by Mary Rosenblum

We all know that description helps bring our words to life. From black ink on a white page, those marvelous words can grow the Amazon rainforest in our living room, can populate our late night bedroom with knights in armor, the clash of battle, and a lovely princess fleeing an evil wizard. Words have the power to lift us from the familiar real world we see every day and set us down in a dynamic new universe. But that doesn’t just happen. While we writers may see that rainforest in vivid detail and hear the clash of the knights’ swords, our readers cannot peer into our minds…at least not before we develop the ‘telepathic hyperlink’! So until that day, how do we non-telepathic writers open the door to that rich universe inside our skulls and invite our readers in?

We are a visual species. In other words, that is our primary sense. We look first, listen only after that. Touch, taste, and smell often go unnoticed unless the input is bad! While you might not notice the delicate scent of green grass on a spring morning, you’ll surely notice the stench of the skunk that sprayed your dog!

But when we begin to paint that rainforest or knights’ tournament for our readers, we need to use all the colors in our palette, not just the visual hues. Remember that the more you mimic reality, the more your reader forgets that he is sitting on the sofa, she is curled up in bed, reading about your imagined universe. No, they are living that joust, they are suspended in the canopy of that Amazon rainforest, straining their eyes for the rare monkey they’re studying. In both fiction and nonfiction, a richly textured setting will suck your reader out of Today and into your universe.

That rainforest is patched with a hundred shades of green, the bright reds, blues, yellows of blossoms and bird feathers, yes. But the heavy, humid air lies like a damp cloak on your shoulders, thick with the scents of flowers and rotting vegetation. A monkey’s shriek pierces the air and the hum of a million insects seems to vibrate through your bones. Sweat sticks your shirt to your back as you clutch the rough fibers of the native-made ropes that hold you among the branches and you taste salt on your lips.

Well, I have included all five senses in the above description: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. If you can do that…slip those five senses into your scene…then your world will live for your reader, and she’ll find herself wiping her forehead, expecting to find beads of perspiration and shucking off that sweater!

Even in nonfiction, the more senses you can include in a piece, the more real it will seem to your reader. If you are writing a personal narrative intended for the novice gardener, you might mention the buzz of a Bumble Bee, the crumbly feel of the soil, the smell of rain-washed leaves in addition to what you see. Of course, if you are writing a straightforward, factual, step-by-step, how-to article about building a staircase for a deck, you’re not going to wander off into a euphoric description of the resiny smell of the fir boards, the powdery sawdust on your fingertips, the call of the spring Robins… Use common sense here! We want to use all our senses in a nature piece, a personal narrative where we want to share the experience with the readers, and even in a how-to cooking article where the texture, taste, or smell of ingredients is important. I really don’t care what the room smells like while you’re teaching me how to reformat my hard drive, but I need to know that I should knead the bread dough until it feels satiny to the touch!

Certainly, in fiction, the senses are critical. As a long time writing teacher, I see description as the most common weakness in the prose of beginning writers. We can see that scene so clearly that we forget that the ‘telepathic hyperlink’ doesn’t yet exist!

So how do we include those details when our hero is treking across the arctic tundra on her way to that rendezvous at the North Pole? Try this. Imagine yourself in that scene. Now close your eyes. You can’t see anything anymore but…what do you hear? Are those seals talking? Seagulls? The hiss of wind in the grass? Now take a deep breath. Cold air? Any smell? Faint whiff of mud flat? Animal musk, maybe caribou? What are you feeling on your skin? Cold? Damp air? The tiny prick of biting flies? Soft mud under your feet? Does the mist taste salty on your lips? Does the water taste faintly of ocean or sulfur? Is that berry tart and seedy?

Never underestimate the power of scent. Some universals evoke a strong response in your reader. Dog poop makes us all go ‘yuck’ as does the smell of a garbage can opened on a summer day. Whew! Roses, new mowed grass, fresh baked bread…all these scents evoke memory for us, of lovely gardens, summer afternoons, Mom and kitchen. Use them to color your scene with the appropriate nuance of emotion! But other scents are less universal. Asparagus will smell differently to me than ‘your’ asparagus may. If I love it and you hate it, the emotional shade may be wrong for the scene when I sniff the asparagus. But strawberries smell good to most people. Rotten eggs smell bad. Stick to the universals!

Now you don’t have to include all of these sensory details. It depends on what is happening in the scene and whether your POV character has time to notice them, or whether they work with your account of the caribou herd you’re following for that Nature article. But your palette is now loaded and you’re ready to paint! If you need those rich tints of sense, they are right there waiting for you.

And you might just be surprised by what you smell, or feel, or hear, or taste! Gee, that world is richer than you think!

Close your eyes, open your ears, and breathe!