Five Scribe readers, a comment I heard often in my early years as a writer is "your characters don't live in a vacuum." I took that comment to mean, "your work is one-dimensional drek, now fix it." Sure, we know that our characters have five senses. But how do we incorporate those senses seamlessly on the page without yanking your reader out of the story? Author Victoria Houseman visits today to introduce her workshop to help us do just that.
Making Your
Writing Come Alive with the Five Senses ©
Victoria Bromley w/a
Victoria Houseman
The story
writer Flannery O’Connor said, “Fiction begins where human knowledge begins –
with the senses.” We have only five ways
of perceiving reality. We can SEE it,
TASTE it, SMELL it, TOUCH it, HEAR it.
Without the information we get through our five senses, we can’t
function as human beings. Each sense is
important individually, but each has its own limitations. Yet, one sense can be used to compensate for
the lack of another sense. A blind man
has a heightened sense of hearing and touch and taste and smell. This is how he learns to cope with the world
around him living in a sightless world.
The most effective way to perceive reality is to use all of our senses
in harmony. In fiction, smell, touch and
taste bring you closer to the story.
Sight and sound can be close or from a distance.
Think of
which sense(s) you use most. Are you
overtly sensitive to smells that don’t seem to bother others? Can you eat really spicy, hot foods that
would burn another person’s mouth? Do
bright lights bother you? Do you like to
make love with the lights on and see the expression on your lover’s face or do
you prefer the dark – knowing what is happening only by touch and sound and
scent?
Stories
need to build on one basic tenet: to convince the reader the story is real –
doesn’t matter if it’s science fiction or fantasy – the reader needs to believe
the story is real, that it may have happened or could happen in the real world
of their imagination. The trick for us
as writers is to get the reader to smell the story’s reality, to taste it, to
feel it, to see it, to hear it.
As authors,
we enter the world of imagination when writing a story; our senses must be
alert to details that exemplify the story thematically as well as
physically. We need to be open to the
sounds and sights and aromas that our characters have around them and we need
to convey what is going on in any one given sense – internally and
externally. Only then can we develop
fully actualized three-dimensional characters.
It’s vital to use the right sensory detail at the right moment. This is where your writer’s imagination kicks
in and uses what sense(s) it needs for your story’s reality.
Use of the
five senses not only tells our reader the experience of our characters at any
given time, but can also infuse an ordinary story with deep layers. In art, it’s called “underpainting” –
building layer upon layer upon layer.
Subconsciously, we know the layers are there, but what we experience is
the full-bodied result of those layers.
Gestalt theory called it “the sum being greater than the total of the
parts”.
By using
the five senses, you can invoke what is going on in their outside world. Remember, it is your characters world – their
point of view. How one character is
affected by the world around them through their senses may not be the same as
how another character is affected. This
is part of the glory of using the five senses – they can be utilized to make
your characters whole and multi-faceted and unique. Even secondary characters come to life. No matter how little time they are given in a
story, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be fully developed.
The ripple
effect of using the five senses is your story is fleshed out and
developed. It bursts forth from your
pages and your reader achieves that “fly on the wall” quality – they feel they
are really there in the pages of your book.
All effects come through the five senses or sensory memories of the
reader as well as of the writer. By
imbuing a reality in your story with the five senses, you bring about a magical
quality. You join the abstract world
with the physical world.
Sometimes a
story develops directly from the sensory details that suggested it. The creative starting point often is simply
some details of the senses, and recording that detail or those details starts
an imaginative process from which a story is evoked. Many are locked in our subconscious and only
need the key to set them free.
In his
story, “A View of the World” (The Charlton Press, 1989), Thomas Kennedy uses
memories of senses he had locked away from a time in high school when he worked
in a shoemaker’s shop. He draws on his
memory of the sensual smells of the shop – the aroma of raw leather straps, the
glue, dye, tins of polish – the grumbling stitch of the heavy sewing machine,
the whack of the nailer, the scrape of the sander, and the moan of the waxing
wheels. From these stored memories,
Kennedy has written a story of how a young apprentice and the shoemaker
schooling him view the world. The shoe
shop and all its sights and sounds and smells serve as the backdrop to their
totally opposite views of life.
USE OF THE SENSES TO ANSWER, “WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?”
Think of the five senses as
plotting devices.
While writers are always aware of the
sensual aspects of a character, they can use this awareness to solve the
problem of what happens next. A character’s senses can guide you, as writer,
through difficult transitions into action. Use them to establish an alliance
between character and reader by making the reader aware of what our
hero/heroine notices. How? Whether or not the reader understands the cultural
background, customs, religion, or politics of a character, she roots for the
heroine, for example, because the reader can identify with what she sees,
hears, tastes.
As our
senses prompt us to action in life, so can they move our characters and story
forward in sequence. Our senses create, and sometimes rule, our moods and
actions. Let them do the same for you characters.
Through
his/her imagination, your reader experiences the same sensory stimuli as the
character, and thus, feels present in the scene. Providing a three-dimensional
environment in which your character functions will enable your reader to step
into the scene and experience the same sensory perceptions and anticipation as
that character.
Ask
yourself: What first catches the attention of your character? What sense? What
does your hero/heroine sense first? Smell? Taste? Note that the mouth and
tongue are the most sensitive. This first impression, via your character, will
be your reader’s first impression of your hero/heroine and begin to set the
stage of your story.
It won’t
take pages or even paragraphs to convey these perceptions. A sentence or even a
word or two will usually suffice. Revealing the senses is easy; remembering to
show the reader how the character reacts to what he senses can be the “elusive
elements” in a scene.
Sensory
writing should create scenes that are alive with emotion and will reel through
the mind of your reader as though on a movie screen. If you do your job
properly by identifying with what your character experiences in every scene,
your reader will savor every moment will live each transgression and every
triumph.
Appeal to
the five senses as a technique for developing your plot into connected scenes
is the best way to place your characters in the story rather than simply
pushing them through a plot.
Discovering
what happens next in our story is the fascinating part of fiction, writing, and
reading. Put yourself in the scene and examine what the character might sense
as he encounters conflict. You will immediately know what comes next, because
you will see, hear, smell, touch, even taste the elements present through your
reader’s actions. More important, your reader will be able to do the same and
will keep turning those pages.
In my
workshop, I use the five senses to make characters three dimensional, to help with
plotting, and setting. To add depth to a
writer’s story.
Learn more
about Victoria Bromley w/a Victoria Houseman’s two week on-line workshop using
the five senses on her website:
www.victoriahouseman.com.
