Come for the Mysteries. Stay for the Characters.
To wrap up my month on writing about the five senses, I have a link to a blog post by Heather Blanton on K.M. Weiland’s site, “Helping Writers Become Authors.” I enjoyed this post because Ms. Blanton uses Edgar Allan Poe as an example of how to describe sound effectively. I hope you enjoy it, too. Click here.
Because the sense of taste can only occur in certain settings, writers may overlook it and not take advantage of it where it makes sense. But writing about the sense of taste can bring a fresh perspective to a scene that is dominated by sights and sounds.
How a meal tastes can show the emotional state of your point of view (POV) character. If your character is eating a favorite food, and someone tells her bad news, she will find the food tasteless or disgusting. Conversely, your character eats something he usually avoids, but he’s in such a good mood, his distaste disappears.
Describing what tastes your character likes and dislikes gives readers insight into her character. If your character is critical or spoiled, then she would harshly describe how certain foods don’t meet her high standards. Or your character may eat something he hates so as not to hurt the feelings of the cook, giving readers clues about his personality. For more on food as writing inspiration, click here for my post from November.
Words may be compared to tastes. A character makes a confession, and the words taste bitter. He says the name of a loved one, and it tastes sweet. For some people with a rare form of synesthesia, certain words really do stimulate a sense of taste. Check out this article to learn about his interesting condition.
Since smell and taste are so closely link, you can bring in taste to give a different spin on a smell. The odor of burning metal leaves a metallic taste. Sweet-scented flowers, the ocean, and fires all have a tastes to them.
How would you use the sense of taste in your writing?
The ocean breeze blew my hair across my sunglasses as I sat at the table on the porch of the beach restaurant. The fragrance of grilling shrimp and garlic stoked my hunger after a morning of swimming.
“Glad you made it, Hailey,” said my younger sister Emma, flipping back her long, chocolate brown hair. “You swam so much this morning, I didn’t think you’d have the energy to climb up the steps to get here.” Her piping soprano didn’t blend well with the soothing murmur of surf and wind.
Our older brother Brandon dropped his linemen bulk into the seat at the head of the table. “Eat fast. We need to catch the ferry to Bear Island at one-thirty.”
I sipped from the glass of ice water. Then I gulped. I was thirstier than I thought, the water carrying away sea salt from my lips.
“What if we skip Bear Island?” Our cousin Logan sauntered out of the dark interior of the restaurant.
Shielding my eyes from the sun’s glare, I looked up to him where he leaned against a post.
“What’re you doing up?” Brandon placed his glass on the table. “It’s not noon.”
“I wanted to ask all of you if you want to go some place else this afternoon.”
“Where?” asked Emma, pulling at the purple T-shirt covering her swimsuit.
Logan didn’t answer. With his sunglasses on, it was hard to guess where or who he was looking at.
Then he said, his subdued voice slipping into between the rattle of dishes and bursts of laughter behind us, “How about Rook’s Cove?”
My brother and sister went rigid as chill skittered up my spine that had nothing to do with the sudden gust blowing in from the sea.
*******
Since my mind runs to crime, this scene inspired me to write about something sinister. I like the contrast between the glaring bright day and the dark, disturbing suggestion.
How would you describe this scene using all five senses?
In the story “The Price of Light”, author Ellis Peters brings medieval England to life through the senses, and especially through texture.
Once I sat down to analyze touch, I realized it encompasses many different kinds of sensation.
Not only clothes, but everything we touch has some kind of texture, if we think about it. The table I’m eating on, the chair I’m sitting on, the jacket of the woman I brush up against in a crowded mall, the goop my kid just invented in the basement. If the point of view (POV) character is touching something, I can switch from sight to touch to give my description variety.
I’m sensitive to food textures. Regardless of how a food tastes, if the texture triggers my gag reflex, I’m done with it. In fact, I will soldier through food that doesn’t taste good but can’t choke it down if the texture is bad. Marshmallows and meringue are two foods with textures I literally can’t swallow.
The temperature and moisture of the air around us is sensed through our skin. So instead of limiting myself to how a snowy scene looks, I will add how the cold makes my POV character feel. Humidity can be described the same way. Instead of writing how the sweat glistens on someone’s face, I will write about how humidity wraps around my skin like a wet quilt. When describing wind, I can switch to how it feels, rather than the effects the character sees or hears.
Pressure on the skin signals all kinds of emotions. If you want large man to intimidate your small main character, he can press against her, crowding her, trapping her. A squeeze of the hand can mean reassurance, a slap on the back affection or anger, a handshake, depending upon the strength, friendship or fury.
I know I haven’t exhausted the possibilities. How would you write about the sense of touch?
“There are fragrances. Beyond fragrances are smells, beyond smells are odors, and beyond odors are stenches. Beyond stenches is what I am about to write here.” — “The Pasture” from Kerplunk! by Patrick F. McManus
These three sentences are some of the best writing about the sense of smell that I’ve read. Using the sense of smell in my writing is something I need to work on. It’s the last sense of I think of because I have such a poor sense of smell. Unless a scent is especially strong, I just don’t notice it.
One way I have noticed the power of smell is its ability to trigger memories. No other sense works as well to recall past events. When I smell cooking onions, I immediately think I’m back at my grandmother’s house. Even if the smell is coming from the basement cafeteria at an elementary school, I still think of grandma. A smokey fire in reminds me of the wood burning stove that my grandparents had. Sunscreen, especially when mixed with the scent of bug repellant, sends me back to high school when I attended camp for marching band.
This unique aspect of smell inspires me as a crime writer. What if something tragic happened to a character at a young age, and now that the person is grown up, she can barely remember it? But when she encounters the same unusual odor that she smelled at the time of the tragedy, her memories come into focus.
Or a man is attacked and never saw who it was but did notice a distinct scent about the attacker. Months later, the man meets someone who smells the same way. With only this clue to go on, he begins digging into this person’s background.
In a lighter vein, describing horrible smells lends itself to humorous writing. The quote above comes from a story about how a terrible stench prevents a young man from enjoying his favorite fishing hole.
For more on how to use the sense of smell in your writing, click here for a previous post on the subject.
How would you write about the sense of smell?
JPC Allen Writes