Writing for Five Senses – Description on the Run

It’s one of the most common writing tips: “Write the scene using all five senses.” But whenever I hear one writer give another that advice, I feel like one of my own trickster characters, and not just the ones with enhanced or extra senses. It’s more that I have to keep my smile in place while inside a part of me will wince.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

It’s a vital point; advice like Orly Konig-Lopez’s Unforgettable Writing: Use all 5 Senses to Add Emotion show how much it can add to a story. What I think it misses is—who’d have thought?—how that single line of advice describes it.

[bctt tweet=”The problem with ‘describe all five senses’ is how it describes the idea. #writing”]

Because… five, seriously?

I think we all cringe a little, at the idea of keeping that many of anything in our minds all at once, at least when we’re doing something as focused as creating an impression out of thin air. For favorite books or grocery lists, five is a small number; for senses to juggle in one description, it’s huge. (Plus, taste? In a chase scene?)

Yes, yes, the tip doesn’t mean every sense needs equal time. But it keeps us thinking about how hard it is to keep track of that many senses in writing, instead of how we could get more of them in by using how they relate to each other.

 

Quick Check: the Big Two

[bctt tweet=”All five senses are not created equal. #description #writing”]

We all know which two of the human senses do most of the work in a story. In fact, you can probably divide your scenes into “mostly hearing” (usually dialog) and “mostly sight” (everything else).

—Just don’t stop at that.

It’s the easiest way I know to bring description to life: keep some sounds mixed in with the sights.

Sight being what it is, it’s the main sense we use to organize our surroundings—especially if we’re trying to describe something and have the space to only mention so much. But it’s all too easy to see (there’s that word again) the scene just in terms of the eye.

When my hero was infiltrating an apartment complex in SHADOWED, I could have opened with:

Trimmed trees and brush lined the paths around the buildings, but Paul saw none of the families walking around it now that the sun had set.

Not too shabby, I think; in twenty-six words it shows different pieces of the place and conveys a larger picture, including how Paul has been waiting to make his move.

Except, all of it is that visual “picture.” This is the kind of one-sense writing it’s easy to slip into, that leaves the description a bit flat. So instead I used:

Trimmed trees and brush lined the paths around the buildings, and Paul could hear a baby crying, probably part of one of the families he’d seen walking when the sun had been out.

Six more words, but just having that second sense in there drops the reader into a more real place. You can start imagining how Paul would pass other sounds as he walks in, and you might even be halfway to filling in the hard concrete under his shoes or the fading smell of barbecue, because the description won’t let you settle back into seing the neighborhood as just a painting. Sound goes with sight like, well, thunder with lightning.

[bctt tweet=”Sound #description goes with sight like thunder with lightning. #writing”]

Naturally this works the other way too: dialog and other sound-focused passages can get the same depth by working in some visuals. A page of pure conversation never feels as complete as a page sprinkled with faces, background images, or a full “walk and talk” of what the characters are doing or passing by as the chat goes on. Imagine how much this line from the next page of SHADOWED would lose if it had stopped with the sound:

“Who are you?” Koenig gasped as he groped for the drawer.

(If you’re a dialog-centered writer, you may have worked out the sight-sound combination starting from this end. Add enough gestures to conversations and you start to see the need for noises in a landscape too.)

Writing would be easier if there were one rule of thumb about this—maybe one sound per paragraph or three sentences of sight and vice versa. But of course the real fun is each of us working out our own mix, and just remembering how much mixing in one other sense fleshes out the moment.

 

That’s my one-step tip for deepening descriptions. I hope you’ll keep it mind when you read, write, or you come across the flat “use five senses” statement.

Next week I’ll go further into how comparing those two senses can help all five work together in a description, and some of the patterns that can steer pacing and suspense. After all:

You can’t see everywhere.

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