Month: May 2024

Using Color in Our Stories

Using colors in our stories

How to write about the sense of sight is just too broad a subject for one post. So I’m focusing on using color in our stories to bring scenes to life that might lie dead if we rely solely on the tried-and-true descriptions using sight. I’ve loved exploring the names of colors, but before I discuss how to add color to our writing, I have to ask …

Does using a lot of colors make sense for your story?

The main character of my teen cozy mystery series is Rae Riley, a twenty-year-old amateur photographer. Because photography is her hobby, it makes sense to mention colors when I write from her first person point of view. It’s something the character would notice, so I can include. To give you an opposite example, fashion is not a hobby of Rae’s. So when she describes characters, she isn’t focused on their clothes unless it makes a definite impression on her.

Examine your point of view characters. Would any of them notice colors? Why? Understanding your characters will help you use colors in their descriptions correctly. But those aren’t the only people you have to understand.

Use colors readers can related to.

Last spring, I made a study of colors. I typed into Google phrases like “shades of brown” and then looked at the many names for different shades of brown. The site where I found the most helpful graphics was “Color Meanings”. Here’s the link for shades of brown.

As I read each name and looked at the color, I jotted down which colors readers would instantly recognize and which ones my character would know. “Coffee”, “caramel”, “cinnamon”, “beige”, and “sand” were all names that would bring an instant mental picture to readers. But others like “ecru”, “bistre”, and “ocher” might force readers to put down my novel to look up what in the world I was talking about. And would a young woman who wasn’t a painter use words like that? So I used names that were both appropriate for readers and my character.

Make the colors fit the genre.

I like to immerse my readers in my settings. But since I write mysteries, I can’t get bogged down in descriptions. If I wrote historical fiction, I might have more space to paint more vivid descriptions. Knowing what readers expect in your genre helps you decide how to write descriptions and employ color.

Here’s an example of how I used colors in to paint the scenes of a Memorial Day picnic at lake in a state park in Ohio.

“Families and groups of friends dotted the imported sand, clusters of wet, deep colors and pastels decorating the drab ground. Rick Carlisle tossed his seven-year-old nephew and namesake Richard into shallow water while his nine-year-old niece Alli paddled on an inflatable, pink swan. Under the picnic shelter on the edge of the beach, Senator Schuster chatted with an elderly man and scooped something from a vivid tangerine bowl. About twenty people milled in and out of the shelter from preschoolers to senior citizens, so it was probably a family gathering, rather than a political one.”

from A Storm of Doubts by JPC Allen

For more tips on writing with the senses, click here.

What books or stories have you read that used color well?

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Use All Five Senses to Describe Your … Junk Drawer

Use all five senses to describe your junk drawer

Or your junk closet. Or maybe your junk basement. We have a junk playroom, now that my kids are teens, but I couldn’t take a picture of that room or my husband would die of embarrassment. So I settle for asking to use all five senses to describe your junk drawer. Like the last two writing prompts, write down your first impressions as you look at the items in your junky space.

  • Sight: Lots of pencils. Gift card. Tools. Batteries. Foam darts. Bobbers. Etc.
  • Sound: N/A
  • Touch: All sorts of textures–smooth, scratchy, rough
  • Taste: N/A
  • Smell: Leather

How can I use these impressions? I could write a comedic story about a mom cleaning out the family junk drawer and horrors she uncovers. Or a teen searching frantically for an important item.

I like the idea of characters finding something unexpected. Such as teens or twenty somethings are cleaning out the house of their late great-grandmother and find an item in her junk drawer that sets them on a quest through her past. Or a husband finds an item so odd that he has to discover who in the family put it there. When everyone denies it belongs to them, he has a mystery on his hands.

For more prompts in your own backyard, click here.

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Using Smell in Our Stories

using smell in our stories

And by using smell in our stories, I don’t mean we should make them stink. (Ha!) But smell and taste are usually the last senses most writers think of including. Taste has obvious limitations for many scenes, but I think the reason I turn to smell last when working on descriptions is because I have such a poor sense of smell. Unless a scent is especially strong, I just don’t notice it.

Scent, Memory, and Crime Writing

Smell triggers memories like no other sense. 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 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.

Smell and Humor

For some reason, describing revolting smells lends itself to humor. Maybe it’s because of the over-the-top reactions we can create for characters. Like a mother trying to look pleased as her young children set some monstrous concoction in front of her for breakfast on Mother’s Day. Or a family’s reaction when their dog or cat enters the house after an encounter with a skunk. In the short story “Silent But Deadly”, humor writer Patrick F. McManus uses a dog’s inability to digest turkey gravy as the reason a teen breaks up with his girlfriend.

But a warning …

We can go overboard with using smells in our stories. I read a teen novel in which the author used the sense of smell to convey the decrepitude of the building where the characters spent a a lot of time. There were so many revolting smells that it actually turned my stomach.

Unlike sight or sound, which make up the meat of our descriptions, smell is best deployed as a pungent spice. Use it when no other sense will do, or if you want to give a scene an atypical emphasis.

What authors do you know who use smell effectively in their stories?

For more tips on using senses in our stories, click here.

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Using All Five Sense Describe Your … Bedroom

using all 5 senses describe your bedroom

Or any bedroom in your house that you might like to use as setting. My kids’ bedrooms contain a ton of inspiration, especially my youngest’s room, which makes a landfill seem orderly. Wouldn’t you love to read about the villain breaking into the hero’s house, only to get caught because he entered one of the kids’ bedrooms and wiped out by stepping on a Tonka truck? Using all five senses, describe your bedroom, as if it isn’t yours. It will make you see it with new eyes.

Here are the impressions from my bedroom:

  • Sight: Shaded from evening sun. View of backyard in shadows. Blue quilt. Faux pine furniture. Blue carpet. Family photos. A mirror. A ceiling fan. Lots of piles of books and papers.
  • Sound: Distant murmur of hear pump. Scraping on stone of someone working outside. Bird chirps
  • Touch: Cool
  • Taste: N/A
  • Smell: N/A

As I wrote this, I began to imagine someone waking in the evening, which would be odd. It immediately begs the question, why?

I lifted my heavy head from my pillow. Shadows had stretched across the house and backyard, deepening all colors to cool shades. The fan turned lazily, the air ruffling my hair.

Sitting up, I ran my tongue around my dry mouth.

I needed cool.

I pulled back my grandmother’s sky blue quilt and dropped lead-lined feet to the floor.

A few bird chirps penetrated the four windows facing the backyard.

Using the pine nightstand for support, I lunged into a vertical position.

I swallowed, my throat feeling sandy.

Might as well see if I could make to the bathroom for a drink.

If you want to write a scene set in a bedroom at night, stay up late and write your impressions then.

For more writing prompts about setting, click here.

What’s a familiar setting you can describe using all 5 senses?

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The Roller Coaster Method of Plotting

For everyone who attended my workshop at the Mt. Zion Ridge Press Writers Conference–here’s the graphic I use for the roller coaster method of plotting, which I learned from James L. Rubart and Cara Putnam. I have it on an older post and discovered that you can’t find it using the keywords “roller coaster method”. I don’t know why. So I’m posting it here for easy access.

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