How to Make Your Reader Feel What You Want Them to Feel, Using the 5 Senses

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 35, how do you get your reader to really feel what you're trying to get them to feel? It's the opposite of what you might think. Today, we explore the importance of writing from the senses. Welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing podcast.

My name is Brad Reed and I am so happy that you're spending part of your day with me today talking about the craft of writing. It's a topic that I love exploring with you and I appreciate so much the feedback you send me through the website at bradreedwrites. com. I really value your suggestions and ideas for the show, so keep those coming. The topic of today's show comes from a listener who was listening back over the show archives to one of our most popular shows. It was an interview with writer and writing teacher Alan Heathcock.

And he asked a question about one of Alan's tenets of writing good fiction that he shared with us on that show. The question related to techniques to get your reader to feel what it is you want them to feel in a scene. So that's what we're going to be exploring today. It's a topic I just covered with my in-person creative writing class, so it's fresh in my mind.

But it's also a technique that I think we can be constantly improving, so I'm looking forward to the opportunity to go even deeper with it today with you. If you haven't checked out the companion website to this podcast, I encourage you to take a look. You're going to find a bunch of great resources and information over there, including all of our free-to-everyone Patreon resources, ways to get in touch with us here at the show, and links to subscribe and rate the show. All that good stuff you're going to find over at bradreedwrites. com.

Introduction to Sensory Writing

All right, on to today's topic, and it's all about the feels. As I mentioned in the intro, today's show idea comes to us from writer Alan Heathcock and a resource he shared with us way back in episode 6. As he was finishing his award-winning collection of short stories called Volt, which if you haven't read, you should definitely check out, he codified his collection of writing advice into what he called the 27 Tenets of Writing Good Fiction.

The Importance of the Senses

Now you'll still find a link to that document in the show notes for that episode if you want to go back and take a look at all of them. One of them that stood out as particularly interesting, though, was tenet number 7, which reads like this. Feeling is communicated through the senses. Communicate through images, sounds, scents, and textures, not through words. You will primarily communicate through images. And I think this is one of his most insightful tenets for a couple of reasons.

First, if we're not trying to communicate feelings to our reader, then what is it we're really trying to do, right? Getting a reader to feel something should be the highest purpose of our art. And secondly, I think he points out how we go about trying to get our audiences to feel entirely backwards. I'm going to try to boil Alan's wise words down here to even more simple language so we can begin to get our minds fully around what I think he's trying to teach us. And here's how I'm going to boil that down.

Let's simplify it to emotions are transmitted to readers through the five senses. He seems to be suggesting that it's not through clever or overwrought plot lines. It's not through lines of dialogue or seeing the furrowed brow of a character. And now all of those elements do play a role, for sure, but they're not the part of writing that is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to translating emotion.

Classroom Experiment on Sensory Details

So rather than explore what's being claimed here from an academic standpoint, I'd rather tell you about an experience I had a few days ago with my creative writing class. I'd been thinking about this concept of transmitting emotion through the senses, and I ended up kind of making up a writing activity on the spot that actually worked really well to illustrate that point. So here's what I did. I took my class in to observe another class in progress. And this other class was playing some kind of Pictionary type game. I'm not even sure why they were playing it, but it was a little bit chaotic, right?

Which is actually a nice environment for the kind of writing that I was asking them to do. So I simply had them write for five minutes about what they saw, what they heard, what they felt, not emotionally, but through touch, what they tasted, if anything. None of them licked the walls, so none of them wrote about how it tasted. And right about what they smelled, right? Basically, it was a five senses exercise using all your senses to document the environment.

So I told them they couldn't actually write a story. They couldn't create characters. They couldn't do any of that. They were just recorders of all of the details that they experienced in that place for that brief period of time.

So after writing for a while, we came back to our own classroom and I had them switch papers with another classmate and pretend that they had just found this piece of writing on the ground somewhere, right? Like they didn't know who had actually written it or where that person had actually been. And then their assignment was to read the description that they found and try to infer what kind of emotion the writer was experiencing or what kind of mood the writer was in when they had written this short quick write.

Now, I didn't know what to expect from this little experiment, but the results were pretty profound, at least for me and what I discovered. So I actually did this writing as well. I do most of the writing that I ask my students to do along with them. And I traded my writing with one of the students and what I found in her writing was not just a list of details. I mean, it was, right? It was actually just a list of details because that's what I'd asked her to do.

But in the process of reading and interpreting her list of details, it became something very different. It became a story with a full range of emotional experience. So she started out describing the students in the room as bright eyed and said that their minds were alive. And it felt very positive and upbeat, right? And I started to kind of build this character in my head to someone who's always looking on the bright side of life and feels very positive and upbeat person.

But then almost immediately the tone changed. Suddenly she was focused not on the group as a whole, but she focused in on one particular student who was off by themselves a little bit. Now the mood that I had assigned to this writer shifted a little bit, right? She wasn't completely happy and positive anymore. Something about her had drawn her attention to the solitary student. And I began to understand that the writer is perhaps a little bit lonely herself, simply because that's what she had noticed in the room.

The next description in her list was of the desks creaking and the chalk drawings crumbling off the wall. She chose that word crumbling, which I thought was really interesting to describe chalk coming down off the walls. Now these two loaded details, right, creaking and crumbling, felt decidedly negative, especially up against all the positive things that were probably around that she could have focused on. I mean, the chalk drawings, after all, they're very bright and they're vivid and they're fun.

But what she noticed was the way that chalk was crumbling off of the board and collecting on the floor. So as the mood and emotion of this character I was building in my mind, I naturally created a kind of story around her. So this was not someone who was simply just bright and bubbly. This was someone who seemed to be desperately trying to see the positives of the world around her, but was constantly being pulled back into kind of a darkness because of whatever she was going through at the time. The really cool part of this is that when I talked to the writer about this afterwards, she told me that I was actually dead on right about her emotional state that morning. Simply by listing details, what she noticed first and the particular words she chose to describe it, she gave me a window into her emotions.

She didn't have to come right out and tell me how she was feeling, but she basically did simply by showing me the world as she was seeing it. In fact, if she had told me how she was feeling, if she had come right out and just said it, I probably wouldn't have heard it as loudly as I did by being able to put myself in her shoes and see and experience what she was seeing and experiencing. And I, in this process, was a fully engaged reader. If she had announced her emotional state at the beginning of her writing, I would have disconnected from it because there was no longer a puzzle to solve, right? And these kinds of little subtle puzzles are exactly what readers come to books to experience. They want to play a role.

They want to figure out things and put things together. They want to be able to discover for themselves how someone feels by the way that person is viewing the world and the things that they're paying attention to. It's a powerful kind of magic that only exists in writing prose. You don't really get access to this kind of thing in film or plays, at least not to the same extent that writers of prose do.

Writing Techniques for Emotion

So here's the hack, right? Here's how we take this information and turn it into good writing. Or at least here's how I'm using it in my own writing. Maybe it works for you, maybe it doesn't.

So when I'm drafting, I often purposefully write really, really terribly. I know that the detail work of a story requires more intense, slow, methodical thought than I can give as I'm just getting the bare bones of an idea down on paper in a rough draft. So it's common that isolated tree left standing in a swath of clear-cut forest. Your reader is smarter than that. They'll do the work of interpreting how that character is feeling simply based on what he or she notices.

Now, they don't do this consciously, your reader, but none of us really do, right? Not even in real life. We're hardwired to solve little puzzles like this. In fact, we get a little boost of adrenaline every time we put one of these little puzzles together. We're doing it constantly in our real worlds, and we can easily bring those same skills to bear when we're reading a work of fiction. It's just the trick is figuring out how to bring them to bear when we're writing a work of fiction.

I recommend that you actually try this little game and see what you learn from it. You don't really even need more than one writer to do it. Just go somewhere where there are people around or things are somehow otherwise interesting, right? There's a lot going on, and write what you see as descriptively as you can.

Now, don't try to tell a story or be overly emotional. You're just going to document what you see, what you feel, what you hear, what you taste. Then ask someone, really anyone, to read it and have them infer, have them guess what mood they think the writer was in when they were documenting these things.

Now, they'll be able to do it, and you'll discover the way something seemingly innocuous, some tiny little detail, can be interpreted with real emotional impact and weight that you didn't even realize was there when you were writing it. And the key here is in the details. So get away from talking about what everybody sees, right? The sky, the clouds, the grass, the road. Live in the tiny things in your writing. Live in the things that ordinary people don't necessarily notice as they go through their day.

These are the things that hold real power in your reader's minds. These are the things that will cause them to stop and wonder, why did that character notice that particular thing out of all the other possibilities? Now, again, they don't consciously stop and put your writing down and scratch their chin and thought, right?

Avoiding Clichés in Descriptions

But those little synapses, those little puzzle-solving areas of the brain are going to be firing on all cylinders to try to put all of that together under the surface. Your reader's brain is going to be buzzing with ideas and inferences, and then you've got them hooked into your story because you've given them a job to do, a puzzle to figure out. Now, a little word of warning here, and I think it's something I mentioned briefly in a recent episode. And this warning is to be careful not to get caught up in a single sense.

Now, we're very visual beings, and if we're not careful, we can write like it's the only sense that we have. If you're a screenwriter, you're really actually kind of limited to that one sense, although you actually have a lot of opportunity to bring in audio details as well. But don't forget, especially if you're writing prose, that we are tasting, we're smelling, we're feeling, we're hearing creatures just as much as we are seeing ones or visual ones.

So work all of the senses into your writing and immerse your reader in the setting that your character is experiencing so that they are right there alongside them. Okay, one more word of warning about all this detail stuff. Be especially careful of cliche here. It can be really easy to slip into describing other senses with cliches, right? We want to bring in a smell, so we end up saying something like, the air smelled like fresh flowers, or maybe his breath smelled like a grave. You know, that may not sound cliche at first, but it's not really doing anything too interesting.

We've heard things like that before. You see, we naturally reach for cliches when we're writing because we've heard them so often. Everybody can think of them because they are so common.

So always keep digging for that angle, that image, that connection that nobody's heard before. Create that moment in your reader's mind where they have to kind of wake up to your description and experience it in a new way because you've forced them to do it with a creative new take on it that they haven't heard before. And make sure when you make that connection that it's connected to your character's mood so it's always doing double duty.

In other words, never stop at the first idea that you come up with. There's always something better out there if you just keep digging and trying more things out. Now, I can't say for sure that what I've been talking about here is exactly what Alan Heathcock meant when he coined his seventh tenet of writing good fiction.

Examples from Alan Heathcock

But I can tell you that I see this kind of work happening in his writing all the time. What I want to do is take a look at a very short excerpt from his collection of short stories, Vault, and discover how he's using the senses, including images, to lead his readers into emotion. So what we're going to read is the first few paragraphs of the first short story in the collection, and this is called The Staying Freight. I'm going to read just a couple of paragraphs here, and then we'll unpack it a little bit.

So here's from Alan Heathcock's short story collection, Vault. This is The Staying Freight. Dust burned the ridgeline, and dust churned from the tiller discs, set a fog over the field. He blinked, could not stop blinking. There was not a clean part on him with which to wipe his eyes. Tomorrow he'd reserved for the sowing of winter wheat, and so much was yet to be done.

Thirty-eight and well-respected, always brought dry grain to the store, as sure a thing as a farmer could be. This was Winslow Nettles. Winslow simply didn't see his boy running across the field. He didn't see Rodney climb onto the back of the tractor, hands filled with meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil. Didn't see Rodney's boot slide off the hitch. Winslow dabbed his eyes with a filthy handkerchief.

The tiller discs hopped. He whirled to see what he'd plowed and back there lay a boy, like something fallen from the sky. Winslow leapt from the tractor, ran to his son. With his belt he cinched a gash in the boy's leg. He pressed his palm to Rodney's neck. Blood pearled between his fingers.

Winslow cradled his son in his lap and watched the tractor roll on, tilling a fading arc of dust toward the freight rail tracks that marked the northern end of all that was his. So that's the first one, two, three, four short paragraphs of that story. And even though we get a third person narrator here, we're not necessarily inside Winslow's brain here. It's third person. It feels like we are because it's focused on a single character, Winslow Nettles. We feel like we're seeing and experiencing the world through his eyes.

So in other words, we are intuiting his emotions and point of view and feeling some of it ourselves. Now the work that Alan has done here is really subtle, and that is the point, right? Anything too heavy-handed starts to feel too obvious and the reader gets the feeling that they're kind of being played, right? They're being manipulated.

So Alan starts by describing the way the dusk burns the ridgeline and how the dust churns up from the tiller to create a fog. Now these words, all in the first sentence alone, start already to speak to us emotionally, right? Burns and churns and fog. It feels like something's coming, something serious and ominous.

So Winslow's apprehensive and moody here. Alan doesn't have to come out and tell us that because we feel it through the details that he's noticed. So he's worried about what is over the horizon, both literally and figuratively. And Alan also gives us this detail that Winslow is absolutely covered in dirt.

Now that is a kind of symbol or a foreshadowing of death, right? If I've ever heard one, covered in dirt. And then right after that, we get an homage to how much this man's farm means to him. Right, the height of his pride was that he, quote, always brought in dry grain, unquote.

Now, I don't even actually know what that means, to bring in dry grain, but I don't have to, right? The emotion, the pride is there in those words and it translates to us as the reader. We feel his sense of pride and this is a guy who takes his job seriously, but he's worried that something is coming to ruin it all.

Now there's a bunch of other examples of using details to evoke emotion in this excellently written opening. But I wanna go ahead and jump to the real emotional meat of this section, right? And that's the moment that Winslow runs over and kills his son.

Now, if this were written as most people would write it, we'd see Winslow break down into gushing tears and he'd rend his garments and, right? The reader couldn't help but miss the overly wrought emotion that they were supposed to feel, so much so that they probably wouldn't have actually felt it at all. It would have been too heavy-handed and too obvious and the reader would kind of put up a wall against it. They would see, they would sense what the writer's trying to get them to do and they kind of work against that.

So instead, Alan shows us this man simply cradling his dead son in his arms as the tractor runs off without him, still tilling the field, still working. So in other words, his regular life, the one he was so proud of, so invested in, literally just left without him. Literally just drove off without him. And that's what this death of his son is for him, right? It's the end of everything that he loves.

Weekly Writing Challenge

Now, none of Vladimir Nabokov. Vladimir says that nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. And isn't that true? What smells take you back in time to a very specific place surrounded by very specific people? For me, it's actually the smell of a Marlboro cigarette.

Now, I've never been a smoker and almost nobody in my life smoked. But my grandfather sure did. And every experience I had with him was garnished with the smell of a Marlboro cigarette. And the best times I had with him, the times we were the closest, was sitting with him in his fishing boat up on Lake Owyhee in eastern Oregon. He taught me to put a worm on a hook, cast a line into the water, jig the bait just so, and reel in a shining, shivering crappie all to the smell of a Marlboro cigarette. The smell of any other cigarette starts to make me sick almost immediately.

But a Marlboro takes me back to when I was a kid and plants me right next to my grandpa and I'm there with him again, fishing with him again. This is the power of the senses. Yes, our sense of sight is vital and it might even be the most important sense in some ways.

But the other senses, I think, can more deeply connect us on an intimate level with emotion and with experience. So let's take it from Nabokov and get some great smells working in our writing. Our weekly challenge this week could have been to try the little writing exercise I described in the main part of the show, the descriptive reporting exercise. And I hope that you'll actually do that as well. I think it'll be a fun and profound experience for you.

But for our weekly challenge, I've got something else in mind. This one is about breaking away from the cliches that so dominate our creative minds. So this week, I'm going to give you a handful of prompts to help you shake up the way you think about description related to the senses.

Now these are taken from a great book edited by Sherry Ellis. The book's called Now Write. And it's full of great writing exercise ideas from some great writers.

So these aren't necessarily meant to be used as is in your writing. But perhaps you'll actually find something interesting that will work. So what I've got here is just a series of sentence starters to kind of break away from the way your brain usually defaults to a cliche. You'll probably need to hear these again or see them again if you actually want to write these. I assume most of you are listening to this not at a writing desk with a pen in your hand.

So go check out the show notes once the episode is concluded and when you want to do a little bit of writing. Go to bradreedwrites. com and find episode 35. Click on that and you'll see these prompts in there under the weekly challenge.

So let me just read through some of these for you. So complete these sentences. The morning sun tastes like what? Her voice smelled like what? See, we immediately have to go a different place in our minds. We can't reach for those cliches because we're breaking the pattern in there.

Let me read a few more. The music sounded as heavy as what? The color green feels like what? The color red tastes like what? Seeing him walk was like hearing what? Or tasting the night's dinner was like watching what?

Or touching her dying father's hand was like seeing what? So these can actually be really fun. I love to use these with my creative writing students because, just like we talked about, it breaks that natural tendency to reach for a cliche. And what's really pernicious about cliches is that we feel like kind of a genius when we first write them. We feel like we're in the zone. You're searching for some kind of piece of figurative language and boom, something just pops in your head and you think, I'm a genius, right?

I just thought of this thing. I didn't even have to work that hard for it. And almost always, that's because it's a cliche. Almost always, it's because you've heard it over and over again and that's why it is so prominently in your mind.

So I love these exercises to break that process down and to force you to think of these similes, these metaphors in new ways. So that's going to wrap it up for us this week. I would love to hear your experience with our weekly challenges, what's working for you, what's not, maybe what you're learning about writing through doing them. Actually, I'd love to hear from you about any aspect of the show. You can get in touch with us by going to bradreedwrites. com.

You can shoot us an email. There's a way to connect with us on Twitter. You can even leave us a message on our voicemail line and perhaps even hear your voice on a future episode of the show. Until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do and I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.