The Importance of Using the Five Senses

This is the working script for the episode rather than a transcript. The recorded show varies from it in places, and any links or resources mentioned may be out of date.

Today's show 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, Volt, he codified his writing advice into what he called the "27 Tenets of Fiction." One of them stood out as particularly interesting:

Feeling is communicated through the senses. Communicate through images, sounds, scents, and textures, not through words. You will primarily communicate through images.

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 are we really trying to do? Getting our reader to feel something should be the highest purpose of our art, shouldn't it? And second, he points out that we go about trying to get our audiences to feel entirely backwards.

Let me boil it down to even simpler language: emotions are transmitted to readers through the five senses. Not through clever or overwrought plot lines, not through lines of dialogue or seeing the furrowed brow of a character. Those elements play a role, for sure, but they are not doing the heavy lifting when it comes to emotion.

An experiment with my creative writing class

Rather than explore this from an academic standpoint, I'd rather tell you about an experience I had a few days ago with my creative writing class.

I took my class in to observe another class in progress. They were playing some kind of Pictionary-type game, so it was a little chaotic, but those kinds of environments are nice for this sort of writing. I simply had them write for five minutes about what they saw, what they felt, what they heard, what they tasted, and what they smelled. A five senses exercise. They couldn't write a story, couldn't create characters. They were just recorders of the details they experienced in that place for that period of time.

Afterward I had them switch papers with a classmate and pretend they had just found this writing on the ground somewhere, like they no longer knew who had written it or where they had been. Their assignment was to read the description and infer what emotion the writer was experiencing.

I traded with one of the students, and what I found was not just a list of details. I mean, it was, because that's what I'd asked for. But in the process of reading and interpreting it, it became something else. It became a story with a full range of emotional experience.

She started out describing the students as "bright-eyed," with their "minds alive." It felt positive and upbeat, and I started building a character in my head: someone looking on the bright side of life. But almost immediately the tone changed. She focused not on the group but on one particular student off by themselves. The mood I assigned to the writer shifted. Something had drawn her attention to this solitary student, and I began to understand the writer as perhaps a bit lonely herself, simply because that's what she noticed.

The next description was of the desks creaking and the chalk drawings "crumbling" off the walls. Two loaded details, creaking and crumbling, and decidedly negative ones, especially with all the bright and vivid things she could have focused on instead. The character I was building was not someone simply bright and bubbly. This was someone desperately trying to see the positives of the world around her and constantly being pulled back into the darkness.

The really good part: when I talked to the writer afterward, she told me I was dead-on right about her emotional state that morning. Simply by listing details, by what she noticed first and the words she chose, she had given me a window into her emotions. She didn't have to tell me how she was feeling. She basically did anyway.

In fact, if she had told me, I probably wouldn't have heard it as loudly. I was fully engaged as a reader because there was a puzzle to solve, and these little subtle puzzles are exactly what readers come to books for. They want to play a role. They want to discover for themselves how someone feels by the way they see the world and what they pay attention to. It's a powerful kind of magic that only exists in prose. You don't get access to this in film or plays, at least not to the same extent.

How to use this in your own writing

Here's the hack. Or at least here's how I use it.

When I'm drafting, I often purposefully write really terribly. The detail work of a story requires more intense, slow, methodical thought than I can give while I'm getting the bare bones of an idea down. It's common for me to write something awful like "Mike was angry about what Martha said" or "Phil was feeling disconnected from society." Sentences like these will never see the light of day. They're doing all the work for the reader and leaving them entirely passive, and that's when readers disconnect and put your book down.

But what I'm really doing is leaving placeholders to fill during revision. When I come across one of these heavy-handed announcements of emotion, I know it's a sign to slow down, put myself in that character's shoes, and spend time seeing the setting the way they would see it.

Would this character, feeling lonely and isolated, notice the vast blue sky overhead? Or would they focus on the single tree left standing in a swath of clearcut forest? You don't even have to write "he felt as lonely as that isolated tree." Your reader is smarter than that. They'll do the work of interpreting how the character feels based on what he noticed. They won't do it consciously, but we're hardwired to solve little puzzles like this, and we get a small boost every time we do.

The key is in the details. Get away from what everybody sees: the sky, the clouds, the grass, the road. Live in the tiny things, the things ordinary people don't necessarily notice as they go through their day. These hold real power in a reader's mind. They cause a reader to wonder why the character noticed that particular thing out of all the possibilities.

Two warnings.

Don't get caught up in a single sense. We're very visual beings, and if we're not careful we write like sight is the only sense we have. We are tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing creatures just as much as we are seeing ones. Work all the senses in and immerse your reader in what your character is experiencing.

Watch out for cliché. It's easy to slip into it when describing the other senses, because we've heard them so often. "The air smelled like fresh flowers." "His breath smelled like a grave." Keep digging for the angle nobody's heard before. Create the moment where a reader has to wake up to your description and experience it anew. And make sure it's connected to your character's mood so it's doing double duty. Never stop at the first idea you come up with.

Heathcock on the page

Let's look at how this works in Alan's own writing, in the opening of "The Staying Freight," the first story in Volt.

Even though we get a third-person narrator, because it's focused on a single character, Winslow Nettles, we feel like we're seeing the world through his eyes. The work Alan is doing is really subtle, and that's the point. Anything too heavy-handed starts to feel obvious, and the reader gets the sense they're being played.

He describes the way the dusk "burns" the ridgeline and how the dust "churns" up from the tiller to create a fog. Those words, in the first sentence alone, speak to us emotionally. It feels like something is coming, something serious and ominous. And we see that Winslow is absolutely covered in dirt, a kind of foreshadowing of death. Then we get an homage to how much this man's farm means to him: the height of his pride is that he "always brought in dry grain." I don't even know exactly what that means, but I don't have to. The pride is there in the words.

Then the real emotional weight: the moment he runs over and kills his son. Written the way most people would write it, we'd see Winslow break down and rend his garments, and the reader would miss the overwrought emotion they were supposed to feel, so much so that they probably wouldn't feel it at all. Instead, Alan shows us this man cradling his dead son while the tractor runs off without him, still tilling, still working. His regular life, the one he was so proud of, just left without him. That's what this death is for him: the end of everything he loved.

None of that is spelled out on the page. It seems completely lacking in emotion, but it's all there in the images, and Alan has left it to the reader to discover. Truly powerful storytelling happens when the reader meets the writer halfway to create meaning. That's when a reader becomes part of the story.

Wise Words

Today's Wise Word comes from Vladimir Nabokov:

"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 to a very specific place, around very specific people?

For me it's the smell of a Marlboro cigarette. I've never been a smoker, and almost nobody in my life smoked, but my grandfather sure did. Every experience I had with him was garnished with that smell. And the best times I had with him, the times we were closest, were sitting in his fishing boat up on Lake Owyhee in Eastern Oregon. He taught me to put a worm on a hook, cast a line, jig the bait just so, and reel in a shining, shivering crappie, all to the smell of a Marlboro. The smell of any other cigarette makes me sick almost immediately, but a Marlboro takes me back and plants me right next to my grandpa.

This is the power of the senses. Sight is vital, maybe more important than the others in some ways. But the other senses can connect us more deeply, on an intimate level, with emotion and experience.

Weekly Challenge

This one is about breaking away from the clichés that dominate our creative minds. Here are some prompts to shake up the way you think about description and the senses. They're from Now Write!, edited by Sherry Ellis. They aren't necessarily meant to be used as-is, but you may find something that works.

• The morning sun tastes like…
• Her voice smelled like…
• The music sounded heavy as…
• The color green feels like…
• The color red tastes like…
• Seeing him walk was like hearing…
• Tasting the night's dinner was like watching…
• Touching her dying father's hand was like seeing…

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.