The Writing Life Too

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions. Flannery O’Connor

The sky is the color of dirty sheets. That is, if the sheets were once white. When I was a girl everyone owned white sheets and Monday was laundry day. My grandmother had an old ringer wash machine on her back porch and laundry was serious business. I can still see and smell the sheets blowing in a summer breeze in her back yard –they smelled of grass and sunshine and bleach. In the winter she had wooden clothes racks that she hung laundry on in the living room and attic. Few things make me feel happier or calmer than the smells of my childhood—sheets hanging in the sun, lilacs, lily of the valley, honeysuckle, turkey baking on Thanksgiving, cinnamon. When I work with writers I always urge them to use all the senses in their writing, especially our olfactory senses are wired into our memories and emotions.

In my book Between the Lines, Mastering the Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing I included a chapter on Sensory Surround. I described why sensory information is important for fiction and nonfiction. Sensory description contributes to every part of fiction and helps readers make connections and experience the story viscerally. Life is breathed into fiction by translating the senses onto the page, producing stories rooted in the physical world. Action and dialogue arrest the reader’s attention, but sensory details assure the reader that they’re actually occurring.

Sensory details penetrate the reader’s nervous system, memory, and imagination; they serve as triggers and catapult readers into the world of the story as well as into their remembrances and emotions. But this penetration cannot happen without highly specific details that can be imagined wholly and viscerally—holly, a ragged hemline, purple pansies, crooked teeth, garlic, rap music blaring from a low-rider, the scent of roses, a rusty swing set, a high school marching band, a vodka martini, a cat mewing pitifully, pearl earrings, roasted red peppers, a Bach cantata, a funeral dirge, black thong underwear, the smell of an old theater—part mildew, stale popcorn, and wet wool.

Sensory details reveal specialness and importance—the places in the story where the reader should pause and take note. Not every scene or action is unfolded with the same weight or importance. Some scenes are transitions, some are building blocks for larger, more dramatic moments, or occur in places where the reader has already visited earlier. In these scenes you won’t lavish as many details on the setting or other aspects—you’ll get down to business and march through the scene. But then for other events, you’ll spend more time and thus more words and details, and your readers will linger there because the level of drama warrants it. The degree of specificity alerts readers when to linger a bit and when to march through actions.

In fact, sensory surround coupled to drama tugs the reader into your story and forces him to keep reading. Precise and sensory word pictures convince the reader that you’ve created a world as vivid as the one he or she lives in. Writing embedded with sensory information pierces the many layers of the reader’s consciousness and delivers an illusion of reality.