the late nineteenth century, then you should pay careful attention to the description of things Victorian, like horse-drawn cabs and gentlemen's walking sticks and ladies' parasols. If your plot involves the Jack the Ripper murders or some other mysterious doings, then come up with plenty of dark alleys and a pea soup fog hugging the river.

Sometimes, even the types of words you choose will bring your readers closer in to where you want them to be. Consider how Walter M. Miller employs unusual imagery to convey another desert landscape in his science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:

A sky-herd of cumulus clouds, on their way to bestow moist blessings on the mountains after cruelly deceiving the parched desert, began blotting out the sun and trailing dark shadow-shapes across the blistered land below, offering intermittent but welcome respite from the soaring sunlight. When a racing cloud-shadow wiped its way over the ruins, the novice worked rapidly until the shadow was gone, then rested until the next bundle of fleece blotted out the sun.

Here the writer infuses his tale set in the distant future with a descriptive device pulled from ancient literature. Sky-herd, shadow-shapes, and cloud-shadow are modern day kennings, hyphenated metaphorical compounds that you might not have dealt with since you read Beowulf in high school. A Canticle for Leibowitz is set in a world that is reorganizing itself after devastation, so this use of an antiquated descriptive device is very much in keeping with the primitive, back to the basics tone of the novel.

Don't be afraid to try something as unusual as this in your fiction. The figures of speech and other approaches you'll use — like adjectives and metaphors and all the rest — are the common tools of all writers, but the unique manipulation of them can be quite uncommon.

Occasionally you will need your reader to detect only slight differences between things in your story, like the almost imperceptible disparity between two shades of the same color. Here's one way to do it, from William Martin's Cape Cod, a novel that begins with the pilgrims coming to the new world on the Mayflower:

Jones raised his newfangled and most expensive spying glass to his eye and studied the horizon. Smoke gray sky sat atop slate gray sea, and beyond the line that divided them lay America.

Here, the reader needs to know that there is only a slight disparity, or none at all, between two shades. The easier task for the writer would have been to tell it: “The sky was a slightly darker gray than the sea.” But the descriptions of colors do more than just describe, they serve to move the bigger story along by showing that a destination, hopefully bright, lies wedged between those two gloomy hues. Sort of a light at the end of the tunnel, one of those cliche´s you should avoid.

You must keep pointing at things that you want your reader to see. Many times, it will be a big, blaring thing that is hard to miss. Other times it will be so tiny that he might otherwise have overlooked it altogether, like the slight differences between these colors.

Remember, you'll call upon the reader's sense of sight much more often than his other senses to anchor him in your time and place, and keep him there. So pay very special attention, always, to what everything looks like, so that you can show it in your writing. Focus on the fine points of colors, lighting, shadows, shapes, and textures as closely as you note the bigger aspects of what will end up in your pages.

Remember, too, that there are at least four other senses to appeal to. Too many writers make the mistake of packing almost all of their description into showing what everything in the story looks like, bypassing more effective senses.

Smell

I heard or read somewhere that the sense of smell is the most nostalgic of the five senses. And I believe this to be true. Every time I smell diesel fumes from a bus or a truck my mind's eye goes quickly back over thirty years to the large army motor pool shop in Germany where I was the clerk. If I'm ever around where butter beans — perhaps they're called lima beans in your part of the world — are being boiled, I am instantly back in my grandmother's kitchen, where she cooked them nearly every day. I'm sure there are certain scents that you, too, can identify because of the memories they evoke.

The fact that your reader's olfactory memory is laden with treasures is reason enough for you to take full advantage of it. If this truly is the most nostalgic of the physical senses, then you should draw on it like a bank account, tapping it often to engage your readers more fully. You have to be generic enough for everybody to make the connections you need them to make, however. Not all of my readers served in motor pools, I suspect, or had butter bean-cooking grandmothers, so I can't use those continuously and get away with it.

You can use smell to, among other things, kick your character's memories into gear, to symbolize something else, to describe something that is difficult (or impossible) to describe, and to help build your setting. Let's look at how a few writers did these things, and at how you can do them, also.

Gore Vidal lets a certain aroma trigger a memory in one of his characters in his novel Washington, D.C.:

“There you are! But get away from those gardenias. I can't stand the smell. They make my head ache. I don't know why Mother's so keen on them. They remind me of dancing school! Remember Mrs. Shipman's? When each boy had to bring his date a corsage consisting of two wilted yellow gardenias. My God, it's hot in here.”

When using a scent to remind a character of something in your fiction, you have to first decide — in addition to what the memory will be — if it will be a pleasant memory or a bad one. Happy or sad? Frightful or hopeful? The overall tone of the thing will color the tone of the remembrance of it. Here, the recognition of a particular smell makes a character recall something unpleasant. So gardenias, which give off a pleasing smell to most people, make this woman want to get completely away from them. Using scents in this way allows you to enlarge your story and, more specifically, your backstory.

In Marly Youmans's Catherwood, a smell becomes symbolic of something being given up:

The smell of the sea grew in intensity as the last glimpse of Ireland fell into the mist. The rich odor of the Irish coast, a fragrance of turf smoke and soil, dropped away.

Sometimes it's a good idea to let something that defines your character — like loyalty or honesty or, as in this case, devotion to a particular place — be triggered by something she smells. A long lost love might come to mind when a woman detects a particular brand of cologne, or the fragrance of fresh lemons might unlock a clue in a murder mystery.

The use of symbolism can be a tricky business for a writer and can quickly go over the top. Modern-day readers aren't as a rule very tolerant of blatant symbolism, where great white whales stand for vengeance and fallen young women walk around with scarlet letters on their chests. But even the pickiest of symbol hunters will accept subtle ones. And some of the most subtle reminders in the world are aromas. In the two sentences from Catherwood, the smells of the sea, the coast, the turf smoke, and the soil are mentioned only once, and quickly. The words are barely there, like the scents themselves, and they are receding, like the place they represent.

There are as many times to be quiet in your writing as there are to be loud. And I'm not just referring to having your characters bellowing out at the stars or whispering sweet nothings in each others' ears. Loud and quiet in regard to using the senses really means blatant and subtle, and all the stations in between. The overpowering stench of stockyards in Upton Sin-clair's The Jungle is one thing; the delicate hint of Ireland in Catherwood is quite another. Both are extremely effective. In your fiction be prepared to be quiet as often as you are loud in your descriptions, for the quiet, subtle approach is often the most effective.

One or another of the senses can even be used on occasion to describe the indescribable. As the sense of smell does in Montana 1948 by Larry Watson:

Because Daisy kept the curtains drawn and windows closed to keep the heat of the day out, the McAuley house was dark and stuffy. The house always had a strange smell, as though Daisy had found some vegetable to boil that no one else knew about.

A lesser writer might have gone to great lengths to describe this completely indistinguishable odor, or might have finally resorted to letting the narrator conclude that he doesn't know what the heck it smelled like. But you have no intention of being a lesser writer, so learn a valuable lesson here from this author: When you've got a particular thing to do, be clever. Turn a phrase. Invent a word. Give the guy in Sheboygan what he's not expecting. Remember those bellied light wires in Cormac McCarthy's novel? Your only limit is your own imagination. Your readers have been seeing things from their vantage points all their lives; let them have a taste of yours.

As with the sense of sight, the description of what things smell like can help you establish the setting in your fiction. Look at how Patrick Suskind in his novel Perfume captures the city of Paris in the eighteenth century by focusing specifically on what it smelled like:

In the narrow side streets off the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Saint-Martin, people lived so densely packed, each house so tightly pressed to the next, five, six stories high, that you could not see the sky, and the air at ground level formed damp canals where odors congealed. It was a mixture of human and animal smells, of water and stone and ashes and leather, of soap and fresh-baked bread and eggs boiled in vinegar, of noodles and smoothly polished brass, of sage and ale and tears, of grease and soggy straw and dry straw. Thousands upon thousands of odors formed an invisible gruel that filled the street ravines, only seldom evaporating above the rooftops and never from the ground below.

Notice that the author uses the word odors, but not aroma. These are words that are at different ends of the olfactory spectrum. Aroma is positive, indicating a scent that is pleasing, and odor is negative, pinpointing something that stinks. Though there are some pleasing smells in his “invisible gruel” — like fresh-baked bread — they are mixed in with significantly more displeasing ones, so the overall balance is tipped decidedly toward odors.

This catalog of odors should take the reader directly to the grimy streets of Paris of two centuries ago, where Suskind's tale takes place. But remember, Perfume can be considered a literary novel, so the author has the luxury of heaping detail on detail to paint his picture. In popular or commercial fiction, we might need to cut to the chase here and winnow all of this down to a couple of well-crafted sentences that show that Paris contained an abundance of scents.

Let's say you have two of your characters taking a walk on a nice spring day. On the soft breeze they can detect several things at once: the fragrance of wild onions from a field beside them, the odors from a factory not far away, and the pleasing scent of a bakery in town. Now, you have two choices here. You can build your details slowly, layering them like bricks in a wall — like Suskind does in Perfume — or you can come up with a nice sentence or two that will do the job more succinctly.

If you choose the more meticulous approach, you can move the tangy presence of those onions across the landscape toward the walkers; you can have multicolored smoke belching out of the smokestacks of the factory (tapping home a bit of environmental criticism into the bargain). And you can have a field day with the enticing fragrances emanating from that bakery.

But if you are aiming toward an audience that reads popular fiction, then you might make do with something like this:

Zach and Noah stopped for a moment and took in the fine day. The sweet, yeasty aroma from Mulligan's Bakery blended with the harder presence of the tire factory. Something sweet and pungent on the gentle breeze told them that old Wilson's big field was teeming with wild onions.

And that's not just making do at all. It's a perfectly fine way to describe that setting, that moment. Your shorter approach can't just be shorter. It has to paint a picture in your reader's mind, just like the longer, more detailed one. So what you have to do here is select the very strongest images, the best ones.

Touch

The sensation of what something feels like is used in fiction to describe everything from sensual pleasure to pain and torture. It's a wide range, and your readers have actually experienced only some of those feelings. So your job is to either make them recall exactly what it feels like when something occurs in your story or, if they haven't experienced it, what it would feel like if they did.

Let's start with the pain and torture, and get them out of the way. We'll save the sensual things for later, sort of like delayed gratification.

One of the very best portrayers of physical pain is Dick Francis, the retired jockey turned suspense novelist, who must have taken more than a few tumbles from his mount to glean such eye-squinting detail. Here he places his narrator in a particularly unpleasant situation in Longshot:

I put both palms flat on the decaying undergrowth and tried to heave myself up unto my knees.

Practically fainted. Not only could I not do it, but the effort was so excruciating that I opened my mouth to scream and couldn't breathe enough for that either. My weight settled back on the earth and I felt nothing but staggering agony and couldn't think connectedly until it abated.

Something was odd, I thought finally. It wasn't only that I couldn't lift myself off the ground but that I was stuck to it in some way.

Cautiously, sweating, with fiery stabs in every inch, I wormed my right hand between my body and the earth, and came to what seemed like a rod between the two.

As it turns out, this fellow has been shot by an arrow. Now, I've never been shot by an arrow, but I can imagine how painful it must be. And part of the reason for that is Dick Francis's description. Look at some of his wordsmithing here: practically fainted, excruciating, couldn't breathe, staggering agony, sweating, fiery stabs. All of which leaves little doubt that this experience is downright painful.

Description of pain in your story or novel might call for such elaboration, but sometimes you can drive the image home with a single sentence, as Chuck Palahniuk does in Invisible Monsters:

“A headache, I get the kind of headache God would smote you with in the Old Testament.”

Now that's a headache. The severity of which is confirmed by the verb smote and the reference to the Old Testament. I think you will agree it is light years better than “I have a bad headache.”

When you describe pain in your fiction, remember that the level of the pain (for your character) should correlate with the level of your description of it. A headache, even an Old Testament one, should usually be mentioned and then you should move on. If the headache gets progressively worse, and impacts your character's actions and your story, then you'll want to describe how it is getting worse. Maybe throbbing becomes pounding.

You want to give your readers an accurate depiction of what the character is going through, but you don't want to lose them — the readers, not the character (maybe both) — in the process. Graphic breaking of bones and twisting of sinews is usually not a great idea. Give a good sense that something bad and painful is happening, but don't overdo it. Look again at one of the phrases that Dick Francis uses: staggering agony. He could have gone into much greater detail here. I, for one, am thankful that he didn't. I don't know about you, but when a writer tells me that a character is in staggering agony, I'm prepared to believe him.

Remember this: When it's time to inflict a bit of pain and suffering in your fiction, put more emphasis on your character's reaction to it than on the actual description of it. In the Francis piece, what this guy is going to do about his situation is the important thing, both to his survival and to the story.

When using the sense of touch, you won't always be describing what a character feels. Sometimes you'll be nudging your readers toward what you want them to feel when they read your fiction, so they can associate a feeling that they might never have experienced with one that they probably have.

Here's an example of how something as simple as rubbing dried flowers between fingers can be used metaphorically for something as lofty as the reshaping of politics and governments. It's from The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver:

Languidly they bring their map to order. Who will be the kings, the rooks, and bishops rising up to strike at a distance? Which sacrificed pawns will be swept aside? African names roll apart like the heads of dried flowers crushed idly between thumb and forefinger — Ngoma, Mukenga, Mulele, Kasavubu, Lumumba. They crumble to dust on the carpet.

The overwhelming odds are that your reader has never restructured governments, but it's a safer bet he has rolled the heads of dried flowers into dust. So here is a small action, which he has experienced, being used to describe a much larger one, which he hasn't.

As with the other senses, let touch sometimes serve more of a function in your writing than to just convey what things feel like. When I was writing my novel A Place Apart I needed to reemphasize the emerging relationship between the narrator and a girl. So in the midst of a description of Paris, I slipped in a bit about her fingers moving like ivymight grow. That way, the intimate touching of fingers to the back of his hand, which is a small thing by any standards, calls attention to the bigger story, which is their budding romance:

She would tell me about Paris. About the Boulevard Saint Michel that she loved the best, and its sidewalk cafes. And how the tall, curved buttresses of Notre Dame rose up over a steep wall just across the Seine from the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop. Ivy spills out over the wall, she said, and wanders down to the river. And her long fingers would make little journeys along the back of my hand, as ivy might grow.

This device, using something seemingly small to enlarge or call attention to the bigger story, will serve you well time after time. Be on the lookout in your manuscripts for places where you can work in bits of sensory detail that will help establish the setting and the tone. In this paragraph, the girl's description of the ivy is sufficient to let the reader know that there is, indeed, ivy there. But the reinforcement of her fingers moving — like ivy might grow — not only calls more attention to it but points the reader in the direction of the more important part of the story: the romance.

Taste

Not long ago, a writer for the Houston Chronicle named Jessica Danes did an article about tea. She included a few of its medicinal values, brief allusions to its place in — and sometimes alteration of — history (remember the Boston Tea Party), and, since it ran in the food section, several of its various types that her readers might like to try.

She could have started it out like a term paper:

The world of tea is wide and varied.

Or she could have kicked it up a notch (to use a phrase not uncommon in food lingo these days) and come up with something like this:

One of the world's oldest foods is also one of the most interesting.

Which is certainly better than that first offering of drab reportage, but not nearly so fine as what she did write:

It tastes like the earth. Pungent and loamy and more real than anything you've tasted in a while.

A sip and the daydreaming starts — of high-peaked mountains and the tender plants the prized leaves were plucked from.

Tea can do that to you.

When I thumbed through my morning paper, I hadn't been looking for a piece on tea, which was just about the furthest thing from my mind. In fact, I hadn't intended to read anything in the food section at all. First the illustration that accompanied the article caught my attention. Then that first sentence hooked me and reeled me in. I read every word, learned a few things, and enjoyed it immensely. To paraphrase the author: Wordsmithing can do that to you.

Now let's consider the bait that she used to attract me: “It tastes like the earth.” It accomplishes two important things very quickly. First, it evokes the sense of taste, which is perhaps the most reliable of all the senses. The others can sometimes be deceptive, but what something tastes like is usually quite simply the pure essence of the thing. Second, this sentence does exactly what a first sentence must do in order to be effective: It makes the reader read the second one. Sensory description is one of the best ways to do just that. In this case, I wanted to know what tastes like the earth.

The word taste has evolved into a universal barometer of our personal likes and dislikes. “I have no taste for country music,” someone might say, or “Her tastes run to the abstract.” And society has long labeled certain types of people by using the sense of taste. A bland, boring person is a milquetoast; a feisty girl is a hot tamale.

Don't overlook this sense to describe things and people in your fiction, and not just in telling what something tastes like; you'll run out of steam pretty quickly if that's all you're after. “It tastes like chicken” only works once, and not very well then.

Use it to help develop a character, as Gore Vidal does in this scene from his novel Washington, D.C. set during World War II. Here is a soldier who is much more interested in the food being served at a tea than with anything else, including the war. He's especially infatuated with anything made with butter, which is rationed and very scarce. Notice how Vidal keeps the character's attention on the food, thereby keeping our focus on his priority, which becomes important in the story:

Life was good. He asked for tea, devoured a chicken sandwich, and said that he had not seen much of Enid lately. “They keep me pretty busy down at the Pentagon,” he invented. The chicken sandwich needed salt, which meant the butter was fresh. He tried a hot rolled cheese sandwich: superb. Butter had been used to glaze the toast; cayenne gave definition.

And later, after some more offerings (probably butter-free) that don't impress him, this:

But the main course was splendid: breast of chicken folded to make a cutlet. As his fork speared the browned surface, hot butter spurted from the interior.

This gradual playing out of little details, in the form of what the food tastes like to the character, moves the reader closer and closer to seeing who this guy is and what is really important to him. It's subtle.

Remember what I said a few pages back about being loud and being quiet? That goes for taste, also. There will be times when you want to quietly work in how something tastes — like this fellow's appreciation of butter. Not calling great attention to it, but letting it slowly help to define the character.

Then there will be times when you will want to be loud. When you'll need to not equivocate, but tell your readers straightforwardly what you want them to know. In The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone uses the sense of taste to show us the nature of a character:

Bertoldo loved only two things as well as sculpture: laughter and cooking. His humor had in it more spice than his chicken ala cacciattra.

No beating around the bush there; this guy has a boisterous sense of humor. Period. Remember the balance of showing and telling you've got to maintain; the Vidal example works best as showing, the Stone as telling.

Just as you can let how something tastes help to establish your characters, let it do the same thing for your settings. If you have a story set in New Orleans, try something like this:

She could taste the sugar-sprinkled beignets from the Cafe´ DuMonde before the plane even touched down on the runway.

The reader of that sentence may never have been to New Orleans, and may never have eaten a beignet. But if this lady is imagining eating one before she even gets there, than the reader must know that they taste good. The idea of New Orleans being a good place to be — at least for this character in this story — gets a toehold into the readers' perception before the tale even gets underway.

Sometimes in your fiction showing what something doesn't taste like is effective. In Girl With a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier's novel, the central character is considering the food in one household as opposed to that in another:

When we ate dinner I tried to compare it with that in the house at Papist's Corner, but already I had become accustomed to meat and good rye bread. Although my mother was a better cook than Tanneke, the brown bread was dry, the vegetable stew tasteless with no fat to flavor it.

Here, focusing on what things taste like — more specifically, on their lack of taste — serves to empower the much larger story that is running its course in two very dissimilar houses. The families that live in those houses differ in many ways, in religion, politics, and affluence, to name just a few. And those differences are at the heart of the novel. So the author uses a variety of ways to call attention to the disparities.

You can use taste in your fiction just as effectively as these authors have. Remember to let it do more than what it usually does, which is to report what something tastes like. Let a character's preference for one taste or another make him clearer in your reader's mind. Let the particular taste of something represent a place (like lobsters in Maine or barbecue in Texas or apples in Washington) or a time (like roasted chestnuts in Victorian England or honey-mead in the middle ages) or a character's mood (like the taste of bile when he thinks of his mother-in-law).

Hearing

Those of us old enough to remember the Gomer Pyle program on television recall that Gomer's drill sergeant used to get in his face and bellow out “I can't hear you!”

You don't want your reader having that same reaction to your fiction.

The reader needs to hear not only your characters speaking to each other, but countless other things as well. Like the cacophony of sounds that usually infuses a setting. Like the absence of sound on occasion. Or like something that only one character hears, like Edgar Allan Poe's murderer in “The Tell Tale Heart.”

Let the sounds that surround you all the time work their way into your stories and novels. Your readers hear them, too, every waking moment of their lives. And they will feel more comfortable in your settings if the hustle and bustle (and sometimes the quietness) of life are there with them.

Listen to this short scene from Guns of the Timberlands by Louis L'Amour.

A clatter of running hoofs sounded on the loose planks of the bridge at the far end of town, then the rattle of a buckboard. It rounded into the street and a couple of fine blacks brought it down toward the riders at a spanking trot.

There's a lot going on here, and the author uses sound as his primary tool to convey it. Remember, one of the best ways to get your readers into a scene is to let them hear everything that's going on. Not all of these noises are important to the story, but they do help to establish the setting quickly, and not in such elaborate detail that the story has to slow down for it. Look for places in your fiction where you can do this; where you can use a short burst of several sounds — or smells or tastes or feelings — that will more clearly define the setting.

When applying the clutter rule about anything not serving to move the story along having to go, you might be inclined to delete good passages like Louis L'Amour's. But remember, even though the loose planks of that bridge and that rattling buckboard might not be greatly significant in the story, they do serve the essential function of bringing the reader more fully in. So they pass the test, and need to stay.

Onomatopoeia is an excellent way to let the reader hear things. In that last example, L'Amour works plenty of effective auditory details in, and then makes them even stronger with words like clatter, rattle, and spanking.

In most cases, as in the last one, you will show what things sound like, but sometimes it will be even more effective to emphasize the absence of sound. Sometimes you'll want to focus attention on something more important than the sound, as Robert Frost does in his classic poem “Stopping by Woods”:

The only other sound's the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.

Frost hits upon one of the great ironies of nature and weather here: While most meteorological events — like storms and rain and wind — are noisy, snow falling is usually the opposite. It is quiet. Thus the adjectives easy and downy and the noun sweep, rather than swoosh or boom.

Sometimes things in your fiction will sound like almost nothing, like the easy wind and downy flake in Frost's poem. But usually they will sound like something, like being met by a fast-moving automobile in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men:

But if you wake up in time and don't hook your wheel off the slab, you'll go whipping on into the dazzle and now and then a car will come at you steady out of the dazzle and will pass you with a snatching sound like God-a-Mighty has ripped a tin roof loose with his bare hands.

Whenever I read that description — about the tin roof and the bare hands of God — I always think: Now that's exactly what being met by a speeding car sounds like. And that's the sort of reaction that you want your reader to have to your descriptions. The way to pull it off is to listen more intently than you probably have before. To anything and everything, but especially to specific sounds and noises that you know will play a part in your story or novel. Then take it a step further: When you pinpoint a sound — like seagulls squawking at each other on the beach — think of what all of that racquet sounds like. Good writers spend much of their time thinking in metaphors. Those seagulls might remind you of a congregation of angry stockholders or of electricity zipping through wires or of Chatty Cathy dolls running amok. One or more of your metaphors regarding the seagulls will more than likely find their way into your writing, making the noise come more fully alive on your pages.

Whenever possible, go to a place that is similar to a setting you are using and listen. Just listen. Then write down what you heard in your writer's journal. You might be surprised by what you hear, and what you don't hear. Make sure you really know what an airport terminal sounds like before you describe one. Or a busy restaurant. Or a country road. This exercise might help you avoid using cliche´s, too. You might just discover that a beauty shop doesn't “sound like a hen yard” at all. But it has a dozen or more other sounds, most of which you probably never paid attention to before.

In your writing, perhaps even in your titles, you might call the reader's attention to what things don't sound like, to vast panoramas that are silent (like Snow Falling on Cedars) or to people or things that are quiet when they shouldn't be (like The Silence of the Lambs). Sometimes the absence of something is the most effective description of all. Let's have a word now from Flannery O'Connor, who we have neglected for too many pages. She defended creating her particularly unsavory characters by maintaining that often the best way to show God's grace was to convey the total lack of it. That opposite approach works with sensory details as well.

On now to something that most of us spend a lot of our time listening to: music. Don't overlook showing the effects of hearing certain songs or tunes on your characters. They might mean entirely different things to different people. Take “As Time Goes By,” the song in the movie Casablanca. The Ingrid Bergman character wants Sam, the piano player, to play it again because hearing it takes her back to happier times. Rick, the character played by Humphrey Bogart, forbids him to play it because it reminds him of his lost love.

One excellent way to help describe your characters is to let the reader know what kind of music they listen to, maybe even what their favorite songs are. The lyrics in many songs, especially ballads, are little stories in themselves. Why not let one or two of them serve to empower your own story, or characters?

Look at how a melody serves to define a particular character in James Baldwin's story “Sonny's Blues”:

One boy was whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all that harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds.

The author uses this tune to help establish his character and his setting. It is both complicated and simple, most likely like the boy himself. And it comes out of him into the brightness and other noises of the surroundings.

Use sound — or one of the other senses — occasionally to make your reader curious. Remember, you've got to keep your story moving all the time. If it starts to sputter or stall out, then your reader might just put you aside and find something better to do. So keep him guessing. Consider how Wallace Stegner begins with a mysterious melody and uses it to solidify his setting in his novel Crossing to Safety:

Then what was I hearing? Holding my breath, I listened. Tick-tick-ticket-tick-tickety-tick-tick, not one clock but many, unsynchronized. I brought my watch to my ear: inaudible an inch away. But the faint, hurrying, ratchety, dry ticking went on.

Folding back the covers, I went to the French doors, opened one, and stepped out onto the roof terrace. The night was lighter than the room, and the ticking was much louder, hastier, its rhythms more broken — such a sound as several children might make running sticks at different speeds along a picket fence a block away. I went to the balustrade and looked down into the street, and ecco, there it came, a bobbing line of lanterns that curved off the Vittoria Bridge and came on up the Lugarno toward the city. Every lantern swung from a two-wheeled cart, and beside every cart walked a man, and drawing every cart was a donkey whose hasty feet ticked on the pavement.

Stegner could have just told us what the source of all that ticking was, as he finally does near the end of the passage. But making us wonder about it — maybe even speculate about it — anchors us more firmly in the time and the place, keeps the story moving along, and hopefully keeps the reader reading.

The Sixth Sense

I'm not talking about seeing dead people here, at least not exclusively. Sometimes sensory description comes down to something more than the five senses can convey. Something not concrete at all. You've had intuitive feelings in your life about something being wrong, or right, and you haven't had a single tangible or logical fact on which to base that feeling. So your characters will have those feelings, too.

This sixth sense becomes important in fiction quite often, especially so in mysteries, like Patricia Moyes's Scotland Yard detective Henry Tippett, who is famous for his “nose,” which is another name for his intuition. That intuition will need to come into play whenever one of your characters suspects something or someone, and that will happen in all types of fiction, not just who-done-its. So let's look at a couple of examples.

John D. MacDonald relates his central character Travis McGee's feeling about a house he steps into for the very first time in The Deep Blue Good-By:

It was one of those Florida houses I find unsympathetic, all black tile, glass, terrazzo, aluminum. They have a surgical coldness. Each one seems to be merely some complex corridor arrangement, a going-through place, an entrance built to some place of a better warmth and privacy that never was constructed. When you pause in these rooms, you have the feeling you are waiting. You feel that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will happen to you before they let you go. You cannot mark these houses with any homely flavor of living. When they are emptied after occupancy, they have the look of places where the blood has recently been washed away.

The message that McGee gets from this house is not anything that he can see or hear or touch or smell. It's something he senses.

The same is true for this morsel from Mary Higgins Clark's novel Stillwatch:

The place seemed peaceful enough. Christmas trees and Hanukkah candles stood on card tables covered with felt and make-believe snow. All the doors of the patients' rooms had greeting cards taped to them. Christmas music was playing on the stereo in the recreation room. But something was wrong.

The something that was wrong was the thing that can't be depicted through the use of any of the other senses. It is intuition; it is something akin to magic, or prophesy. It is what causes that little “pricking of my thumbs” by which we know — according to Shakespeare — that “something wicked this way comes.”

The use of this sixth sense can like everything else be overdone. A character who bases everything on what she feels, and nothing on what she gleans from the other senses, will lose credibility quickly. Use intuition when you need to focus attention on a particular detail that will make the reader wonder what's going on, like the unfriendly house and the nursing home where something was wrong. These premonitions come about rarely in real life, so use them rarely in your fiction.

SUMMARY: LOOKING BACK AT SENSORY DETAIL

Showing your reader what things look, sound, smell, feel, and taste like represents some of your most crucial tasks as a writer. And the essential word here is showing, because it will almost always be a more effective way to convey one or more of the senses than telling.

When using sensory description, recall the points covered in this chapter. Determine early on which audience you are primarily aiming for: readers of literary or popular fiction. Use unexpected, unusual ways to convey images to your reader, like Cormac McCarthy's “bellied” light wires. Don't rely too heavily on only showing what things look like; make sure you use the other senses, too. Employ the smallest, most intricate details as often as you use the glaring ones, like the almost imperceptible difference between two shades of the same color. Sometimes, emphasize the total absence of one of the senses, like sound. Quiet places are often louder in terms of mood and tone than noisy places. Perhaps most important, use sensory description to do much more in your fiction than to simply report what things look and sound and feel and smell and taste like. Let them help build your settings, characters, and situations.

In closing, let me try to reinforce just how important the five senses are to good writing by offering this anecdote that recently happened in my classroom.

A student was having her assignment — a story set in San Francisco — critiqued by the other members in her class. I required, for this piece, that the author/narrator situate herself in one place and show us what is going on in her field of vision. This student had chosen for her specific setting a tour boat making its way under the Golden Gate Bridge. So she had a lot of real estate from which to choose: the Presidio, the bay, the hills and buildings of the city proper, the mammoth bridge rising above her, even Alcatraz off in the distance. We always start with positive comments in our peer critique sessions, so several students mentioned her good descriptions of some of those places. Others pointed out how nicely she worked in a few details about history and local customs. Somebody said her dialogue was right on target. Somebody else said that those seals swimming beside the boat must have been cute.

Then the group fell silent, until the author herself identified the problem.

“It's missing something,” she said. “Isn't it?”

Another student got to the root of the dilemma. He said that he could see everything clearly enough, but that he couldn't smell or taste or touch or hear anything at all.

He was right.

This very good writer had loaded all of her sensory description into only one of her five options. She conveyed only what things looked like. And someone standing in a boat in San Francisco Bay is privy to a much wider array of sensations: the rocking of the boat itself, the barking of those seals, the squawking of seagulls, the smell and taste and feel of a salty mist, the tolling of bells throughout the city, to name just a few.

Once she did her revisions, she turned in a story that was abundantly rich in details. One that plopped her readers right down in that boat under that bridge. Where they could — via her wordsmithing — experience everything with her.

EXERCISE 1

Make yourself a chart or a spreadsheet. Create six columns (up and down) and ten rows (across).

Label the columns Sight, Smell, Taste, Hearing, Touch, Intuition.

Label the rows:

Now, come up with at least one thing or action or feeling that can be described with the sensory description in each column. Feel free to repeat yourself; you might very well use leaf for sound and sight and touch. But don't hinder yourself by focusing too tightly. Though pizza might not actually make a sound, the pizza box being opened does. Fill in every space on your chart.

EXERCISE 2

Make another chart just like that one, with the same labels on the columns and rows. This time replace the things and actions and feelings with words or phrases that show how the sense of each one might be conveyed. For example, for that leaf, you might put rough or raised veins under “Touch,” or spiraling down (maybe helicoptering down; remember it's okay to use uncommon images) for “Sight,” or wispy or swoosh (practice using onomatopoeia) for “Sound.”

The little boxes on your chart might not be big enough for all the wordsmithing you will come up with. Good! Spill over into your writer's journal.

EXERCISE 3

Choose one of the ten topics and, using the images you came up with and all the tools in your kit, write a page or so in which you take your reader to that place, making them see, hear, touch, taste, and smell what is there, even sensing something that is not there (extra sensory perception). Here's a rule: Try not to use the actual words see, hear, touch, taste, or smell (or any variations of them). In other words (quite literally), no looks like …, smells like …, and such reporting.

Show, don't tell.

EXERCISE 4

Using one of your manuscripts and a pencil, circle places that would benefit from more description of what things feel, taste, smell, sound, and look like. I'll bet you've packed most of your description into what things or people or places look like. So pay close attention to how you might use one or more of the other senses to provide clearer description.