five senses in fiction

How to Help Your Readers See Your World

August 23, 2012 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , , , , • 18 Comments

Sense of Sight in FictionBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

I have a confession to make. It took me three tries to finish Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.

I stalled out the first two times in the same place—at the house of Tom Bombadil. I tried to slog through all the description, but my attention would slip, I’d set the book down, and something more interesting would steal its place. On the third try, I skipped that section and sailed through the rest of the series.

Most readers aren’t going to be so determined to read your book, and the biggest trap when it comes to over-describing is the sense of sight. And that’s logical. It’s the sense we use the most, and it’s the sense we need to include the most so the reader gets a solid grasp of our setting.

But how do we include enough sight details without creating the Tom Bombadil problem?

Allow Your Character to Put Their Own Twist on It

We hear this advice all the time. Everything needs to be said the way your point of view character would. What would your POV character notice? How would they describe it?

Take it bigger.

Is your character an optimist or do you want to show her in a good mood? Have her notice the one point of beauty in an otherwise ugly item.

Want to show the character arc? How does what they notice about a particular object change over the course of the story?

Use Carefully Chosen Items to Foreshadow

The problem with sight is every day we’re overwhelmed with thousands of meaningless, extra images. Consequently, when we write, we’re tempted to also fill our books with images that don’t serve a purpose. In fiction, everything needs to serve a purpose.

We can include sight details so people see the setting. We can include sight details to set the mood. We can also use sight details to foreshadow.

Foreshadowing is hinting at what’s to come in your story. You can foreshadow a major plot element, the character’s internal state or future transformation, or a secret (either not yet revealed or revealed to the reader but not to the POV character) all through little sight details.

Remember the key here is subtle. So subtle in fact that not every reader will catch it. But the ones who do will love you for it.

Put What Your Character Sees Into Motion

Unlike the other senses, sight often takes more than a single detail to give us a vivid picture, especially if the setting or character you’re describing is important. While adding action (or at least a feeling of motion) won’t fix a giant info dump, it can ensure longer descriptions still have forward momentum.

Suzanne Collins used this expertly when describing Rue, the youngest competitor in The Hunger Games.

She has bright, dark eyes and satiny brown skin and stands tilted up on her toes with arms slightly extended to her sides, as if ready to take wing at the slightest sound. It’s impossible not to think of a bird (pg. 98).

N.K. Jemisin did the same thing in her Hugo and Nebula-nominated novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

Face like the moon, pale and somehow wavering. I could get the gist of his features, but none of it stuck in my mind beyond an impression of astonishing beauty. His long, long hair wafted around him like black smoke, its tendrils curling and moving of their own volition. His cloak—or perhaps that was his hair too—shifted as if in an unfelt wind (pg. 30).

So How Can We Balance the Five Senses?

Here’s my tip for figuring out your weaknesses when it comes to the five senses in your fiction or memoir. Take your first chapter, last chapter, and five random chapters from the middle. (No cheating and picking your best.) Assign each sense a different color and circle or highlight every time you use a sense. Once you finish, spread the papers out around you. You’ll immediately be able to see which sense you use the most and where you’re weak.

How do you feel about sight descriptions in books? Do you like to be shown everything in detail or do you prefer the author leave much to your imagination?

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on the five senses. If you missed the first four installments, you can check out my posts on taste, touch, smell, and sound here.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

I’d love to have you subscribe. I’ll be kicking off a series on dialogue soon.

Photo Credit: Raphael Pinto on www.sxc.hu

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How to Use Sound to Make Your Novel Stand Out In A Sea of Noise

July 12, 2012 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , , , • 16 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

If you’re limiting yourself to just naming a sound, you’re missing out on the richness that the sense of sound could bring to your fiction. You’re speaking to your reader in a monotone.

Next to sight, sound is the most commonly used sense in fiction, but three techniques can help you change the sounds you use from plain background noise into something that adds new depth to your stories.

Use Onomatopoeia for an Echo

Onomatopoeia is when a word sounds like its definition—hiss, buzz, creak, swish, clatter.

The blade scraped across his stubble.

If you’ve ever listened to a man shave using a razor rather than an electric trimmer, scrape imitates the sound you’ll hear with each swipe.

Another poetry technique worth judiciously stealing is the repetition of sounds within words to mimic the sound you’re describing. One of the best known examples is from the final lines of Tennyson’s “Come Down, O Maid.”

The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmur of innumerable bees.

A morning dove’s call at a quiet summer’s twilight carries the same long o sound as moan, and the sequence of m’s and n’s followed by the zee sound in bees creates a buzz like a swarm.

Because most of us vocalize in our minds when we read, onomatopoeic words and phrases help us hear the sound you’re describing. (Speed readers are trained to stop this internal vocalization because it slows reading speed, but it’s also one of the things that helps make reading so pleasurable.)

Don’t overuse this technique. Not everyone likes it. Personally, used frugally at moments when you really need to emphasize a sound, I love it. (And so does Janice Hardy, former instructor for Writer’s Digest, so I’m in good company.)

Play With the Emotional Effects of Sound Deprivation or Sounds We Can’t Control

Using the sense of sound effectively in fiction isn’t all about the type of sound. Sometimes it’s about the lack of sound, the volume, the duration, or whether we have any control over the sound.

When the power goes out in your house at night, do you sleep through it or does the sudden loss of the white noise of the appliances wake you up? Do you find the loss peaceful or, after a while, does the silence become almost oppressive and ominous?

Scientists have studied the effects of sensory deprivation on the human body, and discovered a short period of sensory deprivation, like being underwater, can be relaxing. Over extended periods of time, though, it can lead to hallucinations, decreased memory function, and loss of identity, which is why it’s used as “white torture.” If you place your character in a situation where they can’t hear, they’re likely to be disoriented at first, feeling almost like their ears are clogged. If you place them alone for a long period of time somewhere like the wilds of Utah in winter, the silence will begin to play tricks with their mind.

If we have the ability to make a sound stop, we’re more able to tolerate it than if we have to endure it with no knowledge of when it might end. While our body eventually learns to ignore soft noises like the ticking of a clock in the background, louder noises or noises intended to motivate us to action can’t be tuned out in the same way. In my last truck, the parking break broke, but I didn’t realize it until I’d set it for a ferry ride, and the warning ding kept going after I released it. I had to drive over an hour with no way to make it stop. The sound never bothered me before, but by the end of that drive, I was tense and irritable and fighting a headache.

Let Sound Set the Mood

They don’t call it mood music for nothing. Your choice of sounds can alter the whole feel of a scene, so choose carefully to create the mood you want your reader to feel. If you want to lighten a scene, add a funny or embarrassing sound to a somber or romantic moment.

One of my favorite lines from my co-writer in our historical fantasy is when our female lead’s closest friend says to her, “The wind carries the voices of the dead tonight.” It highlighted not only the grief they shared but couldn’t speak of, but also their dread and uncertainty over what they’d face the next day.

What sound annoys you most? And which do you find most soothing?

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

Enter your email below to receive updates next time I post here because you don’t want to miss the final sense! If you missed the previous posts, you can find the three techniques for smell, taste, and touch here.

Photo Credit: Peter Mazurek (Obtained via www.sxc.hu)

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How to Use Touch to Pull Your Reader Into Your Novel

July 5, 2012 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , , , • 22 Comments

Did you know that leprosy doesn’t actually make your fingers and toes fall off?

I didn’t. What happens is the bacteria attack the nerve endings in the body so the sufferer can’t feel pain. When they injure themselves, they don’t feel it, and this can lead to infection and gangrene before the injured person realizes it and can get treatment. Imagine if they lost their sense of touch entirely.

Touch is the one sense we can’t survive without, so if you’re not using it in your story, you’re dooming your manuscript to an early death.

Over the past months, I’ve looked at three ways to make your novel scratch and sniff and three ways to use taste to make your readers hungry for more. This week, it’s time to look at three ways to use the sense of touch to touch your readers.

Use All Aspects of Touch

Touch is one of the most multi-faceted senses. You can touch and be touched. You can be touched by another living being, by the weather, or by an inanimate object. To convey touch to your readers, think about temperature, texture, pressure, and intent.

Temperature is about more than hot and cold. It’s about hot and cold within context. A cool hand on a feverish forehead soothes. A cool hand in a handshake is often interpreted as a sign of a cold personality. In an old an episode of Columbo, a character’s cold hands tipped him off to their poor circulation, and that in turn helped him solve the case.

Texture also goes beyond the gritty sand between your toes or the sliminess of separating an egg with your fingers. My co-writer Lisa Hall-Wilson recently wrote a post on how The Details Make the Story. For one of her earliest attempts at a novel, she wanted to write about a fireman and so she booked a tour of a fire hall. Near the end of the tour, she asked to feel one of the firemen’s hands because she needed to know if they were rough like a farmer’s or smooth like a mechanic’s.

Pressure can show intimacy, a threat, or add humor. At my best friend’s funeral, a well-meaning older lady took my hand and squeezed it while she talked to me. The pressure she used normally wouldn’t have been a problem except that when she took my hand, the ring I had on twisted, and every time she squeezed, the stone cut into the finger next to it. She interpreted the pain flashing across my face as emotional and squeezed harder. It was funny in hindsight. Not so much at the moment.

Intent adds layers. I once read that women don’t slap men they’re genuinely furious with. They might punch them, knee them in the groin, shove them, or simply walk away, but they won’t slap them because a slap says that part of them isn’t angry. Part of them secretly knows the man was right or is secretly attracted to him because of what he did. A slap is ambiguous.

Observe (or Break) the Continuum of Intimacy

By its very nature, touch is an intimate sense. You can smell a scent carried on the wind, hear a sound from a mile away, look at stars through a telescope. To touch something, you need to be within arm’s reach.

Jenny Hansen had a helpful post on Using the 12 Stages of Physical Intimacy to Build Tension in Your Fiction where she points out that skipping over any of the stages of intimacy causes conflict. Drawing out these stages amps up the tension as your readers hold their breath to see when your characters will reach the next milestone. You can observe or break the order of the touch levels on this scale depending on what emotional effect you want to have on your reader.

Jenny also notes that the stages of physical intimacy speak to boundaries. Personal space boundaries vary by individual, by gender, and by age, but they also vary by culture. In North America, you don’t kiss an almost perfect stranger on the cheeks in either greeting or farewell. In other cultures, straight men kiss on the lips in greeting. You can add richness to your story by having touch interact with personal boundaries and cultural norms.

Consider How Your Character Will Interpret It

The most important thing for touch, though, is to know how your character will interpret it. A woman whose love language is physical affection will interpret a hug differently than will a woman who was sexually abused as a child. How will a germaphobe handle touch? What about an aging musician whose fingers are going numb?

Do you have a funny story about touch? What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever touched? What did it feel like? (I held a baby crocodile once. He wasn’t slimy at all, and his belly was actually very soft.)

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

Be sure to sign up to receive free email updates so that you don’t miss the last two senses.

Photo Credit: Britta Kuhnen (obtained via www.sxc.hu)

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How to Use Taste to Make Your Readers Hungry for More

May 16, 2012 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , , • 0 Comment

According to Jeff Gerke of Marcher Lord Press, a successful small publisher of speculative fiction, one of the most common problems in both novice and advanced fiction is not enough description.

This means that, regardless of what draft you’re working on, you probably have too little description rather than too much. The fix is actually easy. Engage all your reader’s senses.

Two weeks ago, I looked at how to make your novel scratch and sniff through three techniques that let you make the best use of the scents you choose. This week, we’re going to take a bite out of taste (sorry, couldn’t help myself) with three ways to enhance the flavors in your book.

Decide When Naming A Taste Is Enough Vs. When You Need to Describe It

Some tastes are potent enough and familiar enough that all we need to do is name them. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. A cinnamon-flavored toothpick. Your dentist’s latex gloves. Because they’re part of our shared experience, describing them doesn’t enhance the story at all. Instead, it becomes the kind of excess description we’re so often advised to cut.

A foreign taste, though, always needs a description; otherwise, you’re just placing an empty word on the page. In my co-written historical fantasy, our male POV character drinks a glass of kumiss, fermented mare’s milk with an almond aftertaste. Simply dropping in the word kumiss wouldn’t have heightened your sensory experience at all. In the same way that describing a familiar taste is pointless, so is dropping in a foreign word and expecting the reader to understand it. Now, even though you’ve likely never tasted kumiss, can you imagine the sharp tang, like buttermilk gone bad, and then just as you finish swallowing, the slight sweetness of almond lingering on your tongue and in the back of your mouth.

(This is actually a perfect example of the confusion I often see in writers who are told both that they need description in their story to bring it to life and also that description slows down their story and they should cut it. The right kind of description doesn’t slow the story down at all. Unnecessary description does. Do you see the difference in the two situations above?)

The trick in describing a taste is to do it in a way that doesn’t break POV and end up feeling like author intrusion. For the example I used above from the manuscript Lisa Hall-Wilson and I wrote, we got around this by having our male character crave the flavor of this particular drink as opposed to the wine he’d been offered. When your character is craving a particular food, or savoring it, it’s natural for them to think about the flavors the same way we would in those situations.

Use Metaphors or Other Comparisons

Our brains are wired to compare things we don’t have experience with to something we do. Taste is the sense that lends itself best (in my opinion anyway) to metaphors or other comparisons. Sometimes you don’t need to describe a taste literally to convey its essence.

“The wine tasted like liquid sunlight” (Oakley Hall, How Fiction Works).

“She spoke of fruit that tasted the way sapphires look” (Toni Morrison, Paradise).

Make It Surprising Somehow

You come home from the grocery store with a bag of what appear to be sweet, crunchy grapes only to pop one onto your tongue and get a mouthful of moldiness. Things don’t always taste the way we expect.

You can also use other senses to turn expectations upside down. Parmesan cheese smells like stinky feet and cumin smells like body odor, but both of them add a delicious flavor to dishes. And because we eat first with our eyes, when food looks unappetizing, we remember it that much more when it actually tastes good.

What food do you think looks or smells unappealing but actually tastes delicious? Have you ever tried a food that left you pleasantly surprised?

Because I want these Wednesday posts to be as helpful as possible, please answer this quick poll to tell me what you’d most like to have me write about. Feel free to select more than one response or write in an answer.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

Be sure to sign up to receive email updates so that you don’t miss the remaining three senses.

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How to Make Your Novel Scratch and Sniff

May 2, 2012 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , , , • 35 Comments

Sense of Smell in FictionDo you want your reader to feel like they’re part of your world? Do you want your setting to stick with them long after they’ve closed your book?

One of the best ways to bring your fictional world to life is to use all five senses. Because each sense comes with its own unique strengths and challenges, today I’m starting into a new series to give smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound their due.

The trick with smells is that if you include too many you can burn your reader out the way you deaden your nose if you smell every candle in the Yankee Candle store. (Not that I’m admitting to having done that, but in case you were wondering, my favorite is the Buttercream.)

Three techniques can help you make the most of the smells you choose.

Connect the Smell to an Emotion

Smell can be one of the most powerful senses in your fiction because of its ability to evoke emotions. You probably associate certain smells with memories, people, or places. I hate the way the dentist office smells like burning hair. The smell comes from the singed protein of teeth being drilled, and I associate that smell with pain. If I’m stressed, the warm scent of a clean dog will calm me down because I associate it with the comfort I find in my Great Dane when I throw my arms around her after a hard day.

Think about your own life and what smells evoke memories and emotions. Why do they have that effect on you? You don’t need to duplicate that precise smell in your fiction (you should find one that belongs organically to your character), but by paying attention to how smells intertwine throughout your life, you can learn how to build them into your stories.

If you’re struggling with how to naturally slide in necessary backstory, smell can be your saving grace. As Roni Loren recently pointed out in her post on How to Dish Out Backstory in Digestible Bites, something needs to trigger a memory in order to introduce backstory. Because of how memories cling to scents, smells work as a perfect trigger.

Choose One “Showpiece” Scent

In Ted Dekker’s The Boneman’s Daughter, the serial killer is addicted to Noxzema. I think about it every time I wash my face. That’s the staying power of giving a single scent a starring role.

This isn’t just for fiction writers. For non-fiction writers, you can create the same lasting memory by finding the one key smell to grab your readers. It could be the difference between a forgettable article or chapter in your book and motivating your readers to act. Are you writing a parenting book? What smell defines motherhood for you? How did that smell grow and change with your child? Differ between sickness and health?

Even though you’ll have other scents in your book, weaving one key smell throughout, changing it, playing off of it in moments of tension, ties your entire story together and imprints it on your reader’s mind. The next time they smell that scent in the world, they’ll think of your book.

Contrast a Good Smell with a Bad One

Choosing two antagonistic scents can be done simply to make both smells stand out more than they would on their own, complement a theme, or subtly support what’s happening inside your character.

In my co-written historical fantasy, our main male character is torn between the desire to sleep with his new female slave and the desire to obey his new God who forbids it. He commands her to strip off her tunic, and when she does, the scent of sweat and cypress invades his nostrils. The opposing scents mirror the struggle between his opposing desires.

In The Hunger Games trilogy, President Snow smells like blood and roses. He uses the roses to cover up the fact that his breath reeks of blood, and this becomes a metaphor in a way for how the beauty and glitz of the capital tries to disguise the repulsiveness of the country’s situation. Suzanne Collins could have just had him smell like blood, but the contrast with something as beautiful and symbolic as roses made the smell of blood that much more grotesque. And Katniss is never able to think about roses the same way again.

What smell brings back a strong emotion for you, either good or bad?

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

Be sure to sign up to receive email updates so that you don’t miss the remaining four senses.

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