Are your texts losing their magic? If everything you write ends up becoming a flat, gray blob of disappointment, this is the article for you, my friend. Don’t worry: many creative writers and authors have felt stuck once or twice. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get your mojo back as a professional. A way to light a fire under your character and place descriptions is to focus on the way you perceive the world around you, that is, through your eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin.
In this article, you’re going to find key tips on how to use your five senses to write deep, complex, and meaningful descriptions that will instantly transport your reader to the scenario of your choice. You’ll also read some literary examples about every sense for you to feel inspired.
Tips on Writing with The Senses
1. Create Scenarios to Feel More
This is a great excuse to get creative and try new things! Here are some examples:
- 👄👃 Taste an exotic food or ingredient with a pungent taste or smell
- 🖐️ Walk barefoot on grass, gravel… even food you dropped on the floor!
- 👂 Go see a foreign movie with no subtitles and focus on the sounds
- 👁️ Use a kaleidoscope or look through a tinted-colored glasses
- 🖐️👂 Leave the house without an umbrella on a rainy day
- 👁️👃 Safely set fire to an object and watch it burn
A good tip is to document your experience before, during, and after you did all of these things. That way you won’t forget anything! Try to be as thorough as you can with your descriptions.
2. Denaturalize Familiar Objects or Places
There are several ways to achieve this: for instance, if you are into sports, try to focus on the fans and not the players when you go to a game. Behind their cheers and hoots, you may hear a man selling hotdogs, or the crunching sound their teeth make when stuffing their mouths with salty snacks.
On a different note, you can visit a familiar place at an unexpected hour —e.g. go to the beach at night). Perhaps, once the people are gone, you’ll be able to focus on the rhythmic sound the tide makes when it goes back and forth. Maybe you’ll feel the cold, soft sand getting inside your socks or between your toes. This can be a tricky exercise, but it will be worth it once you see the results.
3. Don’t Go Overboard
As tempting as it may be, you don’t want to overwhelm the reader with descriptions; it wouldn’t feel natural. After all, who senses that much all at once? Try to focus on one sense at a time. That way, you can develop more deep and complex descriptions without skipping from one sense to another.
4. Describe What You DON’T Feel
Yes, you heard me: what isn’t there can sometimes be more important than what there is. For instance, walking down the street at night and not hearing a sound can be quite a scenario to build up tension. On the same note, the absence of stimuli can give the reader important clues in a detective story. Let’s say a teenage girl is not described without mentioning the intense smell of her nail polish. Imagine what it can mean when that trait isn’t mentioned. Could she be acting strange?
5. Take It One Step Further
What emotions or thoughts are triggered by what you perceive with your senses? Maybe, the smell of salt in the air of a coastal city makes you feel nostalgic about long-gone family vacations. Perhaps, stepping on a soft rug that dims your footsteps makes you think you’re underdressed for the occasion. Put all those thoughts down in writing!
Literary Examples for Every Sense
👁️ Sight
Sight is the sense we rely on the most, so visual descriptions are usually the easiest to achieve. For that reason, there are many great examples available. One that I particularly fancy is the one J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about Elrond in the first volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy:
“The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight, and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars.”
Visual description is especially important when creating a fantasy or science fiction universe. This new world and all who live in it must be heavily characterized so that the reader can recreate it in their mind.
👂 Sound
Sound is a key sense for suspense: for instance, if you’re describing a person lost in the woods or a child playing hide and seek inside an old house, even the faintest of sounds may alert them. However, sound is the sense that allows us to experience music in all its beauty. A detailed description of music can be found in Tom Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, an English novel from 1891:
“Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim, flattened, constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that of nudity … She undulated upon the thin notes as upon billows, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with waves of sound.”
👃 Smell
Smell may seem weak compared to the other four senses, but don’t let that preconception cloud your judgment. The faintest of stimuli can quickly become a suffocating nightmare in a matter of seconds. One great example of an unbearable smell is Hernán Díaz’s description in his book In the Distance. His novel, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, uses the smell of burnt sugar to describe a woman’s rotting teeth. Here’s an extract from the main character’s perspective:
“Back in his room, Håkan washed his face with the pine-oil water left over from his nightly scrubbings, trying to wipe out the impression of burned sugar. It was lodged underneath his forehead and eyes, smeared on his palate, and coated on the walls of his throat. Had the smell merely rubbed off the woman or were his own gums now rotting, shedding their teeth, and emanating that putrid perfume? He tapped on his incisors and tried to wiggle his molars to make sure they were firm. Had he known the word for it, he would have asked for a mirror.”
👄 Taste
Taste can become a double-edged sword if we let it: because it’s so easy to talk about flavors, our food descriptions can sometimes become unmoving. This example, a classic of Modern literature, is nothing of the sort. I’m talking about Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the longest novel ever written. In the first volume, Swann’s Way, the Narrator tastes a madeleine dipped in tea, which awakens an involuntary feeling of nostalgia about his childhood in Combray:
“I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.”
🖐️ Touch
This sense can work both ways: you can focus on how a character feels when touching something as well as what they feel when being touched. For instance, an introvert may interpret a slight brush of a person’s hand as a hurricane of emotion. This is why your wording must be on point; a blow isn’t as intense as a light graze, so use them accordingly.
Touch is also the main sense involved when describing pain. A brilliant example is Frank Herbert’s science-fiction masterpiece Dune. In its first volume, the main character Paul experiences severe discomfort when asked to place his hand inside a mysterious box at the risk of being poisoned to death:
“Paul clenched his left hand into a fist as the burning sensation increased in the other hand. It mounted slowly: heat upon heat upon heat … upon heat. He felt the fingernails of his free hand biting the palm. He tried to flex the fingers of the burning hand, but couldn’t move them. […] Pain throbbed up his arm. Sweat stood out on his forehead. Every fiber cried out to withdraw the hand from that burning pit… but … the gom jabbar. Without turning his head, he tried to move his eyes to see that terrible needle poised beside his neck. He sensed that he was breathing in gasps, tried to slow his breaths and couldn’t. Pain! His world emptied of everything except that hand immersed in agony, […] His lips were so dry he had difficulty separating them. The burning! The burning! He thought he could feel skin curling black on that agonized hand, the flesh crisping and dropping away until only charred bones remained.”
Conclusion
As we saw (heard, touched, smelled, and tasted), creative writing can be challenging, but focusing on your five senses can get your creative juices flowing in no time at all. If that doesn’t work, you can always try some other writing exercises to improve your writing.
At Palabra we are literary enthusiasts, expert writers, and avid readers. We have plenty of experience bringing other people’s ideas to life in written form, and we love to do so! If you happen to have a novel you wish to improve with our help, all you need is to ask! We can write, correct, and edit it in no time, plus find many publishers that may like what you created. Get in touch with us and follow your literary dream!
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