Writing for Five Senses – Combining Them All

Can you write a description with just sight and hearing? No, but those two can organize how all five senses fit together.

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

Last week I wrote about the classic advice to “describe all five senses,” and how much easier keeping track of description is if we focus on alternating the main two. But of course writing isn’t supposed to be easy. Having two primary senses doesn’t excuse us from keeping all five in mind to cover a scene, or help weave them together to build the kind of high-powered suspense (or warmth, or humor, or whatever your own goals are) a story deserves.

Except, they do.

[bctt tweet=”Sight and hearing aren’t just a shortcut, they’re models for writing all five senses. bit.ly/5SensesBy2″]

Two Models

Think about it: what’s the basic difference between eyes and ears? Different writers might think of points like:

Sight organizes our surroundings, with sound giving advance signs before something comes into view. (Or as we action writers call them, warnings.)
Sight gives a complete “picture” of surroundings; sound often adds feeling with someone’s tone of voice, or a noisy object’s “personality.” More poetic writers can savor this.
Sight shows everything (in theory); sound picks out which things are moving or active.

All true, and I think they all come back to one rule for organizing descriptions:

[bctt tweet=”#Describing sight is about things’ positions; hearing is about their nature. #writing bit.ly/5SensesBy2″]

When I look out my window right now, I see everything from the parking lot up to the sky—which also means I have to (literally) focus on different parts of the view each moment, and it means that if I don’t see someone walking up to visit me, there’s nobody right there. Hearing is more selective; someone standing beyond my door is hidden until he knocks, and I still won’t know if he’s holding a package or anything else until he (or she) makes another noise with that.

–That position vs nature difference is nothing new to any of us, but how often do we really think about it, as writers? Especially one further effect of it: if there is a sound, my hearing might still pick it up through walls and behind my back, and even when I’m not paying attention. (Say when a car alarm goes off when I’m trying to write…) But sight’s power and limits might lead to me walking over to check what’s off on the side of my window frame.

Of the two, focused sight is the one we keep acting on to get a clearer picture of what we need; sound gets broadcast to us on its own. For a writer looking to follow the moment, that difference is pure gold.

And best of all, the other three senses fit right into these patterns.

Touch is as position- and focused-based as sight, the way we have to reach out to feel anything that hasn’t come to us; it even has the same similarity that we already have a skinload of cold air, tight shoes, and other touches we’re always half-aware of and trying to focus past. And taste only has the range of our tongues, except when memory or “the taste of fear” stir something up.

Meanwhile smell works much like hearing: certain things jump right out at us because they—but only they—give off much scent, and they pour those sensations right into the air.

There may be five senses, but all they follow these two plans… and so does a character using them.

Stepping through the Senses

Since I always look at my writing as a chance to build different kinds of suspense, I think my scenes only work if I can build them in the right order. So if I want to drop a reader deep into one moment, I might describe all five senses at once. But more often, I’ll tie it all to the process of how my character is living through that scene:

Step 1) First outside senses: Is there something he can hear, or smell, before what’s important comes within reach of the focused senses?

A crunch of boots on the snow made him whirl around.

Step 2) Surveying: What can he see, touch, or taste as he first tries to take in what’s there? And, which pieces matter most to him, and what patterns (like barriers or possibilities) do they form in his mind?

One of the thugs staggered from the door, blocking the alley. Dark blood soaked his shirt, but Mark shivered to see the “dead” man’s wild eyes gleam brighter than the knife in his hand.

As part of this, sound/smell components: check which few of those sensations would also create a sound or smell, and how those senses might “demand” a bit of our attention. So instead I could start those lines with:
One of the thugs staggered from the door, scraping dully against the brick wall as he blocked the alley….

Step 3) Act & React (focus+changes): As the scene goes on, keep tracking what the character and everyone else do, the same way as Step 2. That is, use sight, touch, and taste to do their best to follow everything worth noticing, but watch for which things are adding a noise or scent to the mix.

Mark edged back, watching his balance as his heels picked through the treacherous bags of garbage piled behind him. The stink of blood as the killer stumbled closer brought sour vomit to Mark’s mouth.

plus Background: For an extra layer, once and a while is there a sound or smell from outside the immediate area that could filter into the mix?
The police sirens faded in the distance.

—Or if those sirens were to turn around, that “background” sound could restart the cycle as a new Step 1 of the police starting to drive into view. (Even if they don’t, if you know my Lavine series, you know Mark has at least four ways to survive that scene.)

That’s how I build suspense, or poetry or warmth or any other mood, by playing up the differences in the “focused” and “broadcast” senses to work them each in at their own places. Because to me (and I make no apology for saying it)—

Losing that distinction would be… senseless.

On Google+

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.

On Google+

Plot and the Power of OR

“Depth” is a word people have used different ways about fiction, sometimes not being that clear what they mean–just some sense that a character winds up with more layers, a situation more reality, and so on. Personally, I think the metaphor might be incomplete– because one of the best ways to give a story realism, or complicate a moment or a plot, or just loosen up the writing mind to let more in, is something I think of more as “width.” That is, ask the question “Or what else?”

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

Yes, that’s partly what all writers do: work out a plot or moment by thinking, “what if something different happened here?” To rethink a choice that isn’t working, or to keep the next thing varied from what’s gone before, sure. Such as:

OR it’s someone else making a move (or even an object breaking or changing)
OR they focus on something else (a different plan)
OR it gets a different result.

Mixing up who takes the initiative can add a lot: a hero working through his plans while the villain never strikes back makes the story seem lazy, and a hero always defending is passive, but a sense of each retaliating against the other makes the whole story more organic and exciting. And other characters can’t be labeled so “secondary” that they never demand a scene when she tries to bargain for her husband’s life, or he needs protection after being the only crimelord to survive the villain’s purge, or they’re sure they’re the ones a troubled young man will listen to. For the second option, changing the target of that someone’s action covers going to deal with different people (or eliminate them, or whichever), gaining some other tool or pausing to develop it–using the whole world as a source of possible different tactics.

But changing up a plan’s result gets tricky–“let the villain win” can sound fun, but it’s bad news when the story’s only half over, and not much better to have the hero winning too much too soon. Worse, half the time the person and plan that fit best seem too sure to wipe out big parts of the story; what if the villain just had too good an opening to fail at? Asking that kind of “or” can put a whole story at risk.

But “or” can be more than a way to shake things up, it can be a whole perspective to work in. People often talk of stories as having “depth” when its elements have layers to reveal–a person with attitudes like masks over other masks, or a setting the story can explore within rather than acting like a 2-dimensional backdrop. But I like the idea that besides static layers, a story can reveal itself by how a character acts by asking “what else he tries,” or what his reaction is to someone else’s attempts; they “move forward but zigzag” to deal with each of those options to follow their goal. By this model, “depth” comes from those layers of zigzagging, how many different choices (of their own or others) that they deal with. All from considering “Or.”

That is, how many choices does a character really get to try out? At least half of making a story believable is in looking at those; couldn’t he just “leave the haunted house,” or Google a problem to get its basics, and doesn’t every problem have some expert or authority who’s already trying to deal with it? A story that covers more of its situations’ and people’s options comes off as more real–simple as that.

(The other half of plausibility is “what wouldn’t work” and the sad business of finding out if the hero’s glorious strategy is liable to get shut down because cars just don’t explode.)

“Or” is the viewpoint that can work all of this out, just by asking which options there are, and how far each goes:

What choices get blocked right away? Look at any situation from the view of a character trying to get through to a goal there, and it becomes a set of barriers and lost opportunities. An isolated house has distance to stop help from coming, and a fortress that’s lost its commander may have no leader strong enough to help; that’s what makes them ominous from the start.

What choices do characters realize won’t work? A fast way to explore more options is to just talk out, think out, or make quick tests to show some things as dead ends. How many scenes do we know where an Expert was called in, that began with “Did you try–“/ “Well of course!” Even a few lines of this builds realism, and suspense, in both how many choices it checks and the process of how people would go through them.

What choices do people try but fail, and which tempt them? These two might be half the structure of a scene or plot, and they may be the more important half.

After all, even though what actually happens or works is the spine of the story, so often what brings it to life is its contrast with the failed schemes, red herrings, and roads-not-taken set up next to them. A murder with one suspect, or a duel with no choice between safe and desperate maneuvers, don’t compare to stories that do make full use of these, and what they mean that a character chooses one over the other. After all, making that duelist choose between finesse and letting himself be hit creates a whole different scene–and character–from using skill vs. driving his opponent into a rage. Better still, when the story paces these to crush certain hopes at the right moment, or spring a new option just when someone’s resolved to go one way… now that’s momentum.

(Finally, what if there’s a plan or force that really does work–and something else comes down and overwhelms even that? “The cavalry comes over the hill” is annoying, unless it’s been hinted at first without ruining suspense… or it’s enemy cavalry…)

So often, “or” is the story. It sorts out the basics and then adds what else can justify them; it can take anything and define what it is by capturing what it isn’t; and then deciding how often to zigzag between choices can be the meat of designing any plot, scene, or even sentence.

Just a theory. Or…

On Google+

Plotting – Divide the Plan by Two

For some of us, writing is a constant study in planning, in looking far down the road of a half-formed story arc or into a set of possibilities and defining what it’s going to be. For others, we work through the journey one step at a time… but we may still want to sneak a glimpse ahead or get a little help making a decision. And I’ve found there’s a way to plan any part of a story in simple terms, taking the organizing just as far as I want: dividing the plan by two, or more.

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

It may be the simplest kind of plotting that there is, just taking whatever you’re working on and adding one wrinkle to it–though it could as easily be more if that’s what comes to you–then moving on to add other layers below that for as long as you want to keep going. It’s using “one thing at a time” to dodge the crazy-making of juggling too many issues, applied to defining the larger picture that going step by step can lose.

What does “dividing” mean? Well:

What do you divide? Anything you want.

You can divide the story into stages, whether it’s books of a trilogy or one moment’s description into several sensations.
You can divide the concept of a story into types–goals and obstacles, heroes and villains, triumphs and tragedies–and then decide how many of each you need.
You can break down a need for particular plot elements–again and again we find places where we need several examples of a thing to make a point, from naming the last few galactic wars to which bits of decor in a room to mention.

How many do you divide by? That’s the fun part: just see if “two” works. Turning one need into two contrasting types or stages or whatever is as simple as planning gets, but as often as not we come up with three or four right there.

Either way works. So many small things only need to be taken past a single point to reach a whole new level of life (“a tall man” is a rough image, but “a tall man with a loud voice” gains a lot more completeness from that second thought, even without making that thought much different from the first), or a more complex plan might start with picking two parts and then splitting each of them another time or two. And there will be plenty of times the mind goes straight to three or four or more examples that are more or less equal, or that all need to be there to interact… though if goes past five or six, it’s probably a sign that you’re already seeing some of the sub-parts that these should be split into next.

Just picking combinations like this can teach a lot about writing. Sometimes a thing just has two main sides that matter, and the rest are subparts within those. Or it might call for three steps, one thing that changes what went before and then how it’s resolved afterward (the famous “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” or situation, problem, solution)–of course the mind loves thinking in threes just to appreciate that it’s more than just two things, and we writers certainly learn to think that way. Or some kind of reaction or buildup might be just as important, and “he said, she said, they agreed” doesn’t work as well as “he said, she said, he said, she said” or maybe “chitchat, he said…” Then again, it may not be the interactions that matter as much as nature of the thing; you might just know the hero’s going to deal with Doubt that he’ll win, Greed of the people in his way, and Guilt over what he does to do it.

A couple examples:

In planning my contemporary fantasy The High Road, I realized:

its first part would be my heroes Mark and Angie facing their most immediate challenge (a street gang with a vendetta tends to get your attention),
so that the second part would be a deeper understanding of the problem and how many other secrets the family magic is tied into.

That first part then had two main stages:

their first discovery of the magic and their enemies,
and then trying to deal with them.

And that beginning stage would be

the Blades’ threat,
then clashing against them with the magic,
then what else breaks loose during the immediate aftermath

–and I have my first three chapters.

Or, if I’m looking for possible images for someone leaving a building, it’s natural to think of the basic Sight Plus Hearing division. But if I’m looking for more detail I know there are five senses to consider.

Sights are easy to split up by direction:

above everything, the moon, but there’s little other light out,
in front, the empty parking lot and the pathway beyond it,
on the side, the streets heading off that he won’t take,
and behind him the town hall he’s left

–then I might further break down those directions by adding clouds against that moon, trees alongside the path, and so on.

To think of sounds I might run through the same directional check, or I might consider classes of things that make sounds:

people (back in that town hall, driving on the streets, etc.),
objects (does he pass the building’s whirring air conditioner?),
animals (birdcalls, rustlings in the brush),
and maybe the weather and so on.

Touch can also be a few position types: anything about the ground he walks on or the things he brushes past, and if the wind or cold or anything touches him, and anything about his clothes or any injuries or such he’s carrying with him. And suddenly I’ve got a sceneful of possible descriptions, just waiting to be put in place.

In fact, dividing by two-plus can lay out a whole book:

maybe four plot stages (or two halves with two to three substages each), each with
four-ish chapters (maybe two events of two chapters each), that might contain
two to four (or more) scenes.

Or a scene itself could have a certain number of points: steps people take in what they’re doing, places they move past, or subjects of a dialog. And dialog subjects can be made up of just how many lines people say, and so on.

Planning–or just glimpsing ahead–can be as simple as you want, just by taking it a step at a time and deciding how far to go before you have enough to move on.

Simple as one-two.