Ann 1"I can smell your ink!" Writing with the senses.
October 19th 2008 03:08
"I can smell your ink!"
Writing With The Senses.
Disregarding our sixth sense, and the interior enlightenment novice writers are convinced they possess, I want to concentrate on the five principal senses.
As creatures with bodies, we perceive things through our corporeal senses. We see, we hear, we touch, we smell, we taste.
We store these experiences in our brains (memory) and hearts (emotions).
Words act as triggers on our intellects and emotions. They recall the sights, the sounds, the feel, the smell and taste of objects.
‘Lamb roast’ usually elicits a range of responses, besides Tom Cruise. Some people see the roast and the steam rising, or where they last had it, and whom they ate with, some hear it being carved, some hear the music that was playing at the time, some hear the social chit-chat of the time, some feel it sliding down their throat, or the feel of it raw during the preparation process, some feel lamb’s wool, some smell meat and mint and garlic and roast potatoes, some taste it, or the difference between the taste of lamb, beef, chicken and fish. Some do all of the above.
“Well, Clarice - have the lambs stopped screaming?”
Writing with the senses is about employing words to recall sights, sounds, and the feel and smell and taste of objects.
It’s about injecting a piece of writing with these sensory perceptions via words in order to trigger a certain response in the reader’s mind or emotions.
It’s great to set out with the aim of writing an emotional, passionate piece. But, if all you write is a piece littered with vague, abstract terms describing intangible objects like feelings, emotions and passions, you’re not writing with the senses. Or with much sense in regards to a sensible approach to writing?
So, after writing a page-and-a-half of how you feel about something or someone, you haven’t mentioned one of the exterior senses. It ends up about as interesting as listening to an hour-long phone conversation from your best friend whom has rung you up to tell you how much he or she is in love. And how much someone else is in love with him or her. And the entire conversation is about how they feel about each other. You nod. Go Yeah? And switch off?
They should invent a new genre: Post Vague Abstractionism. To cover the glut of emotional outpourings disguised as poetry and fiction narrative.
One of the reasons people don’t write with the senses is because they don’t even know what the term means? They’re too busy teaching themselves to write? And teaching others before learning how to? And wonder why after 2,000,000M words, their writing hasn’t improved? So they start a new book? Then another one? And another? And the third book is as bad as the first? And they can’t work out why? So they begin teaching others to write? With a view of learning how to themselves?
All of this might sound harsh, but that’s only because it is. If you want to improve as a writer, you’ll take it on board. If you want to spend another six months not improving, totally disregard it. Or take it personally? As though it’s not just stuff passed on that might be of benefit to someone willing to learn?
If you already know all this? Then view it as a reminder and nothing else. Or totally disregard it. This is not for you.
Write with the senses and let your reader experience the emotion and passion of the moment(s).
Let’s take a couple of classic scenarios: Boy Meets Girl and they fall in love. Boy and Girl break up with each other and fall in hate.
Some ‘writers’ will focus on all the interior emotions and write such rubbish as, ‘I knew I was in love with him/her the moment we met. I just knew it. I could tell.’ Then the clichés come thick and fast. It was love at first sight. My heart was racing. And on fire at the same time? Someone call 000 or 911? Ambulance, thanks.
Then when it comes to the break up, the writing is full of loneliness and despair and hate. Still no writing with the senses. Or sense itself?
Nothing tangible exists for the reader to focus on, or grasp hold of in this type of writing. Some people like this ‘style’ of writing. I’ll leave them to it.
Whereas if you write with the senses, it completely transforms the story into something worthwhile reading.
Once you’ve written a passage, and let’s say, for example, it is the scenario of boy meets girl, when you read your own writing, what do you discover in relation to the following?
The Sense of Sight:
What do you see?
The Sense of Sound.
What do you hear?
The Sense of Feel:
What do you feel like you’re touching?
The Sense of Smell:
What odours are present? Or, what do you smell?
The Sense of Taste:
What do you taste?
Do the ‘boy meets girl’ writing exercise. Limit yourself to an hour maximum. And just try to include all five senses in the piece.
I knew I was in trouble the moment I noticed Louie wasn’t wearing panties. It was exactly the type of trouble I was looking for when I agreed to meet her in Brighton. There was more material in the white cotton hankie in my pocket than there was in the mosquito-red outfit she was wearing. The sound of the chef in the kitchen at Half Moon Café stropping his knife against the emery block should have acted as a distraction, but it only made me imagine her in a barber’s stool, and the barber using his blades and scissors to snip and shave her pubes into a landing strip. “They do a good carpetbag steak here,” I said, as she leaned forward. “It’s a juicy fillet of steak cut open and filled with oysters.” She tried to contain her amusement, nearly choked on her own smirk, and three short puffs of laughter came out of her nostrils. Her cheeks flushed like a toilet cistern with a red duck deodoriser clamped to the bowl. I don’t know the name of the perfume she was wearing but it made me feel like I was in a sauna, and the steam was generated from a heated bath full of coconut milk, cinnamon sticks and ripe cherries. I put my fist to my mouth as though I was about to cough, and bit into my index finger. My own flesh tasted like stale tobacco and smoky car rides. Louie reached under the table and grabbed me on the leg just above the knee. “I might go for the sausage,” she said, and the special combo of her shrill laughter and my bellowing did more than break the ice in the water jug. It shattered it into tiny fragments, and bitterly disturbed the lemon rind. I flipped the menu shut. “Want to forget the meal altogether, and just go?”
It’s not world class writing, but it’s a lot better than writing about how I met this chick I really, really liked because she had a sick sense of humour.
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Comment by Kleonaptra
Kalikapsychosis
That was brutal! Man, I fell for it hard. That was such a great example of creating a visceral impact in a reader. I actually felt my stomach drop out.
This post has been a major wake up call for me. Dont worry if it sounds harsh - harsh teachers are the only ones that actually teach you anything. But I really needed to hear this right now. This is really going to spice up everything Im working on.