Seeing sense
Try using all the senses to give extra dimensions to your fiction, with advice from Alyson Hilbourne
Alyson Hilbourne
We rely on our senses – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch – to tell us about the world we live in. This should carry over into our writing, using the senses to establish the world our characters inhabit.
It’s not as simple as describing what a character sees, hears, smells, touches or tastes. These experiences need to affect the character in some way – pinpointing the setting in space and time, creating an atmosphere around them, foreshadowing events or reflecting the character’s emotions. The senses show readers something about our characters and their world and give them something they can connect with.
When you’re working on a piece of writing, be it fiction or non fiction, it’s worth sitting back and checking that you’ve covered at least three different senses. Sight and sound are easy, but try using taste, touch or smell to fully bring a story to life and connect with readers.
Sight
Sight is probably the easiest sense to use and therefore a default for most writers. We see colours and shades of light and dark, which combined with movement and balance, gives our brain the information to know where we are. Because we can see these things we tend to describe them to readers.
But sight is a sense where less can be more. It can be interesting to home in on details of a scene or character and let the reader fill in the rest. For example, you might describe how the windows of a derelict house had cracked into lacy designs and were wrapped in cobwebs, but leave the remainder of the building to the reader’s imagination.